Quotes of the Day:
“There never was a good war or a bad peace.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
Americans:
Willing to cross a frozen river to kill you.
In your sleep.
On Christmas.
Totally not kidding
We‘e done it.
(George Washington crossed the Delaware on December 25, 1776)
-Internet Meme
1. A Rift in the Conservative Foreign-Policy World
2. Bear, Meet Porcupine: Unconventional Deterrence for Ukraine
3. How the Taliban Outwitted and Outwaited the U.S.
4. The Art of War (not necessarily Sun Tzu)
5. A Quiet Cadence (Book review)
6. 10 Facts about Washington's Crossing of the Delaware River
7. China in Afghanistan: How Beijing Engages the Taliban
8. O'Donnell: America’s First Christmas that Changed the Course of History
9. US delays intelligence center targeting foreign influence
10. No time for war: Russians see no chance of conflict
11. Putin's Asymmetric Blind Spot
12. Russian Brinkmanship Meets Weaponized Finance: Prepare for Deterrence to Fail
13. Russia accuses Ukraine of an 'act of terrorism' over Molotov attack
14. Has the Myth of the ‘Good War’ Done Us Lasting Harm?
15. The Art of Losing
16. Opinion | China is testing the West. We shouldn’t back down.
17. Who’s more likely to win Myanmar’s raging civil war?
1. A Rift in the Conservative Foreign-Policy World
Perhaps some inside baseball. Although this is focused primarily on Kori Schke and AEI it does provide a look at the think tank world and how it is evolving inside the beltway.
But as one of my closest friends and advisers (who daily provides me with a dose of reality about what the rest of America may be thinking) will likely ask me in an email response to this, "What does 'Joe Lunchbucket' think about this and how does he think this will affect him?" Does this matter to anyone outside the beltway and is this just an example of the elites naval gazing in Washington?
But for those that do care about these issues there is a lot to parse from this article.
A Rift in the Conservative Foreign-Policy World
December 23, 2021 6:30 AM
For years an influential foreign-policy voice on the right, the American Enterprise Institute finds itself at odds with hawkish Republicans.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
W
hile Donald Trump’s presidency realigned the foreign-policy debate on the right, that realignment hasn’t fulfilled predictions of an isolationist renaissance. Trump did inject heterodox, anti-interventionist views into the mainstream of the conservative movement, but the lion’s share of his foreign-policy successes were crafted by hawkish officials from the very establishment he campaigned against — people who worked to counter the Chinese Communist Party, contain Iran, forge Middle-East peace deals, and deter Russian aggression.
In the wake of Trump’s defeat, a network of conservative foreign-policy experts have been free to mingle with those who chose not to associate with the former president’s administration, and a number of conservative institutions — the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Hudson Institute, to name two — bulked up with the addition of officials who recently served in the last administration. In these corners, the result has been somewhat of a restoration of a traditional Republican outlook in foreign affairs.
But one longstanding bastion of mainstream conservative thought, the American Enterprise Institute, has been moving in a different direction, according to hawkish foreign-policy hands. Under the think tank’s new foreign-policy director, they say, AEI has distanced itself from the rest of the movement’s approach.
Kori Schake, a former State Department and Pentagon official, took the reins of the think tank’s storied foreign- and defense-policy arm in 2019 amid a period of change. She took the job under then-newly appointed AEI president Robert Doar, a welfare-policy expert without a foreign-policy background, following a successful stint at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Around Washington, she is a generally well-regarded expert on defense issues.
But two years into her tenure, hostility to Schake’s stances is percolating in some conservative circles. The critics take issue with her defenses of the Iran nuclear deal, opposition to sanctions to kill Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and criticism of Republicans for speaking out against critical race theory in the military. “What she’s done is genuinely made the Hill ambivalent about AEI,” a senior congressional Republican staffer told National Review. “No one pays attention to their events, and no one reads their newsletters.” Several other Republican aides echoed that sentiment during interviews about their interactions with AEI, with one senior staffer saying that AEI research gets a “presumption of denial” when it comes across his desk.
Schake, however, doesn’t see things that way, telling NR, “I think we’re doing a ton of good stuff with conservatives on the Hill.” She cited seven AEI scholars whom she points out work regularly with congressional Republicans on everything from China to Afghanistan to defense budgeting. Within AEI, she said, there’s a “commonality of conservative principles,” but different scholars have different views on a range of policy issues. “I mean, we’re having an internal argument right now about whether there is a near-term military threat to Taiwan, or not. And our China scholars are of a diversity of views on that. And we not only respect their academic freedom, we celebrate it.”
Of course, rather than allying itself institutionally with the Republican Party, AEI has long promoted a core set of values, including U.S. strength and leadership in the world. In practice, those ideological commitments historically lent themselves to intellectual influence within conservative coalitions and over elected Republicans. The primary example of this is AEI’s leading role in crafting the Bush administration’s 2007 Iraq surge strategy, where aspects of a report by AEI’s Fred Kagan, “Choosing Victory,” were implemented by commanders on the ground. But it wasn’t just when Republicans were in power that AEI had influence. When the GOP was banished to the wilderness in the Obama era, AEI’s foreign-policy experts marshaled conservative opposition to the Iran deal and the White House’s soft-on-Russia approach. It’s not an exaggeration to say that AEI was at the vanguard of Republican foreign policy.
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But that began to change in the Trump era, when AEI experts spoke out against the former president’s anti-intervention instincts; meanwhile, the White House was populated with fewer AEI alums than during the Bush administration. Over time, however, some of AEI’s leading foreign-policy voices praised Trump’s foreign-policy successes. Former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen became a generally pro-Trump voice in the Washington Post’s opinion pages, and Danielle Pletka, Schake’s predecessor, started to pen op-eds hailing some of those policy victories. She even publicly explained why she was considering voting for him in 2020 — something she could not stomach in 2016.
Schake, by contrast, has gone beyond temporal differences with Trump, signaling her objections to some core tenets of conservative foreign-policy doctrine. One recent example that piqued close observers of Schake’s tenure at AEI came when, last month, she said on a podcast that “tolerating [Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons] is actually a better choice than war.” Isolationist-minded foreign-policy experts celebrated the comments as a signal that the traditionally hawkish AEI wants to let Iran develop nuclear weapons. But Schake, who has endorsed the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and opposed the U.S. withdrawal from it, told NR that’s not what she meant. “I just think our current policy isn’t credible, and we need to come up with more credible ways, more credible threats that we make. Because I think we have this policy, the Iranians are continuing to make progress, and we need to find ways to diminish the value to them of the progress that they’re making.”
Meanwhile, the debate over wokeness in the military has turned into another flash point. She has publicly criticized Senator Tom Cotton, Senator Ted Cruz, and others for supposedly politicizing the military by railing against critical race theory. “Politicians like Senator Cruz are disgracefully trying to draw the military into culture wars that are terrible for cohesion in our military,” she told Politico. Her stance has deepened divisions with Republicans on the Hill. “Pretty much all GOP senators are concerned about wokeness in the military. It’s a consensus issue across the party and the movement. Why would any GOP staffer take anything from AEI, especially on issues where they just know the basics, when they know AEI is totally on the wrong side of a consensus issue?” a Senate GOP staffer said.
But Schake defended the stances that GOP aides say have damaged AEI’s reputation. “It is my very strong view that it is bad for the United States to pull our military into politicized debates, and there has been some of that going on on both sides of the aisle.” She also faulted General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for “wading into the conversation about critical race theory,” thus igniting a political controversy.
As Schake prefaced an explanation to NR about why she opposes Nord Stream 2 sanctions (arguing they needlessly antagonize an ally, Germany), she maintained, “The first thing is that I’m entitled to my view.” Republicans, however, worry that Schake has made AEI’s brand on the Hill politically unpalatable.
Another concern is that she’s using her perch to reopen the conservative foreign-policy world to advocates of isolationist policies. Primarily, this includes the network of foreign-policy experts cultivated by the Charles Koch Institute, including a constellation of groups that push for U.S. retrenchment amid global conflicts and oppose confronting America’s authoritarian adversaries. This year, Schake raised eyebrows by speaking at a conference sponsored by CKI and by participating in events with experts from the Quincy Institute, a controversial think tank funded by Koch and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Quincy in particular has raised eyebrows by advocating diplomatic cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, and some of its scholars have downplayed — and in at least one case repeated Beijing’s denials of — the Uyghur genocide. But Quincy’s rising prominence and its wrongheaded stances, Schake said, are precisely why she favors engagement despite disagreement within her shop. “There is a diversity of views, with some folks feeling that the Quincy Institute’s behavior to this point is sufficient that we shouldn’t give them a platform, that we shouldn’t engage with them, and others that feel, as I do, that our arguments can easily defeat the positions that they’re trying to get purchase from,” she said. “And if we don’t engage in the argument, they will get more traction on ideas that we think are dangerous to the country.”
AEI’s direction is not yet settled. While Schake represents the face of the think tank’s foreign-policy and defense initiatives, conservative Hill staffers pointed to longtime AEI scholars who they still think are doing important work, primarily on China and Iran. And Schake has made a number of interesting new hires, including scholars looking at cutting-edge defense-policy topics relating to Beijing’s use of tech companies to advance its national objectives and how the Party is thinking through a potential invasion of Taiwan.
Conservative hawks’ general disaffection with AEI could easily be dismissed as D.C. intrigue of interest to only a small circle of foreign-policy experts. For now, perhaps that’s what it is. But, as AEI charts its next steps, potentially inching away from mainstream GOP circles, it could leave an intellectual vacuum on the right that other organizations have yet to fill. Few have AEI’s heft.
2. Bear, Meet Porcupine: Unconventional Deterrence for Ukraine
I do not know if this is the authors' issue of the Defense One headline editor but this misses the point of the full spectrum of unconventional deterrence. It does provide an answer to the question of how can the joint force support unconventional deterrence? But it misses the entire point of resistance among the population.
There is only one mention of civil society and what could be tied to the actual concept of unconventional deterrence coined by Bob Jones at USSOCOM J5 (which should be part of integrated deterrence - nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence and unconventional deterrence) . But the emphasis of this article is not on developing a real resistance operating concept that is the foundation of unconventional deterrence.
It focuses only on the military technical aspects of making Ukraine "un-occupiable" and spends more time on the unassailable than the un-occupiable. Thus, the article falls short.
Ukraine must quickly grow a coat of quills that can make it unassailable or at least un-occupiable.
Excerpt:
Civil society presents another asymmetric vulnerability. Ukrainian cyber-teams could build counter-surveillance “halos” around opponents of the Putin government, protect their communications, interfere with telecommunications eavesdropping, and potentially, sow confusion among Russian internal security agencies. They could also take steps to ensure that any carnage wrought by “Putin’s war of choice” will regularly appear on smartphone screens across Russia, along with messaging that Ukraine simply wants a normal relationship with Russia, not one imposed at gunpoint.
Can unconventional deterrence become the third pillar of integrated deterrence along with nuclear deterrence and conventional deterrence? How can the Joint Force support unconventional deterrence:
· Unconventional Deterrence (Robert Jones) and Resilience
· The premise is simple – deter unwanted competition with little risk of escalation through the credible threat of unconventional warfare.
· The goal of UD is not to destabilize the societies of our enemies, rather the goal of UD is to deter our enemies from destabilizing our own society, and those of our Allies and Partners.
· In many ways, unconventional resilience is the opposite of unconventional deterrence. Instead of deterring the bad actor, unconventional resilience works to preclude the bad actor by denying the opportunity for action.
If we were thinking sufficiently about Irregular Warfare as part of the National Defense Strategy these concepts would easily come to the mind of policymakers, strategists and planners and not just those in the SOF community. It will be interesting to read the new NDS when it comes out early next year. I hope those senior leaders who are reviewing it now will consider whether there is sufficient emphasis on irregular warfare (or is everyone biased against IT because they equate it solely with COIN in Afghanistan and Iraq?).
The fundamental questions I would ask the authors are these: Do we understand the indigenous way of war and do our concepts adapt to it? Both the Russian and Ukrainian way of war? Or are we using US TTPS, concepts. and equipment? We must not forget this rule of irregular warfare: Do not force the US way of war upon indigenous forces if it is counter to their history, customs, traditions, and abilities. https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html
Bear, Meet Porcupine: Unconventional Deterrence for Ukraine
By "going porcupine," Ukraine can make it clear to Russia that invasion will be costly and unsuccessful. But Kiev needs help.
By CHRIS BRONK and GABRIEL COLLINS
Neither the forces committed nor the economic sanctions threatened by Washington and Brussels are enough to deter Russia from sending its massing forces across the Ukrainian border. What’s needed is a new form of deterrence: “going porcupine.” Ukraine must quickly grow a coat of quills that can make it unassailable or at least un-occupiable. Fortunately, affordable and scalable capabilities make this possible—if the U.S. will back the effort to the tune of just one-tenth or less of the money spent annually on Iraq and Afghanistan.
One key is vastly expanding Ukraine’s existing arsenal of a few dozen large drones, plus unknown quantities of smaller systems. Drones’ usefulness in large force-on-force warfare was demonstrated during last year’s 44-Day War, when Turkish-manufactured Azeri Bayraktar TB2 drones and various loitering munitions defanged Armenia’s Russian-made air defense systems, then destroyed hundreds of armored vehicles, fortifications, and troop concentrations—both by direct strikes and by spotting for artillery.
But Ukraine could, and should, also use its new drones to help persuade Russia not to start a fight in the first place. For example, drones might regularly snap high-quality imagery of potential targets that could be broadcast on social media. They might be used to frequently and unpredictably test air defenses. Entire fleets of drones—“swarm troopers”—could be brandished in “elephant walk” flights undertaken from several of Ukraine’s dozens of drone-capable airfields. Elephant walks could intersperse actual armed TB2s and other cheaper and numerous unarmed machines with a similar radar, visual, and aural signature to sow further uncertainty. Non-lethal “roof knocking” attacks against military targets might also be employed.
But “going porcupine” isn’t all about drones. To deter a Russian combined arms invasion, drones must be integrated with anti-air, anti-tank, and, particularly, cyber assets. Starting immediately, Ukraine should “defend forward” on the cyber front to pre-empt threats and shape the information and physical battlespaces. Kiev should hold at risk Russia’s pipeline and energy sector control systems, power grid, GLONASS global positioning system, and communications infrastructure, among other things—especially if Russian-linked actors attack Ukraine’s domestic energy system, as they did in 2015 and 2016.
Russia also has asymmetric cyber vulnerabilities in the political space. A hundred or so key oligarchs control an estimated $630 billion in wealth, much of it stashed abroad in various forms (even crypto-currencies). Other Russians likely serve as wealth-holding fronts for the country’s political leaders, allegedly even including Vladimir Putin himself. Ukrainian cyberwarriors—with NATO assistance—could likely locate, freeze, seize, or otherwise interdict these asset pools. There is precedent for such actions. For instance, Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations were disrupted by a cyberattack after he suggested a nuclear strike against Iran.
Civil society presents another asymmetric vulnerability. Ukrainian cyber-teams could build counter-surveillance “halos” around opponents of the Putin government, protect their communications, interfere with telecommunications eavesdropping, and potentially, sow confusion among Russian internal security agencies. They could also take steps to ensure that any carnage wrought by “Putin’s war of choice” will regularly appear on smartphone screens across Russia, along with messaging that Ukraine simply wants a normal relationship with Russia, not one imposed at gunpoint.
Once shooting starts, Ukraine would need to imperil Moscow’s helicopter fleet, force strike aircraft to stay above 10,000 feet, and force a “mostly ground war.” U.S. Stinger missiles and Polish GROM/Piorun systems would be particularly useful in this effort, because they are relatively easy to use, affordable, and replenishable at scale. For instance, the Polish military spent $220 million in 2016 for 420 Piorun launchers and 1,300 missiles. MANPADS could be geo-fenced to operate only within Ukraine in order to assuage proliferation/leakage concerns.
On the ground, Ukraine already has domestically-made RK-3 and Skif anti-tank missile systems, but these are either heavier or shorter-ranged than the American Javelin missile. Also, neither Ukrainian indigenous system is fully fire and forget, which exposes operators to counterfire. The U.S. has done a bit to rectify these challenges, delivering a total of 77 Javelin anti-tank missile launchers and 540 missiles to fire from them. But it should hurry to send several times that many.
One way to do so quickly would be through a temporary lease where after sufficient de-escalation by Russia, the unused missile stocks could be transferred back to U.S. custody. Such a modern “Lend Lease” process would supply munitions such as Javelins and Stingers at scale in response to Russian actions and place them under temporary, but full, Ukrainian operational control. Once Russia showed signs of de-escalation, remaining weapons above a pre-established baseline level would be handed back over to U.S. or NATO custody.
To maximize anti-armor capabilities’ deterrence impact, the U.S. could transfer “fast attack”-style vehicles that can mount anti-tank guided missiles or carry Javelin teams and move much faster than Russian armored units, thus enabling them to rapidly shoot and reposition, complicating invading forces’ ability to hit them with air or artillery fire. These vehicles cost around $30,000 apiece (versus $6 million or more for a UH-60 helicopter) and can also safely operate underneath Russian surface-to-air missiles that would threaten helicopters.
The third key is providing targeted financial support to convince Russia that Ukraine can sustain high-impact armed resistance—and that it can be scaled up if necessary. Targeted investments by the U.S. could magnify Ukraine’s ability to sustain drone operations in the face of formidable Russian air defenses. Armenia lacked the ability to conduct effective counter-UAV operations against Azerbaijan with its four Su-30SM fighters because it did not procure missiles along with the jets—a mistake Russia won’t make.
Work is already underway to construct a TB2 factory near Kiev. In late 2019, Baykar announced plans to spend 600 million liras ($106 million) to double TB2 production capacity at its plant near Istanbul to 92 units per year, while also producing 24 Akinci and 36 other combat drones annually. Extrapolating from those numbers suggests that U.S.-NATO financial assistance to Ukrainian defense firms on the order of $1 billion could credibly lead to production of more than 100 drones annually in Ukraine and a similar number from facilities cited in Poland or another willing neighbor less subject to direct Russian attack. The U.S. could also fund equipment upgrades and raw material procurement for other relevant parts of the Ukrainian defense sector to help it sustain a multi-year conflict.
This deterrence strategy would communicate clearly to Russia the near-certainty of hell if it invades. It also emphasizes limited objectives. Porcupine quills only impale bears that attack.
The views expressed in this article are exclusively those of the authors. They do not reflect official assessments or positions of the Baker Institute, Rice University, or the University of Houston.
3. How the Taliban Outwitted and Outwaited the U.S.
Long and troubling read.
“The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerilla wins if he does not lose.” Henry Kissinger, Foreign Affairs, Jan 1969
“Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other.” Marshall Foch, Battle of the Marne, 1914
How the Taliban Outwitted and Outwaited the U.S.
Islamist movement spoke of moderation as it solidified gains on the battlefield, taking Washington and its Afghan allies by surprise
By Yaroslav Trofimov in Kabul and Jessica Donati in Washington | Photographs by Kate Brooks/Redux Pictures for The Wall Street Journal
Dec. 24, 2021 10:02 am ET
The Taliban won’t seek to rule Afghanistan on their own anymore, the document assured, and a new constitution “would pave the way for power-sharing in the next government.” When the republic’s delegates returned to Kabul, many enthused about how much the Taliban had evolved from the ruthless regime that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s.
For the next nine years, the Taliban continued to lull the world with conciliatory messaging as they pursued a bloody war at home in parallel with diplomatic efforts to secure their ultimate goal: an American military withdrawal.
“Monopoly of power is a story of failure. That is why we want to have all on board,” Suhail Shaheen, now the Taliban’s ambassador-designate to the United Nations, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal six weeks before the group seized Kabul, deposed the Afghan republic and monopolized all power. “Past experiences have shown that you will ultimately fail and will not bring durable peace.”
Throughout its history, Afghanistan defied foreign attempts to reshape the country, from the British Empire in the 19th century to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s to the failed American experiment in nation-building.
An examination of why U.S. peace efforts collapsed so spectacularly, setting back the Biden presidency and America’s global standing, reveals the Taliban’s mastery of the diplomatic long game.
America’s increasing impatience with its longest overseas war drove the pace of these talks—removing one by one the Taliban’s incentives to compromise. For President Biden just as for President Trump, the “priority was to get out, not the Afghan settlement,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, who served as chief U.S. negotiator under both administrations. “They made it clear—and that strengthened the Talibs.”
Seeking an exit, U.S. officials found it expedient to paint Taliban behavior in the best possible light while exaggerating the strength of the Afghan republic they had brought to life. Recognizing this opening, the Taliban leadership learned how to obfuscate their true intentions in the comforting language that appealed to foreign diplomats and negotiators.
The question now is whether Western powers can apply lessons from past failures as they try to nudge the Islamist movement into adopting more-moderate policies. Experience suggests that the Taliban won’t readily trade long-held traditions for Western cash and a place in the global community.
Some U.S. and former Afghan officials continue to believe the relatively pragmatic Taliban they dealt with were sincere and that a negotiated solution could have preserved at least some achievements gleaned from the 20-year international effort in Afghanistan. Intransigence by President Ashraf Ghani, they argue, ultimately torpedoed these efforts and bolstered the Taliban’s more hard-line elements.
“Monopoly of power is a story of failure. That is why we want to have all on board.” — Suhail Shaheen
The new Afghan government established in September is made up almost exclusively of Taliban clerics prominent in the insurgency. While the new regime has refrained so far from openly hosting terrorist groups or committing the kind of atrocities that earned it world-wide condemnation in the past, it has already sharply curtailed the rights of women, banned girls’ education beyond the sixth grade in most provinces and marginalized ethnic communities that aren’t part of its Pashtun power base.
In continuing talks with U.S. and allies in Doha, Qatar, the new Taliban administration is seeking diplomatic recognition, a removal of American sanctions and the unfreezing of over $9 billion in Afghan central-bank assets abroad. One of Washington’s key conditions is the creation of a more inclusive government in Kabul that respects human rights, one that would fulfill promises that the Taliban have been making since Chantilly.
“The Taliban regime should seek legitimacy within Afghanistan before seeking international recognition,” said Thomas West, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, who is leading these talks.
The Road to Doha
The Taliban sought to negotiate with Washington and other Afghans immediately after a U.S. invasion ousted their government in 2001. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s American-anointed new leader, wanted the Islamist movement to participate in the Bonn conference that year that established the country’s new political order. Washington, still shaken in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, which Osama bin Laden plotted on Afghan soil, vetoed the plan. Potential Taliban negotiators were hunted down by U.S. special-operations forces and the Central Intelligence Agency, and shipped to detention in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
American and allied attitudes to engaging the Taliban changed as the group bounced back in the ensuing decade. By 2009, the Taliban once again controlled large parts of the countryside. Mr. Obama surged the U.S. military presence to over 100,000 troops to defend the Afghan republic—while also promising to start withdrawing all American forces 18 months later.
Fatima Gailani, one of the members of the Afghan republic’s negotiating team in Doha.
By the time Washington was ready to negotiate, Taliban leaders refused to sit down with Mr. Karzai’s administration, dismissing it as an American puppet with no legitimacy or agency of its own. Mr. Karzai, for his part, objected to the U.S. engaging in talks with the Taliban that excluded the Afghan republic’s democratically elected government. The Obama administration agreed not to discuss Afghanistan’s future without Kabul but also endorsed the idea of creating a Taliban political mission abroad to facilitate diplomatic contacts.
The U.S. and the insurgents began building trust by negotiating tactical deals, such as freeing five senior Taliban leaders who had spent more than a decade in Guantánamo in exchange for the Taliban handing over Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. Army sergeant who walked off his base and was captured by the insurgents. Taliban representatives, some of whom had been living in Doha for years, formally opened a political office there in 2013.
While the Taliban still rejected direct talks with the Kabul government, its envoys based in Doha began to engage in several rounds of so-called track-two meetings with members of the Afghan republic’s political elites. The Chantilly confab was followed by similar events in Europe, Russia and China.
Over the years, the Taliban office in Doha, and the exemption of its members from United Nations travel sanctions, allowed the insurgent movement to reach out to governments world-wide, gaining growing acceptance as a legitimate political force.
“One of the reasons why the Taliban outsmarted Americans is the fact they set up relations with the whole world while negotiating with the Americans—something that the Americans didn’t want to happen,” said Rahimullah Mahmood, a veteran insurgent commander who served as governor of Wardak province after the Taliban takeover and now is deputy head of the Kandahar-based military corps. “They succeeded in convincing the world that the Taliban weren’t the terrorists as depicted by American propaganda.”
In 2018, President Trump, a longtime critic of the Afghan war, scrapped the long-held precondition that the U.S. would only enter into talks with the Taliban that included the Afghan republic’s government. Mr. Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Kabul and to the United Nations, was appointed as special envoy with wide latitude to negotiate a deal.
Born in Afghanistan in 1951, Mr. Khalilzad knew Mr. Ghani since both went to the U.S. as high-school exchange students. The two men later studied at the American University in Beirut and then earned their Ph.D.s in the U.S.—Mr. Khalilzad at the University of Chicago, and Mr. Ghani at Columbia. Mr. Khalilzad’s dealings with the Taliban dated back to the 1990s, when he served as a consultant for the Unocal oil company that explored building a pipeline through Afghanistan.
“His mandate was to figure out a way to enable us to leave quickly and potentially zero out the force, but to be able to call it a victory,” said a senior State Department official who was involved in the effort. “And it wasn’t always understood that those were mostly mutually exclusive.”
Mr. Ghani, a former American citizen who succeeded Mr. Karzai as president in 2014, was alarmed by these negotiations. A co-author of a book called “Fixing Failed States” and a onetime fixture of Washington’s think-tank circuit, he boasted to other Afghan officials about his understanding of American politics. But, until too late, he and senior officials in his administration misread American intentions and clung on to illusions that Washington would never actually pull the plug on Kabul.
The U.S. had been talking about leaving Afghanistan for more than a decade, after all. “There was this notion of Afghanistan being a unique geographical location that would always be an area of interest for global powers,” said Nader Nadery, a senior Afghan peace negotiator who headed the fallen republic’s civil service. “Some of our colleagues believed until the last months that the U.S. forces would never leave.”
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani misread U.S. intentions until it was too late.
Photo: KIANA HAYERI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“In Kabul, they were living in an unrealistic world,” agreed Mr. Khalilzad, who left the U.S. government in October. “That was the grand miscalculation.”
That belief that America’s national-security establishment wouldn’t allow Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden to abandon Afghanistan was coupled with another strategic blunder: excessive optimism about the Afghan republic’s own military strength, Mr. Khalilzad added. “They didn’t assess their forces correctly. I don’t know that any of them thought, at the leadership level, that the force would collapse that quickly.”
The combination of these two miscalculations meant that Mr. Ghani slow-rolled peace talks between the Afghan republic and the Taliban on a possible power-sharing agreement that would have inevitably involved him leaving office. It is unclear to what extent the Taliban would have compromised. But, as the insurgents made dramatic military gains, their calculations changed, too. In Doha over the months, discussions moved from possible power-sharing to considering an “inclusive government” dominated by the Taliban to essentially a surrender on Taliban terms.
“Ghani was not flexible, and that is why we are in this dark situation,” said Habiba Sarabi, a member of the Afghan republic’s negotiating team with the Taliban and a former governor of Bamian province. “His mentality was that the Taliban should join his government and he would be on the top. This was not possible in a peace process. He loved power. He was crazy for power.”
Ms. Sarabi, who like most of the Afghan republic’s senior officials and negotiators is now in exile, added that Mr. Khalilzad shared the blame because he consistently stressed the Taliban’s alleged moderation and interest in a peaceful transition. “He wanted to sugarcoat the almond. But at the end the bitter taste appeared,” she said.
“In Kabul, they were living in an unrealistic world. That was the grand miscalculation.” — Zalmay Khalilzad
Mr. Khalilzad, who wrote an op-ed all the way back in 1996 to argue that “the Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism,” said that he believed in the sincerity of Taliban negotiators and that it was the fault of both sides that no political settlement could be found. “They didn’t rise to the occasion,” he said. “I couldn’t blame that one side was more at fault than the other.”
Withdrawal or Peace?
To begin serious talks, Mr. Khalilzad needed a Taliban counterpart with appropriate seniority. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar fit the bill. He was a co-founder of the Islamist organization, served as deputy minister of defense in the previous Taliban regime and coordinated the insurgency’s commanders after the U.S. invasion. A relative pragmatist, Mr. Baradar had tried to open negotiations with the U.S. in 2001, and engaged in secret contacts with Mr. Karzai’s government in 2010. One of the few senior Taliban members from the same aristocratic Popolzai clan as Mr. Karzai, Mr. Baradar was captured by Pakistani and U.S. agents in Karachi later that year, and kept in Pakistani custody since.
In September 2018, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo led a delegation to Islamabad to press the need for Pakistan’s cooperation and to demand Mr. Baradar’s release. Pakistan acquiesced and Mr. Baradar moved to Doha weeks later to take the helm of the Taliban political office. The Taliban’s secretive supreme leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, who has never been filmed in public, gave his blessing to the negotiations.
The talks faced a constraint from the start: Mr. Trump’s impatience to bring home the troops. American negotiators say they woke up every morning with the fear of seeing what they described as “the tweet of Damocles” in which Mr. Trump would announce an unconditional withdrawal.
As American and Taliban envoys started hashing out a deal in Doha, U.S. ambassador to Kabul John Bass tried for months to push Mr. Ghani to name a broad negotiating team that would be ready to begin Kabul’s own talks with the Taliban. The Afghan president refused, unwilling to dilute his administration’s control over the process.
“President Ghani’s model of negotiation—and that was the essence of his unhappiness—was that he should be the one negotiating with Hibatullah. That he would have his laptop under his arm, sit with Hibatullah, and make a deal,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “And of course that was not realistic from the get-go.”
By the summer of 2019, Mr. Khalilzad’s team hammered out the broad contours of the deal with Mr. Baradar in Qatar. Then, the Taliban suddenly reversed course and demanded prisoner releases, a new, major concession. To break the deadlock, the U.S. yielded and signed off on a clause that required Kabul to free up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners in Afghan custody. Mr. Ghani was allowed to read the draft text but not to keep a copy. He wasn’t given access to the agreement’s secret annexes, either.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, second from right, was a pragmatic point man for the Taliban in talks with the U.S.
With preparations under way for Mr. Trump to host a grand signing ceremony around the Sept. 11 anniversary, a car bomb went off near the U.S. Embassy and Afghan security compounds in Kabul, killing 12 people, including a U.S. soldier. The Taliban claimed responsibility. A furious Mr. Trump tweeted that he “called off” the talks with the Islamist movement and canceled plans for a meeting with Taliban leaders and Mr. Ghani in Camp David.
Encouraged by the apparent about-turn, Mr. Ghani hoped that Mr. Trump’s rush for the exits would now be restrained. His national-security adviser, Hamdullah Mohib, complained that America was “whitewashing the Taliban” because it was tired of the war, and called for reassessing the deal. Mr. Nadery, the peace negotiator, wasn’t as optimistic. That September, he binge-watched a Netflix series on the fall of South Vietnam, noting that the government in Saigon, just as the government in Kabul, had been kept in the dark by the U.S.
In Washington, John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s then-national security adviser, held a similar view. “We were basically selling the government out. The analogy of Vietnam is really true,” said Mr. Bolton, who quit that month over disagreements with Mr. Trump that included Afghanistan policy. “In both cases, everybody, every other interested party could see that the principal U.S. objective was to get out.”
The suspension didn’t last long. Mr. Trump still wanted to leave Afghanistan before the U.S. presidential elections. Within weeks, U.S. diplomats opened talks to swap two professors of the American University in Kabul held hostage by the Taliban in return for Anas Haqqani, the younger brother of the Taliban’s deputy leader Sirajuddin, who was held by the Afghan government. The U.S. has designated the Haqqani network a terrorist organization since 2012 because of its links to al Qaeda.
By February 2020, the Taliban agreed to a brief cease-fire as a show of goodwill and Mr. Trump approved signing the deal. It was officially called the “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” even though the Taliban made no commitment to stop military operations against the Afghan government and security forces.
In the text, the U.S. promised a full military withdrawal by May 2021 in exchange for the Taliban pledging to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghan soil to threaten other nations. The Taliban, in a significant departure, also agreed to open peace talks with Mr. Ghani’s government. The U.S. withdrawal wasn’t conditional on the success of these negotiations—in part because Washington didn’t want to give Mr. Ghani a lever to slow down the departure.
Mr. Pompeo flew to Doha to attend the signing ceremony on Feb. 29, 2020. Minutes before his arrival in Qatar, the Taliban staged a victory march with the white flags of their Islamic Emirate, prompting fears among the Qatari hosts that the embarrassment might scuttle the deal at the last moment. The Qataris were prepared to prevent the Taliban from entering the luxury Sheraton resort with the flags. The insurgency’s representatives left them in their vehicles.
Mr. Pompeo grimly shook hands with Mr. Baradar after aides failed to orchestrate his separation from the Taliban in the room. Mr. Khalilzad signed for the U.S. while Mr. Pompeo followed with a somber speech delivered mostly to journalists in another room afterward. Members of Mr. Khalilzad’s team were relieved the day had passed without incident and stayed out until late in Doha, drinking overpriced cocktails.
Mr. Ghani initially resisted the Doha agreement’s commitment, made by the U.S. without his assent, that Kabul release thousands of Taliban prisoners. He also kept rebuffing American pressure to create a negotiating team including his political foes in Kabul, such as Mr. Karzai and his challenger in the 2019 presidential elections, Abdullah Abdullah. Any power-sharing deal with the insurgents would be contingent on Mr. Ghani stepping down, after all. Loath to leave office, the Afghan president instead kept hoping that Washington would reverse the withdrawal decision, especially if Mr. Trump were to fail in his re-election bid.
“We, the Afghan government, should have seen the writing on the wall,” Mr. Mohib, who served as Mr. Ghani’s national-security adviser until both men fled Kabul on Aug. 15, said when asked what was the Afghan administration’s biggest error. “It was a withdrawal, not a peace agreement. Democratic values were not as much of a priority as we thought. The gains of the past 20 years were not as much of a priority as we thought they would be.”
Taliban military commanders were also initially upset with the Doha deal. Mullah Mohammad Fazel, a Taliban negotiator and one of the five former Guantánamo inmates freed in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl, traveled across front lines from Qatar to a meeting with insurgent commanders from all over Afghanistan to explain its terms.
Mullah Mohammad Fazel, who was released after 12 years in Guantánamo, became a Taliban negotiator.
Some of the men, sporting the Taliban’s black turbans and beards, believed the agreement was naive, according to those present. How were they supposed to trust that the U.S. would in fact leave Afghanistan the following year? Why should they stop hitting American forces even as Washington retained the right to conduct airstrikes against them?
“During the negotiations, many were claiming that the Americans were deceiving us, that it was all a trap for us,” said Mr. Mahmood, then the military commander of the Taliban’s eastern zone, who attended the gathering in the Musa Qala district of Helmand province. “Many military commanders wanted to resume attacks on Americans. The suicide bombers, in particular, were extremely sad: they cried and mourned the fact that they wouldn’t get martyred.”
Yet, the Taliban political negotiators’ argument that Washington would deliver on pledges made in Doha and withdraw from Afghanistan prevailed at the end, said Mr. Mahmood. “It’s a treaty of victory,” was the message that he carried back to his troops.
Shortly after that, the Taliban’s propaganda department published a calendar for the Islamic year 1442 that began in August 2020. It showed an American and a Taliban hand signing the Doha deal—described as “the agreement to end the invasion”—and Afghanistan breaking free from chains of foreign occupation. Below was a quote from the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mr. Hibatullah, pledging: “We don’t want the monopoly on power.”
Drawdown
The lack of progress in Afghanistan ahead of the U.S. presidential election was causing Mr. Trump to get impatient, and in June he ordered a fresh drawdown of troops to 4,500, without any concessions by the Taliban.
At that point, the Taliban hadn’t delivered on any of their major promises except for stopping attacks on American troops. They still refused to meet the Afghan government’s delegation. Trying to gain the prisoner release and break the stalemate, Mr. Baradar made verbal assurances to U.S. negotiators that violence would drop as soon as the 5,000 Taliban inmates were set free.
A buoyed Mr. Khalilzad sent a cable to Washington announcing that Mr. Baradar had promised a near-complete cease-fire. Ross Wilson, who had taken over the role of top U.S. diplomat in Kabul, delivered the message to Mr. Ghani. The promised cease-fire “was part of our selling of what was a very difficult decision for good reasons,” Mr. Wilson said. Grudgingly, Mr. Ghani agreed to a prisoner release in phases in exchange for the Taliban setting free 1,000 government personnel in their custody.
With the release complete in September 2020, Taliban and Afghan republic negotiators finally gathered in Doha’s Sharq Village resort for their own peace talks. The venue spread around a large beachside pool frequented by bikini-clad tourists who lounged under loud pop music that wafted into Taliban negotiators’ rooms. Afghan republic delegates were told by Kabul to stay away from the pool to avoid embarrassing headlines. The Taliban didn’t swim.
The two sides had breakfast in separate halls and rarely socialized. Key Taliban negotiators, who by then spent several years in Qatar and had families and businesses there, only occasionally showed up in the Sharq Village.
Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai headed the Afghan government’s negotiating team with the Taliban in Doha.
As the two Afghan delegations began their discussions, a U.S. military team monitored the levels of violence in Afghanistan to evaluate whether the Taliban were abiding by Mr. Baradar’s assurances. The team documented a rise in insurgent attacks instead. U.S. Army Col. Brad Moses, who served as deputy to the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Scott Miller, briefed about the alarming data on intensifying violence during regular calls with the White House, the State Department, the CIA and other U.S. government agencies.
“It never reduced,” he said. The Taliban would claim to the U.S. that these attacks were either carried out by spoilers or criminals when confronted with the evidence, he added.
The Afghan government, meanwhile, instructed its forces, cooped up in isolated bases and outposts, to stop offensive operations during the talks and engage in what it called “active defense.” The loss of initiative handed over a critical advantage to the insurgents, said Lt. Gen. Imam Nazar Behboud, who commanded the Afghan army’s Kandahar corps.
“This meant that you just had to stand there and wait until the Taliban attacked you. No matter how much you got killed, you just had to wait,” he said. “There were huge casualties. The troops were tired, they were not receiving any backup from Kabul, and they lost their trust in the central government.”
By October, the Taliban had gathered a huge force in the south and launched a wide-scale assault on Helmand’s provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. The U.S. intervened with airstrikes to prevent the city’s collapse. Weeks later, the Taliban moved toward Kandahar, capturing the Arghandab district on the edge of the country’s second-largest city. Another torrent of U.S. airstrikes stopped further advances. Both sides accused each other of violating the Doha agreement.
Nader Nadery, a senior Afghan peace negotiator, once binge-watched a Netflix series on the fall of South Vietnam.
Still, the Taliban stuck to their promise not to strike American targets, showing that they could exercise discipline over their fighters when they wanted to. Despite sustaining heavy casualties in the airstrikes, the Taliban leaders calculated it wasn’t in their interest to disrupt an American withdrawal they viewed as inevitable.
“We convinced our fighters that, as our negotiations with the Americans are under way, we will not fire a single bullet at the Americans. We proved that we can uphold our treaties,” said Mohammad Farouk Ansari, a member of the Taliban’s military commission that united some 50 top commanders from across the country. “We told each other at the time that it was a victory. When the Americans started closing their outposts and evacuating their bases, we knew that the country was ours, today or tomorrow.”
U.S. officials still wonder whether they had been played by Mr. Baradar’s promises or whether the chief Taliban negotiator himself was being used by the insurgency’s real leadership to lull the U.S. and Kabul into complacency.
‘It was always hard to tell if the Taliban were serious about a political settlement or not,” said Carter Malkasian, who was part of Mr. Khalilzad’s team as a representative from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “One possibility is that they never meant it. That they were saying what we needed to hear. We may learn, like we have about the Vietnamese negotiations, that they never had any intention of conceding.”
The U.S. presidential election was held on Nov. 3 and Mr. Trump lost. While fighting to overturn the results, he ordered the Pentagon to pull remaining troops out of Afghanistan and appointed a new defense secretary, Chris Miller, a former Green Beret and vocal war skeptic, to carry out the plan. Mr. Miller, along with other close advisers, convinced the president to keep a downsized force of 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to avoid the country’s collapse, which they said would hurt Mr. Trump if he wanted to run for office again.
Around that time, Mr. Khalilzad circulated proposals for a new interim government that would be equally split between the Taliban and representatives of the republic. The proposal, he said, didn’t specify who would be in charge.
Mr. Miller said the unspoken goal of retaining a small force to keep the Kabul government afloat was to eventually force Mr. Ghani to cut a power-sharing deal. “And let’s be honest, the Taliban probably would have had about 14 seats in the cabinet. And Ghani probably would have had four. He probably would have had sports and recreation. Probably would have had, like, roads and sewers,” Mr. Miller added.
“He loved power. He was crazy for power. ” — Habiba Sarabi of President Ashraf Ghani
The Afghan president hoped the American determination to withdraw from Afghanistan would end with Mr. Trump’s term on Jan. 20. He was so convinced that the new Biden administration wouldn’t follow through on the Doha agreement that he declined to see Mr. Khalilzad when the American envoy came to Afghanistan that January. Mr. Ghani subsequently rejected Mr. Khalilzad’s power-sharing plan, which was promptly leaked to the media, and kept refusing to engage in meaningful talks in Doha.
“It was us, the republic, that were lingering. The Taliban were much more flexible,” said Fatima Gailani, a negotiator for the republic who belongs to one of the country’s most influential families. “Negotiations need a give and take, and an honorable compromise is absolutely fine, but that was not the case at all. It was purposefully lingering and waiting for Biden to come. Why were they thinking that Biden would bring a miracle, I don’t know.”
Mr. Khalilzad gave his proposal to Mr. Baradar, who agreed to consider it but offered no formal response.
By then, Taliban commanders on the ground, emboldened by their military successes and the looming American withdrawal, had little desire to share power with their enemies. “The strategy of a colonizer, when it is forced out of a country, is to leave its offspring behind, so as not to break the chain of colonization. The Americans wanted to keep a parallel government here, for the Taliban and the rest to have equal power,” said Mr. Ansari, the Taliban military commission member who operated southeast of Kabul. “We did not agree with this from the very beginning. We said that we’re the rulers in the country. The country is our home. We don’t accept a second ruler in our home.”
Mr. Ghani’s hopes about Mr. Biden were quickly dashed. The new president had advocated withdrawing from Afghanistan back when he served as Mr. Obama’s vice president, and showed little inclination to reverse Mr. Trump’s deal.
For months after Mr. Biden took office, interagency officials held an endless series of meetings on how to mitigate risks from the pullout. Abandoning the Doha agreement, the White House calculated, would force the Taliban to resume attacks on American forces, requiring a major troop increase with no end in sight. As for the peace talks shepherded by Mr. Khalilzad in Doha, the White House concluded that chances of progress were too slim to justify delaying the withdrawal.
“There is not a lot of evidence that either side treated those negotiations in Doha in good faith,” said a current senior Biden administration official who was involved in the decision-making.
On April 12, the Taliban refused to participate in a peace conference that the U.S. was trying to convene under the sponsorship of the United Nations in Turkey, fearing that they would be forced to make concessions.
“We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it…responsibly, deliberately and safely,” Mr. Biden said in the White House’s Treaty Room that day. “More and endless American military force could not create or sustain a durable Afghan government.”
Kabul was stunned. The following afternoon, Mr. Ghani convened top Afghan security officials to discuss Mr. Biden’s bombshell. The army chief of staff wondered how the Afghan military could continue servicing its aircraft once American advisers and contractors left. Mr. Ghani, according to a person present at the meeting, was calm and said he was working on securing continuing U.S. support.
Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who used to work closely with the CIA, refused to believe that Mr. Biden would actually withdraw all U.S. forces. Could Mr. Biden’s announcement simply be a pressure tactic to force Kabul make concessions to the Taliban in Doha, he wondered, according to people present.
Mr. Saleh, Afghanistan’s former intelligence chief, told the Journal his U.S. interlocutors had been assuring until the last moment that Washington wouldn’t abandon his administration. “There were so many occasions in which I asked the visiting dignitaries, diplomats, intelligence officials, generals and members of the U.S. intelligentsia if the U.S. would hand over Afghanistan to the Taliban,” Mr. Saleh said after Kabul’s fall to the Taliban. “The answer would be outright no, with nuances explained later but still implying no.”
As members of Mr. Ghani’s inner circle continued to cling to illusions, Afghan army and police field commanders drew a different conclusion: The end was nigh. Survival meant striking private deals with the Taliban and preparing for a rainy day meant selling off their units’ ammunition, food and fuel on the black market.
By May, the Taliban started taking one district after another, often without a fight, allowing government troops to go home unharmed and giving them pocket money for the road. Still, in accordance with verbal commitments given to Mr. Khalilzad, the insurgents refrained from seizing any of the country’s 34 provincial capitals. In Doha, Taliban negotiator Mohammad Nabi Omari, another former Guantánamo inmate who is affiliated with the Haqqani network, hashed out a transition proposal with a narrow circle of Afghan republic representatives.
Under the proposed deal, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mr. Hibatullah, would become Afghanistan’s head of state but the country would turn into a constitutional monarchy of sorts, governed under the 1964 constitution promulgated by King Zahir Shah, with an elected parliament. Ms. Gailani, who was involved in this negotiation, joked that Mr. Hibatullah, who hadn’t been seen in public for years and widely presumed to be dead, was a perfect head of state. Her Taliban interlocutor assured her that Mr. Hibatullah was very much alive. Both sides agreed to keep the planned agreement secret.
“They were not easy. There were things on which they would absolutely not compromise upon. They would never accept the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. They would never accept our constitution,” said Ms. Gailani. “But at least 60% of our values could be rescued. Our flag could be rescued.”
Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, the lead Afghan government negotiator in Doha and a former defense minister and intelligence chief who regularly briefed Mr. Ghani on the talks, said he believed the plan presented by Mr. Omari was just an individual idea and not a solid proposal backed by the entire Taliban leadership.
In late June, Mr. Ghani flew to Washington in a last-ditch effort to persuade the U.S. of the need to keep providing support. Mr. Biden agreed to receive Mr. Ghani in the White House only if he came with Dr. Abdullah, then holding the title of head of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation. “We’re going to stick with you. And we’re going to do our best to see to it you have the tools you need,” Mr. Biden promised in joint remarks.
The American president’s April withdrawal decision “has made everybody recalculate and reconsider,” Mr. Ghani chimed in. “The Afghan nation is in an 1861 moment, like President Lincoln, rallying to the defense of the republic. It’s a choice of values—the values of an exclusionary system or an inclusionary system.”
President Ghani gives an interview in his office in Gul Khana Palace.
Photo: KIANA HAYERI FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Ms. Gailani met Mr. Ghani in Washington during that trip and briefed him on proposals discussed with Mr. Omari and other Taliban negotiators. Mr. Ghani encouraged her to continue the talks, she said. “I thought, good, he decided to be the de Klerk of Afghanistan, not the Saddam or Gadhafi,” she recalled. “It was clear that this was the end, but at least it could have been a decent end. At least the institutions, the army, the police would not have collapsed.”
Yet, in following weeks, Mr. Ghani continued playing for time. “He lingered and lingered, which just made things more difficult,” Ms. Gailani said.
In July, a senior foreign envoy visited Mr. Ghani in Kabul. The Afghan president was defiant, boasting about the strength of government forces massed in the city and saying that the Taliban would suffer 50,000 casualties should they attempt to attack the capital. Still, he added that he instructed his bodyguards to give him a lethal injection should he face the risk of being captured by the Taliban, according to the envoy.
Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, the head of U.S. Central Command, flew to Kabul later that month to meet Mr. Ghani, publicly promising intensified airstrikes in support of Afghan forces. “Taliban victory is not inevitable,” he said at the time. In private, Gen. McKenzie told Mr. Ghani that Mr. Biden was still evaluating options for continuing to provide air support to Afghan forces from bases in the Persian Gulf after the withdrawal.
The Republic Collapses
In early August, the Taliban’s military commission chief, Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir, gathered military commanders in the insurgent stronghold of Aryub Zazi in the eastern Paktia province. The time to capture provincial capitals had come, Mr. Zakir announced, but the Taliban should take their time and not rush.
“It was decided that we should enter the cities cautiously, targeting the provinces that fall an easy prey,” said Hajji Qari Osman Ibrahimi, a member of the Taliban military commission who attended the meeting. “And we were told not to enter Kabul, because we had promised so to the Americans.”
As it turned out, almost all the cities were easy prey, and just a week later the Taliban were at the doorstep of the Afghan capital. Dr. Abdullah held another round of meetings in Doha and returned to Kabul to brief Mr. Ghani and other political leaders: A transitional arrangement that would save at least some of the Afghan republic’s institutions was still possible. The Taliban had a strong incentive to cooperate. The U.S. had assured the insurgents that such a transitional government would get diplomatic recognition and would have access to billions of dollars in Afghan central-bank reserves and continued foreign aid.
Dr. Abdullah, Mr. Karzai, Islamist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other Afghan leaders planned to fly to Doha to strike such an agreement but needed Mr. Ghani’s commitment to resign first. Once again, the Afghan president stalled for time, haggling over the composition of the delegation and insisting that close aides such as Mr. Mohib participate. The delegation was tentatively scheduled to leave Aug. 16.
Afghan government representative Abdullah Abdullah, seated third from left, confers with other negotiators at the start of talks with the Taliban in Doha.
Amin Karim, a senior member of Mr. Hekmatyar’s party and a former adviser to Mr. Ghani, went to see the Afghan president in the palace that week.
“It’s game over,” he started the meeting, in English. Mr. Ghani, flustered, accused Mr. Karim of defeatism, saying that Kabul was safe and that tens of thousands of elite troops from all over the country were ready to protect the Afghan capital.
On Aug. 14, Mr. Wilson, the American envoy, also met with Mr. Ghani. By then, the major cities of Kandahar, Herat and Ghazni had fallen to the Taliban. He says he was struck by how calm the Afghan leader appeared. Reporters were invited to cover the meeting, which was unusual. Taliban commanders in the mountains around the city had no inkling that just hours later they would be in control of the Afghan capital.
“We were sure that provinces would fall without any resistance, but we weren’t sure about Kabul. Bluffing by the government had given us a sense that there would be a fight,” said Mohammad Salim Saad, a senior commander of the Haqqani network’s Badri force who oversaw insurgent operations within the capital. “We worried that a battle for Kabul would destroy the city.”
The morning of Aug. 15, some armed Taliban sympathizers started appearing in the city. On Washington’s request, the Taliban issued a statement in Doha that requested all Taliban units to stay away. Mr. Wilson ordered all remaining personnel to move from the U.S. Embassy compound in Kabul’s Green Zone to the airport, then held by the American military.
Remaining staff were told to leave their personal effects behind and were allowed just one suitcase. Mr. Wilson left his suits and shoes at the embassy, and packed the essentials, including a book that had just arrived via Amazon delivery. As he boarded the chopper to leave for the airport, the pilots told him that Mr. Ghani had been spotted fleeing Afghanistan by helicopter about 30 minutes earlier.
“He gave us no hint that he was leaving. Not a scintilla of a hint that he was going to leave the country,” Mr. Wilson recalled. Mr. Ghani, in a statement released weeks later from the United Arab Emirates, where he now resides, said his unexpected departure “was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul.”
In Doha, senior Taliban representatives gathered on the 21st floor of Qatar’s foreign ministry for a meeting with the country’s special envoy who oversaw Afghan affairs, Mutlaq al Qahtani. In disbelief, they watched the news of Mr. Ghani’s escape. Would the U.S. military want to secure Kabul for two weeks, to enable an orderly transition, they asked.
Mr. Baradar, Mr. Khalilzad, Gen. McKenzie and other officials met in Doha that afternoon. “There was a sense of anarchy coming. Law and order was falling apart in Kabul,” Mr. Khalilzad recalled. Following Mr. Ghani’s escape, the rest of the Afghan republic’s ministers, including the minister of defense, also rushed to the airport to flee the country.
The Biden administration wasn’t interested in taking potentially open-ended responsibility for the besieged Afghan capital and its five million residents. “It’s not my job. My job is to safely withdraw my forces,” Gen. McKenzie replied to the Taliban proposal, according to Mr. Khalilzad. “If you attack, we’ll defend ourselves.”
By 8 p.m., Taliban units, mostly those belonging to the Haqqani network, started entering the city, reinforcing the first echelon of clandestine operatives who had seized strategic locations.
Taliban fighters take control of Afghan presidential palace after President Ghani fled the country on Aug. 15.
Photo: Zabi Karimi/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Instead of a negotiated transfer of power with international recognition that had been discussed with the U.S., the Taliban found themselves running a government with empty coffers, subjected to American sanctions and denied a United Nations seat.
Mr. Baradar, widely expected to become the Taliban’s new head of government, was marginalized as one of three deputy prime ministers, and later disappeared from view for weeks. His verbal promises to American and other international negotiators, such as a commitment to ensure girls’ education, were no longer binding for Afghanistan’s new regime.
Instead, the Haqqanis and the southern military commanders under Mullah Omar’s son Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob emerged as the factions with real authority in Kabul.
A newly published Taliban calendar, for the Islamic year that began in August 2021, no longer carried Mr. Hibatullah’s promise of not seeking a monopoly on power. Instead, it pledged to enforce a “pure Islamic system.” A pile of wrecked Humvees left behind and a fleet of Chinooks flying away with tattered American flags illustrated the message.
—Gordon Lubold contributed to this article.
4. The Art of War (not necessarily Sun Tzu)
There are many lessons still to be learned from the Cold War. I read a previous review of Menard's book and I meant to order it. So I just gave myself a late Christmas gift and finally did order it. (It is only $1.59 on Kindle ).
Excerpts:
Given the inexorable nature of Menand’s story, it can be hard to imagine how one might restore a world in which achievements in fine art and classical music—or even robust funding for public universities—would be perceived as a path to global power and popular acclaim. If certain prognosticators are to be believed, the United States is now facing a new cold war with China. But it seems unlikely that this cold war will produce any sort of high-culture renaissance. The most powerful calls to increase university funding focus almost exclusively on scientific and technological research, areas in which the Chinese system seems to excel. There is little comparable concern over the future of American arts and letters. In the 1940s, Americans expressed deep anxieties about their status as cultural influencers. Nearly a century later, mass culture seems to be one of the few areas in which U.S. power remains unparalleled around the globe. Political polarization, too, leaves little room for the sort of bipartisan investment (or embrace of intellectual and artistic refugees) that made certain forms of cultural production possible in the early Cold War. Even the most devoted adherents of the “new cold war” metaphor do not envision a primarily ideological struggle, waged in the terrain of hearts and minds. Today’s anxieties focus on economic, military, and technological competition, with cultural and intellectual innovation and freedom distant matters at best.
Should this seem like cause for lament, it is worth remembering that the early Cold War itself was hardly a worry-free time of academic and artistic freedom. Menand’s claim that left-liberal intellectuals and artists achieved unprecedented celebrity and influence is true as far as it goes. But as the historian Richard Hofstadter noted at the time, the United States has long nurtured a powerful anti-intellectual strain—one that reached an especially vicious apotheosis during the 1950s. To the artists and writers who actually lived through the early Cold War, the period seems to have felt less like a renaissance than like a time of vicious and often terrifying far-right reaction. The defining politician of the decade, after all, was not the brainy Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (a two-time loser) but Senator Joseph McCarthy, the spiritual progenitor of today’s populist “Big Lie” Republican politicians.
It is safe to say, then, that creative types do not necessarily know that they are living through a golden age even when that may be the case. Most intellectual and artistic life—then as now—gains its spice from dissatisfaction with the world. During the early Cold War, that dissatisfaction led to an outpouring of grief and despair and bewilderment and, in the end, a handful of creative and intellectual breakthroughs with staying power beyond their immediate moment. Today’s anxieties will no doubt inspire their own wave of innovation in high culture, art, and thought. It is less likely that those achievements will be widely known, embraced, and supported by millions.
The Art of War
Can Culture Drive Geopolitics?
By Beverly Gage
January/February 2022
Around 1949, fresh out of college at Northwestern University, my mother moved to New York to take a job at NBC. She arrived at the dawn of U.S. television. NBC had entered the business just about a decade earlier. Rather than being assigned to a sitcom or a variety show, she ended up at the NBC Opera Theatre, one of the splashiest, most expensive ventures in the new lineup. The corporation had long sponsored its own radio orchestra under the leadership of the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini, who had fled Mussolini’s Italy in the 1930s for refuge in the United States. When television came along, executives assumed that one of its functions would be to make Toscanini-style high culture available to the American masses. That dream—that a major television orchestra and opera company would be both popular and profitable—lasted an astonishing 15 years, from 1949 to 1964, before NBC concluded that the future of television lay elsewhere.
This is roughly the time period covered in Louis Menand’s new book, The Free World. Menand is less interested in classical impresarios such as Toscanini than in the cultural innovators of the age: the philosophers and composers and painters and wise-man diplomats whose ideas put them at the cutting edge of Western culture. In Menand’s telling, for a brief period following World War II, U.S. liberalism proved its power and luster by creating a society open enough to foster vibrant exchange in the realm of high culture, art, and ideas—and rich enough to sustain the men and women engaged in such work. That moment came crashing to an end in the 1960s, as challenges at home and abroad tarnished the United States’ self-conception as the epicenter of “the free world.” While it lasted, it produced something like a golden age of intellectual and artistic experimentation, with a bona fide popular audience.
Although Menand’s subtitle links this period of cultural innovation to the Cold War, the relationship he imagines between artistic expression and geopolitics is often tenuous. Major philosophers and academic thinkers wrestled with the fate of the world, but not necessarily in ways that explicitly privileged the United States or the Soviet Union. Composers and painters and choreographers explored the existential dread of a post-nuclear world but did not tend to weigh in on any particular policy direction. The diplomat George Kennan and other Cold War realists put in star turns at the helm of the new American leviathan, but the connections between their thought and, say, John Cage’s classical compositions can be hard to trace. “The free world,” Menand suggests, was a feeling and impulse and form of expression more than it was any sort of coherent political body.
Despite its impressionistic style, Menand’s book speaks powerfully to one of the most important themes in twentieth-century U.S. politics: the ways in which the Cold War—and the specter of communism—reshaped American society from top to bottom. As historians such as Mary Dudziak and Glenda Gilmore have shown, the struggle for postwar civil rights was tied to debates over communism and Third World revolution. The U.S. welfare state, too, was developed with socialist models as inescapable points of reference. It has long been obvious that anticommunist sentiment constrained liberal policy ambitions in the 1940s and 1950s, when universal health care was derided as “socialized medicine” and champions of labor rights were inevitably accused of harboring communist sympathies. In less obvious ways, however, the Cold War drove the United States in more progressive policy directions: as a struggle against a society that claimed to stand for cradle-to-grave economic security, the Cold War pushed the United States to present itself as a model nation, supposedly able to provide its citizens with the best quality of life in the world.
Menand’s cultural story often implies, rather than identifies, explicit connections between those geopolitical debates and the realm of high culture. But in art and thought, too, the Cold War was inescapable. In the academic sphere, the influx of federal money into universities, spurred by the Cold War knowledge competition, restructured intellectual life, for both good and ill. On the left, the implosion of the Popular Front, combined with the repressive atmosphere of McCarthyism, led to a sense of dislocation and disillusionment for an entire generation. The swirl of geopolitics brought thousands of pathbreaking European artists and intellectuals into the United States even as it made cultural exchange with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe increasingly fraught. Perhaps most of all, the early Cold War lent a sense of vibrancy and high stakes to nearly everything happening in American arts and ideas, high and low, as the nation set out to declare and then win a global culture war.
from the ashes
Menand’s style in The Free World will be familiar to fans of The Metaphysical Club, his Pulitzer Prize–winning 2001 bestseller. That book tracks the intellectual lives of four erudite men: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, the first three of whom met in an intellectual club of their own devising. Together, according to Menand, they invented pragmatism, transformed American liberalism, and contended with some of the greatest questions of their day.
The Free World, too, is filled with chance encounters, creative relationships, and discussions over dinner. This time, however, Menand has scaled up. Rather than four characters, he offers dozens, each chapter its own deep dive into a fleeting but consequential group conversation. Gathered (willingly or unwillingly) in the United States, some of the West’s most important intellectuals, composers, writers, artists, and wise-man diplomats made beauty and meaning out of a world in which the Holocaust, nuclear power, and Cold War ideology suddenly loomed large. In the process, they produced their own host of “isms”: structuralism and poststructuralism, anticommunism and anti-anti-communism, nihilism and existentialism, realism in international affairs and abstract expressionism in high art.
Amazingly, they found a popular audience for their musings. “Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered,” Menand writes of the 1950s, in implicit contrast to today’s era of 280-character thoughts and Instagram poses. Kennan’s learned memos drove foreign policy. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings became national icons. Existentialism provided a vocabulary for middle-class disaffection. From the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the world adopted a language of, as Menand puts it, “anxiety, authenticity, bad faith”; from Sartre’s friend and rival the writer Albert Camus, that of “the absurd, the outsider, the rebel.”
Born in 1952, the son of a historian and a political scientist, Menand recalls hearing all these names over dinner in his childhood home outside Boston. His sense of both admiration for and distance from his subjects permeates the book. Perhaps he dreamed as a child that he might one day enter this glittering world of high-culture celebrity. It may have been a disappointment to come of age—indeed, to become a Harvard professor and New Yorker writer—only to discover that the happenings of such a world no longer mattered as much.
Pollock in East Hampton, New York, January 1949
Arnold Newman / Getty Images
The most vibrant protagonists in Menand’s story are the European refugees forced by circumstance to flee to the United States and resigned (to varying degrees) to make the best of it once there. The German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt arrived in New York in 1941, barely speaking a word of English. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived that same year, seizing the offer of a post at the New School as a lifeline out of Nazi-occupied France. Over the course of the late 1930s and early 1940s, dozens of other major thinkers, artists, and writers made similar trips, many of them Jews fleeing for their lives. By one estimate, more than 700 European fine artists alone—painters, sculptors, photographers—moved to the United States between 1933 and 1944. On their arrival, they formed vibrant communities to carry on their work. And whether they liked it or not, most of them became American in one way or another.
U.S.-born citizens were part of the cultural mix, too, of course. One thrill of the age, according to Menand, was the chance for Americans to mingle and brainstorm with the best that Europe had to offer. Before the war, such exchanges had happened mostly in Paris, the undisputed center of Western culture. After the war, they took place in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and, above all, New York. Some of what drove the cultural renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s was a deep American anxiety about whether or not the United States’ intellectual and artistic achievements were any good—whether they were, in short, worthy of the country’s new status as a global superpower and the arch-defender of liberal democracy. “In 1945, there was widespread skepticism, even among Americans, about the value and sophistication of American art and ideas,” Menand writes. Part of the mission of the early Cold War was to prove that the country’s artists, writers, and intellectuals were indeed ready for the global leadership that had been thrust upon them.
The Cold War’s soft-power struggles generated no end of tiresome propaganda and covert manipulation. Such crass forms of cultural imperialism are not Menand’s concern. He takes on the more sophisticated aspects of Cold War culture, in which Americans sought to advertise their country’s artistic vitality and openness to new ideas by way of heightening the contrast with its totalitarian rivals. “Responsible liberals feel better adjusted for having an appreciation of art and ideas that are contemptuous of the values of responsible liberals,” Menand writes. What made the postwar United States great, Menand suggests, was a willingness—at least within the liberal establishment—to contemplate its own flaws and failings. That tendency toward self-critique may ultimately have been the tragic flaw of Menand’s midcentury creatives. But while the moment lasted, the combination of imperial ambition, liberal individualism, transatlantic exchange, and social affluence produced groundbreaking books, paintings, and musical compositions.
The Cold War led to creative and intellectual breakthroughs with staying power beyond their immediate moment.
It also produced some excellent parties. In his love for the chance meeting, Menand devotes a good deal of attention to the social aspects of cultural production: the receptions and performances and exhibits where one inquiring soul connected with another, yielding inspiration and alchemy (and, in Menand’s telling, quite a lot of sex). The great couples of the highbrow set animate the book, from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Diana and Lionel Trilling to Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Around them swirl a dazzling array of creators and thinkers, each borrowing ideas from the others. “Rauschenberg was fearless and prolific,” Menand writes of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, “but his art and his influence were enhanced by his association with three other innovative figures who also became internationally renowned: John Cage, [the dancer and choreographer] Merce Cunningham, and [the fellow artist] Jasper Johns.” Nearly every chapter contains a similar formulation, with one passionate thinker happening on another, then plunging into a relationship of deep (if sometimes brief) intensity.
Some of the most fascinating chapters explore the struggles of leftists and ex-leftists to come to terms with the demise of the Popular Front and the emergence of the Soviet Union as the chief geopolitical and ideological rival of the United States. The anguish involved in that experience can be hard to capture today, with the Soviet collapse now a full generation in the past. But many of Menand’s characters came of age in the 1930s, when the communists seemed to be at the cutting edge of antifascist, anticapitalist, and antiracist politics. The realization that Joseph Stalin was killing hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, and holding the rest in thrall to a totalitarian dictatorship, caused a crisis of conscience on the left that took some two decades to unfold. Out of that crisis came some of the seminal works of midcentury thought and literature, including George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949), the work of a self-proclaimed socialist whose own “abuse of socialists,” according to Menand, “could be as vicious as any Tory’s.”
Menand is at his best when dissecting the historical circumstances and influences that produced a book like 1984 and gave it popular currency. Often presented to today’s students as an abstract critique of totalitarianism, 1984 was also a highly specific commentary on the dilemmas of postwar life, drawing on the images and ideas that Orwell found around him. He borrowed heavily from the philosopher James Burnham, the eccentric American communist turned conservative whose book The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941, envisioned a world of competing superpowers similar to Orwell’s Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. By putting Orwell and other figures into historical context, Menand shows how great art can emerge from situations of confusion, muck, and terror.
The major difficulty of Menand’s book is that he does this again and again, with each chapter introducing its own invigorating new cast of characters. The result can be enlivening. It can also be exhausting. Menand writes in the introduction that The Free World is “a series of vertical cross-sections rather than a survey.” The book nonetheless retains some of the qualities of a college survey course, which indeed it was—Harvard’s United States in the World 23: Art and Thought in the Cold War. That format provides a handy guide to the best method for reading The Free World: one or two chapters per week, engaged with seriously and consistently, with the grand conclusions about how it all fits together left open for small-group discussion.
hearts and minds
Few readers, especially those of an intellectual or artistic bent, will be able to resist Menand’s portrait of a time when an especially compelling late-night conversation or a well-wrought article in an obscure left-liberal journal seemed to carry the fate of the world. Menand is skillful at conveying the thrill of creative discovery, even when it was accompanied by personal difficulty and loss. He has somewhat less to say about the policy choices and economic supports that made such creativity possible. He devotes several pages to the CIA's secret activities and sponsorships, but these are the exceptions in a book focused on biographical and cultural analysis.
Similarly underdeveloped is any discussion of countercurrents from the right, which underwent its own midcentury cultural and intellectual renaissance. William F. Buckley founded the National Review in 1955 on the premise that “ideas have consequences” (itself an idea articulated by the conservative writer Richard Weaver in 1948 in a book of that title). Midcentury conservatives, no less than their liberal counterparts, professed to recognize the value of intellectual provocation and A-list parties. They, too, had their European exiles, including the economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They even had their own Metaphysical Club: the Mont Pelerin Society, founded atop a Swiss mountain in 1947 in order to bring the West’s finest free-market thinkers together in a collective rebuke to the emerging liberal order.
Some of that conservative organizing took aim at the most important institution of Cold War intellectual life: the American university. Buckley’s first book, God and Man at Yale, published in 1951, identified his alma mater as a site of outrageously liberal thought, beginning with its supposedly socialist Economics Department and extending to its culture of religious tolerance. Menand’s book underscores the ways in which Buckley’s critique was at least partly true, if not for Yale (which was, in a relative sense, still a bastion of conservatism), then for the American university system writ large. High on the postwar agenda was the dream of making American universities the finest in the world, beginning with the GI Bill and extending into new funding for the arts and sciences. With that influx of money came a generation of thinkers emboldened to think new thoughts but also structurally tied to the liberal project.
Rauschenberg's work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, November 2009
Mario Anzuoni / Reuters
Menand expresses ambivalence about the rise of the university as a center of intellectual life. With its promise of full employment for intellectuals came a tendency to siphon creative energies into specialized scholarly arenas, he suggests. Several of his characters exhibit a love-hate relationship with their academic posts. “I am ashamed of being in a university,” Lionel Trilling declared on being promoted to full professor at Columbia. “I have one of the great reputations in the academic world. This thought makes me retch.”
Such rarefied laments were harder for others to make. As Menand notes, many Jewish intellectuals were shut out of Ivy League respectability, although the most ambitious “turned into journalists instead and ended up having a greater impact on literary and intellectual life than most academics ever do.” Women and people of color encountered more difficulty still. Menand identifies individuals in both categories who managed to transcend the constraints of the age, including the feminist activist and author Betty Friedan and the writer James Baldwin. But they occupy a slightly different place in the narrative than do figures such as Kennan and Trilling, who held real institutional as well as cultural power. A few, such as Arendt, landed decent university sinecures. Others were relegated to hand-to-mouth essay writing, activism, and sometimes, as in Baldwin’s case, self-imposed exile. By the time opportunities opened up for them to be considered cultural arbiters in their own right, the postwar high-culture renaissance was in free fall, and the best dinner parties were already over.
Menand attributes this collapse to political shifts both at home and abroad. The civil rights movement called into question the United States’ self-image as a bastion of liberal egalitarianism (and rightly so). The Vietnam War likewise challenged the wisdom of the American imperial project and of “the best and the brightest” who had designed it. At the same time, the rapid expansion of mass popular culture, especially in the television and music industries, displaced the brief postwar emphasis on high art and intellect. As it turned out, most people preferred rock-and-roll to Cage’s silences and 12-tone disarray.
It seems unlikely that a new cold war with China will produce any sort of high-culture renaissance.
Given the inexorable nature of Menand’s story, it can be hard to imagine how one might restore a world in which achievements in fine art and classical music—or even robust funding for public universities—would be perceived as a path to global power and popular acclaim. If certain prognosticators are to be believed, the United States is now facing a new cold war with China. But it seems unlikely that this cold war will produce any sort of high-culture renaissance. The most powerful calls to increase university funding focus almost exclusively on scientific and technological research, areas in which the Chinese system seems to excel. There is little comparable concern over the future of American arts and letters. In the 1940s, Americans expressed deep anxieties about their status as cultural influencers. Nearly a century later, mass culture seems to be one of the few areas in which U.S. power remains unparalleled around the globe. Political polarization, too, leaves little room for the sort of bipartisan investment (or embrace of intellectual and artistic refugees) that made certain forms of cultural production possible in the early Cold War. Even the most devoted adherents of the “new cold war” metaphor do not envision a primarily ideological struggle, waged in the terrain of hearts and minds. Today’s anxieties focus on economic, military, and technological competition, with cultural and intellectual innovation and freedom distant matters at best.
Should this seem like cause for lament, it is worth remembering that the early Cold War itself was hardly a worry-free time of academic and artistic freedom. Menand’s claim that left-liberal intellectuals and artists achieved unprecedented celebrity and influence is true as far as it goes. But as the historian Richard Hofstadter noted at the time, the United States has long nurtured a powerful anti-intellectual strain—one that reached an especially vicious apotheosis during the 1950s. To the artists and writers who actually lived through the early Cold War, the period seems to have felt less like a renaissance than like a time of vicious and often terrifying far-right reaction. The defining politician of the decade, after all, was not the brainy Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson (a two-time loser) but Senator Joseph McCarthy, the spiritual progenitor of today’s populist “Big Lie” Republican politicians.
It is safe to say, then, that creative types do not necessarily know that they are living through a golden age even when that may be the case. Most intellectual and artistic life—then as now—gains its spice from dissatisfaction with the world. During the early Cold War, that dissatisfaction led to an outpouring of grief and despair and bewilderment and, in the end, a handful of creative and intellectual breakthroughs with staying power beyond their immediate moment. Today’s anxieties will no doubt inspire their own wave of innovation in high culture, art, and thought. It is less likely that those achievements will be widely known, embraced, and supported by millions.
5. A Quiet Cadence (Book review)
A Quiet Cadence
American voters never elected a Vietnam veteran as president of the United States, though a few came close. John Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, and fellow Navy veteran John McCain won the Republican party’s nomination in 2008. Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, received more electoral votes in the 2000 presidential election than any other runner-up in history. Gore enlisted in the Army and deployed to Vietnam in January 1971 as a journalist before being discharged months later.
But the Vietnam War retains its power to intrigue American readers, as proven by the popularity of books over the decades such as Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers in 1974, Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn in 2009, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer in 2016. Into this tradition, author Mark Treanor introduces A Quiet Cadence (Naval Institute Press, 2020), his excellent new novel of young Marty “the Mick” McClure’s experiences fighting in Southeast Asia and the long journey home. The story is familiar. McClure drops out of college and enlists in the Marine Corps at age 19, joining “Bush Bravo” and a cast of eclectic, eccentric young men drawn to war and the camaraderie of a combat infantry unit. McClure participates in killing, of course, but it’s what he witnesses -- friends killed and maimed -- that haunts his memory. “I knew, even if I wouldn’t have been able to articulate the thought at the time, that a darkening brew was seeping into my soul,” McClure recalls of combat.
He returns to the States and graduates college, starts a family, and embarks on a teaching career as the “darkening brew” continues to swirl inside him. Like many veterans, McClure discovers the hardest part about going to war is coming home to face himself. Ultimately, he finds a way to honor the best memories of lost comrades while discovering purpose in a new life. The author’s depiction of war’s aftermath, the tug-of-war waged in the veteran’s mind between past and present, is especially engrossing. Treanor knows of what he writes, having served a year in Vietnam as a rifle platoon commander. “I’m sure many of the guys from World War II and Korea had the same experiences,” the author told me from his home in Edgewater, Maryland, “but they came back and got on with it. That’s what I wanted to say.”
What follows is our conversation about the novel, Treanor’s time as a Midshipman at Annapolis, and his five years in the Marine Corps. He also shared memories of a couple of friends and veterans who ran for president, one of whom, Jim Webb, he fought alongside in Vietnam.
Let’s go back to where it began, Annapolis. You finish your second class year in May of 1967, just a week or so before the Beatles released Sgt. Peppers. You come back to the Yard for your final year, and the Battle of Hue City kicks off in January of 1968. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated on April 4, 1968. You commission into the Marine Corps in late May of 1968. Tell me about that time.
That was an amazing and interesting time. I reported to Annapolis in June of 1964, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident took place that August, and then the First Marine Division went into Vietnam in January of 1965, I think. So, from the time I began at Annapolis, my classmates knew what was going to happen and that we would likely be going to war. I decided plebe year that I wanted to be a Marine. I had read the book Marine! The Life of Chesty Puller by Burke Davis, and thought it would just be a fascinating thing to do. But, yeah, it was a very different time in the United States. The Tet Offensive and the real overcast that threw on people’s thinking about Vietnam. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June of 1968. There were protests against the war in Washington, D.C., then all over the place after King was assassinated. I was dating a girl in Baltimore and remembered seeing National Guard encampments because part of the city had been burned in riots.
It was a fascinating time to go through service selection at Annapolis, which happened in February of 1968, if I recall, around the time of Tet. Starting plebe year, they put up the names of classmates who had been killed in Vietnam, and so by the time of service selection, there were a couple of different boards full of names. It got everybody's attention when guys from the classes of 1966 and 1967 were killed in Tet. I think my class was the first one that didn't make the quota for Marine Corps. About 10 percent of the class was allowed to go into the Marine Corps in my year, which is way up to 20 percent or more nowadays. I knew at least a couple of guys who were engaged, and their fiancées said something to them, like "it's me or the Marine Corps" kind of thing. But I graduated and went down to Quantico. The Basic School was usually six months long—we graduated in nineteen-and-a-half weeks. I got to Vietnam in January of 1969 and came back in January of 1970.
You graduated from Annapolis with a storied class, some of its members profiled in Bob Timberg’s terrific book The Nightingale’s Song. Tell me about your class.
Yeah, amazing class. I’ve forgotten how many flag and general officers came out of that class. Mike Hagee became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Mike Mullen was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jay Johnson was CNO. Chip Gregson. Joe Anderson. Charlie Bolden became NASA administrator. I was fortunate enough to know or meet all these guys. You mention Nightingale’s Song, and I knew John McCain from some Vietnam vet stuff that I was involved in during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, and so I got to know him relatively well. I ended up traveling with Sen. McCain a bit as a volunteer during his presidential campaign, but didn’t know him in the Navy. I was on the boxing team, too, so I got to know Jim Webb and Ollie North. I was in Bravo 1/5 and Jim was a platoon commander in Delta Company. Phenomenal Marine. He and I kept in touch and got together over the years. I was really pleased when his book got the attention it received because Fields of Fire is just an incredible book, some of it based on Jim’s life and the rest his imagination. Back at the Academy, I never could have foreseen Jim as a political figure. I could have foreseen him as an appointee or someone in government, but never a senator. If he hadn’t been medically retired, he probably would have made a career in the Marines, and I believe he’s said that. Jim believed in the near-sanctity of being an officer in the Marine Corps. He had a strict sense of right and wrong.
As for Ollie, he was incredibly hard-charging and couldn’t wait to get out of the Academy and down to Quantico. He was so eager, in fact, I think he skipped leave after graduation so he could report early to The Basic School. He was on staff at TBS when I got there to be an instructor after my tour in Vietnam—Ollie, this larger than life hot dog.
Now, you’ve written a war novel that’s a little different from mainstream literary fiction about war. The story has a positive arc. Is there too much self-pity in war literature?
I think there’s a fair amount. I hope A Quiet Cadence is a counterpoint to that. We weren't victims, you know. When we came back, we certainly weren't treated how veterans ought to be treated, and that's the understatement of the week. But the majority of us were volunteers, and we went off and did what we were supposed to do.
In the 1980s, Reagan put together the "Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program" as an attempt to get some of us who'd been successful in helping out those who had challenges to get guys education and job opportunities. The program ended up with 50 chapters around the country, and I was the first chairman of the Maryland chapter. I got to meet and talk with a lot of guys who didn't have nearly the good fortune I had when I came back. So, fast forward to when I was writing the book in 2014-15, and one of the national newspapers on Veterans Day has a front page story of a guy whose photograph made him look like Keith Richards coming out of the crypt, and the story was how he overcame decades of heroin addiction. That pissed me off. Here we are 40 years after the war, and that's how they tell the story of America's veterans.
Is too much being written about PTSD?
I am a fairly strong believer that anyone who's been involved in ground combat will have some sort of post-traumatic stress. You can't go through the stress of a ground combat experience, what you saw and did, and not have something that stays with you afterward. But I'm also a strong believer that a lot of us don't have the "D" on PTSD. A person in that situation does has to be done and the overwhelming majority of guys come home and become productive, just get on with life. I wrote the novel in part to try and say something like that because I thought Vietnam vets hadn't gotten positive press. Eighty-five percent of Vietnam veterans went to war, got honorable discharges, and got on with life. There was a survey in the 1980s that said Vietnam veterans had a higher employment rate than people who hadn't gone to war. I think too many of us conflated the war with the warrior, and because it was such an unpopular war, the guys who got sent to fight took on too much of the blame back home. But foot soldiers don’t make policy decisions. When I was writing the book, I knew I had never seen a book that started with the authenticity of combat and then proceeded to follow that warrior home. My protagonist, Marty, comes home from war and becomes a teacher and continues wrestling with the war, but he carries on. I heard from any number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who said the book was written for them.
Let’s get into the book. You write of the combat experience as a “darkening brew” that seeps into the soul of your protagonist, Marty. Can he ever come back—can anyone ever come back?
Absolutely. Combat changes you, it does. It also makes you think differently about some things, but I wanted to depict Marty as this kind of naïve, nice guy when he gets to Vietnam. Then he spends weeks, months living in a hole in the ground. He eats food out of little green cans. He tries to kill people who are trying to kill him. This is a basic, good guy, but he gets pushed so hard by what he's seen and done and been through. He cares about the people he's with but tolerates bad things that they do, and he watches. The experience is made up of things he couldn't have conceived of when he left home. Marty wrestles with decisions that he never could have conceived of at the start of the narrative because all he cared about was taking care of his friends and trying to survive himself. When he gets home, these bad things don’t dominate his thoughts, but he is haunted by the ghosts of his dead friends. What I’m trying to say is that you can come back from the experience, but shooting at people and watching your friends get blown up by booby traps does something different to you.
How’d you find Marty’s voice, the enlisted Marine who goes to Vietnam and then comes home to get on with life?
The book started off in the third person but evolved by the second or third draft into a first-person narrative. I realized I could depict everything better, especially when Marty’s looking back as a 65 year-old guy, partly amazed, partly proud, at what he and others have experienced. I tried to depict what a smart young guy would say and think within the circumstances I placed around him.
The story divides into two parts: combat and life afterward. The afterwar period is especially compelling. I was struck by a dilemma Marty faces when applying for his first teaching job after graduating college. Explain what he goes through.
Despite all of what’s going on in Marty’s head with the occasional nightmares and his doubts about the war after it crashed in 1975 and even before that, Marty is still proud of being a Marine. He puts it on his resume. But when his college professor advises him to remove this from his resume, he has a quiet crisis about whether to deny this part of his life. On the one hand, he’s proud and wants to represent what he’s done. On the other hand, he needs a job and has been getting stonewalled, possibly because of the unpopularity of Vietnam. So, he removes it from his resume. Some of the impetus for this came from friends I knew who had a tough time finding a job after coming home. Everybody was thought to be a drug addict, another Lieutenant Calley, or a loose cannon. I wanted to put Marty in that position, where his choices sucked but he had to do what was necessary to get a job and support his family.
I had an interesting conversation about the book with another veteran. I asked him what he thought about the scene, and he understood completely that this was something Marty had to do to keep moving forward; he didn’t consider him a sell-out or anything like that. Another classmate from the Academy said he got turned down from one of the first jobs he applied for because of the Marine Corps, and so he wiped it from his resume.
Designer Louis Nelson told me the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “healed a Nation.” Tell me about the Wall.
I liked his interview, and I think it went quite a ways toward healing us as a country, but it’s an overstatement to say the Vietnam Veterans Memorial healed a Nation. Evidence of that in my head? The front page article depicting the Vietnam vet 40 years later, the one about him overcoming a heroin addiction. The Wall had a major healing effect, though. Vietnam vets were not a bad group of people. The Wall was healing but it did not heal the rift. While the Wall and the national salute were a major step in the right direction, a good dose of medicine, they were not a cure. The Wall makes its way into the novel because it was emblematic of memory in a way. Marty wrestled with tamping down his bad memories so he could remember the good things about Vietnam, and the Wall was the beginning of that healing. It took Marty’s friend’s enthusiasm for the Wall to make him enthusiastic, too.
I understand people are reading your novel in book groups, at colleges, and also at VA medical centers. What have you learned touring this book?
One of the things I mentioned earlier: the younger guys, the ones who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that the book nailed some universal truths for them. We wrestle with the same thoughts and feelings across generations. Also, I’ve been fascinated by the number of women who have read the book, women in middle age or older who say they understood for the first time what family members have gone through in combat and afterward. That’s been interesting. I was talking with a woman who told me her brother never said a word after he came back from war. And yes, the book is being used in some of the VA centers and guys relate heavily to the combat parts of the book, but they see the second half of the book as showing a way to get through some of the feelings and thoughts that arise after coming home. The book tells a war story and a coming home story, about a normal way to process. I think I did a decent job on the war story part of it, but I don’t think what I attempted to do in the second half of the book had ever been done before. I’m proud of the second half, especially.
The book was a long time coming. You’ve been a lawyer, corporate executive, and a consultant, among other things. I understand you’re now retired from practicing law. How did this novel come about after such a long and varied career?
I had puttered away on various writings for 30 years, actually. This is the fourth novel I wrote. The first novel was absolutely horrid. The second novel wasn’t so bad. The third novel was halfway decent, but I couldn’t find an agent or publisher for it. All those books had a Vietnam theme, and they’re all gathering dust in my basement. They were different iterations with different voices, but none as good as A Quiet Cadence. Several years ago, I was having lunch with a guy named Skip Isaacs who was a correspondent in Vietnam. Skip lives in the Annapolis area and we had lunch one day and I told him I wanted to make a new attempt at the novel and asked his opinion. He told me don’t think about what somebody’s going to want to publish, but think instead about what I really wanted to say. I thought about that for some time afterward and decided I wanted to write about a Vietnam war veteran in a way that shows both the war part and the aftermath. Some of that came from my work with veterans after the war, my dissatisfaction with how veterans were treated. I actually thought that the stories about Afghanistan and Iraq were very similar to Vietnam. It was about guys with problems. I’m sure many of the guys from World War II and Korea had the same experiences, but they came back and got on with it – that’s what I wanted to say. This book applies to everyone who ever went to combat.
John Waters is a writer in Nebraska.
6. 10 Facts about Washington's Crossing of the Delaware River
10 Facts about Washington's Crossing of the Delaware River
General George Washington and the Continental Army's famously crossed the Delaware River on December 25-26, 1776.
1. Washington crossed the Delaware River so that his army could attack an isolated garrison of Hessian troops located at Trenton, New Jersey.
So why were Washington and his bedraggled Continental Army trying to cross an ice-choked Delaware River on a cold winter’s night? It wasn’t just to get to the other side. Washington’s aim was to conduct a surprise attack upon a Hessian garrison of roughly 1,400 soldiers located in and around Trenton, New Jersey. Washington hoped that a quick victory at Trenton would bolster sagging morale in his army and encourage more men to join the ranks of the Continentals come the new year. After several councils of war, General George Washington set the date for the river crossing for Christmas night 1776.
2. Washington’s attack plan included three separate river crossings, but only one made it across.
George Washington’s plan of attack included three different crossings of the Delaware River on Christmas night. Col. Cadwalader was to lead his force of 1,200 Philadelphia militia and 600 Continentals across the river near Burlington, New Jersey. His role was to harass and prevent the British and Hessian units near the town from racing north to support the Hessians at Trenton. Gen. James Ewing’s force of 800 Pennsylvania militia was to cross the river at Trenton and take up defensive positions along the Assunpink River and bridge. Ewing’s soldiers would work to prevent the Hessians from retreating from Trenton. And Washington and his 2,400 soldiers would cross at McConkey’s and Johnson’s ferries, roughly 10 miles north of Trenton and would then march down to Trenton to surprise the garrison at dawn. This was an ambitious plan, one that even well rested and experienced troops would have had difficulty in executing. Both Cadwalader and Ewing’s forces were unable to cross the ice-choked river. And Washington’s main force managed a crossing, but was more than three hours delayed.
Plan of Operations of General Washington against the King's Troops in New Jersey by William Faden, 1777 (Library of Congress Geography and Maps Division)
3. Spies and deserters had informed the British and Hessians that Trenton was likely to be attacked.
Lurking within Washington’s headquarters was a British spy who has never been identified. This spy was privy to the early deliberations of Washington’s war council and correctly passed along to British Major General James Grant that Washington’s army was looking to attack north of the river. Grant passed along this information to General Leslie and Col. Von Donop who then passed it along to Col. Johann Rall at Trenton. And while Grant stated that he did not think Washington would attack, he did command Rall to be vigilant. Rall acknowledged receipt of this important intelligence at about the same time that Washington was beginning his crossing. With typical Hessian bravado, Rall dismissed or even welcomed the threat stating “Let them come… Why defenses? We will go at them with the bayonet.”
The day before, Rall had received two American deserters who had crossed the river and told the Hessians that the American army was ready to move. Other loyalists informed the Hessians that an attack was imminent. So why wasn’t Rall more active in opposing the crossing or better prepared to defend the town? History records that a series of false alarms and the growing storm had given the Hessian defenders a sense that no attack was likely this night. How might history have changed if the Hessians responded differently to all this intelligence?
4. Washington’s force used a collection of cargo boats and ferries to transport his men across the Delaware.
Thanks to the foresight of General Washington and the actions of the New Jersey militia, the American forces had brought all available watercraft on the Delaware to the southern bank, thus denying the British the use of these crafts, while making them available for an American recrossing. Much of Washington’s force crossed the river in shallow draft Durham boats – strongly built cargo vessels, most between 40 and 60 feet in length, designed to move iron ore and bulk goods down the river to markets in and around Philadelphia. These stout craft with their high side walls were robust enough to survive the ice-choked Delaware. Heavy artillery pieces and horses were transported on large flat-bottomed ferries and other watercraft more suited to carrying that type of difficult cargo. It shouldn’t be surprising that most of Washington’s soldiers stood during the crossing since the bottoms of Durham boats were neither comfortable nor dry.
5. Experienced watermen from New England and the Philadelphia area ably guided the boats across the challenging river.
One factor in Washington’s favor was the large number of experienced watermen to be found at the crossing site. Col. John Glover’s Marblehead regiment was filled with New Englanders who had extensive experience as seamen. Glover’s men were all quite identifiable with their short blue seaman’s jackets, tarred pants, and woolen caps. Other experienced watermen from the Philadelphia area, many familiar with this exact stretch of river, had also congregated in the area and were able to provide the muscle and skill needed to make the perilous nighttime crossing.
6. The crossing was made worse by the arrival of a strong storm that brought freezing rain, snow, and terrifying winds.
By the time that most of the soldiers had reached the launching point for the boats, the drizzle had turned into a driving rain. And by 11 o’clock that evening, while the boats were crossing the river, a howling nor’easter made the miserable crossing even worse. One soldier recorded that “it blew a perfect hurricane” as snow and sleet lashed Washington’s army.
7. Washington’s carefully planned timetable was woefully behind schedule and Washington contemplated canceling the attack.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that Washington’s carefully choreographed attack plan should have fallen so far behind schedule. His men were tired, hungry, and ill-clothed. They had to march many miles through the dark and snow to even reach the river crossing site. From there, they needed to board boats at night, during a frightening nor’easter. Finally, across the river, Washington was dismayed to discover that he was a full three hours behind his schedule. His plan had called for another march of 10 miles to the outskirts of Trenton on roads that were now slick with ice and snow. With every delay Washington’s fears that his army would be caught in the open magnified. What to do? Contemplating his choices Washington was seen brooding on a crate near a fire. Washington later wrote, when remembering this fateful moment, “…As I was certain there was no making a retreat without being discovered and harassed on repassing the River, I determined to push on at all Events.”
8. The Continentals brought a great quantity of artillery across the river.
One would think that crossing an icy river at night was hard enough without also bringing a great contingent of heavy artillery pieces with them. Despite the trouble, Washington and the Continental army wanted the extra firepower that the artillery could produce. Under the overall command of Col. Henry Knox, the Continentals brought 18 cannons over the river – 3-Pounders, 4-Pounders, some 6-Pounders, horses to pull the carriages, and enough ammunition for the coming battle. The 6-Pounders, weighing as much as 1,750 pounds were the most difficult to transport to the far side of the river. But in the end, all the trouble of moving this large artillery train to Trenton proved its worth. Knox would place the bulk of his artillery at the top of the town where its fire commanded the center of Trenton.
9. The Delaware River is less than 300 yards wide at the point where the army crossed.
Despite how the Delaware River is commonly portrayed in works of art, the site where General Washington and his army crossed was rather narrow. Durham boats and flat ferries were used to cross. They were probably fixed to a wire strung across the river.
10. One of the most famous American paintings shows Washington and his army crossing the Delaware River.
Painted in 1851 by German artist Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware became a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Painted in Dusseldorf Germany, Washington Crossing the Delaware shows a bold General Washington navigating through the frozen river with his compatriots braving the elements on their way to victory at Trenton. While the painting was in Germany, Leutze hoped that this brave episode in pursuit of American independence and republican rule would stir his fellow countrymen to more liberal reforms. In the fall of 1851, the painting was shipped to the United States where it wowed audiences in New York City and the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in Washington DC. The New York Evening Mirror boldly called it “the grandest, most majestic, and most effective painting ever exhibited in America.”
Leutze went to great lengths to make his portrait accurate, but even his efforts still left many inaccuracies in place. Nevertheless, the 12’ 5” by 21’ 3” (3.8m x 6.5m) painting stirred the patriotic emotions of countless Americans who have seen the painting which now is on display in the American Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
7. China in Afghanistan: How Beijing Engages the Taliban
I am not sure if Afghanistan will cause PRC-US cooperation after the pandemic.
Excerpts:
As the U.S. has shifted its attention to the Indo-Pacific, American presence in the region is likely to dwindle further, and its influence remains palpable only through cooperation with regional states to stabilize Afghanistan.
Despite differences in China-U.S. relations, both parties do not want Afghanistan to become a “hotbed” for terrorism and violence. The COVID-19 pandemic has limited the spread of terrorism and violence as countries tightened their borders, but when borders open up in the post-pandemic era, new security challenges and militant activities may spread. Thus, the common objective for a stable Afghanistan would likely pull U.S. and China together to collaborate on reconstruction, counter-terrorism and regional security.
China in Afghanistan: How Beijing Engages the Taliban
Insights from Claudia Chia.
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The Diplomat author Mercy Kuo regularly engages subject-matter experts, policy practitioners, and strategic thinkers across the globe for their diverse insights into U.S. Asia policy. This conversation with Claudia Chia, a research analyst with the Institute of South Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore, is the 302nd in “The Trans-Pacific View Insight Series.”
Explain China’s involvement in Afghanistan since the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
Following the Taliban takeover, China was the first foreign country to pledge emergency humanitarian aid (worth 200 million yuan) to Afghanistan. The Taliban, who were facing a humanitarian catastrophe and economic meltdown, welcomed Beijing’s prompt delivery of food and medical supplies. Additionally, China recently funded a construction project in the Ministry of Justice compound, and there are reports suggesting that Chinese firms have visited Afghanistan to explore mining opportunities.
China has maintained direct communication with the Taliban administration, and both sides have met on several occasions, bilaterally and internationally, to discuss plans for Afghanistan reconstruction. Beijing has also been active in various international, multilateral, and bilateral talks on Afghan issues with regional governments and international powers. The Taliban regard Beijing as an important partner with economic prowess, and Beijing has proven itself to be a reliable partner with its sustained assistance.
In what ways is China assisting the Taliban government and what are Beijing’s strategic interests in Afghanistan, if any?
At the moment, providing humanitarian aid and donation of COVID-19 vaccines are China’s main assistance to the Taliban. On the diplomatic front, China has made efforts to rally international support and aid for rebuilding Afghanistan, particularly by calling the international community to lift sanctions and unfreeze Afghan foreign assets. Correspondingly, Beijing and other regional states have come together to urge the Western powers to engage the Taliban and to provide assistance to the country.
There are two aspects to Beijing’s interest in Afghanistan – securing security in its western frontiers and securing security for its Belt and Road projects in Central Asia and Pakistan. Beijing sees “three evils” – terrorism, separatism, and religious fundamentalism – as threats to its national security and has openly urged the Taliban to make a clean break with other terrorist groups, particularly the East Turkestan Islamic Movement and Islamic State. China also wants the Taliban to fight off these forces to prevent cross-border terrorism and spread of radicalism into Xinjiang.
Second, China needs a favorable security paradigm in the region to protect its economic interests. Since 2013, China has made substantial investments in Central Asia and Pakistan via the China-Central Asia-West Asia and China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. These investments around Afghanistan have drastically increased Beijing’s vulnerability to conflict in the region. There exist worries in Beijing of militants launching attacks on Chinese personnel and projects. A stable Afghanistan would reduce security threats, improve investment climate, and assist China to advance its economic goals.
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Analyze China’s interests in developing Afghanistan’s lithium and copper deposits.
China has expressed interest in Afghanistan’s mining sector since the 2000s, but past initiatives were fraught with difficulties. The Mes Aynak copper mine, which was leased to the China Metallurgical group for 30 years in 2008, is one well-known example. The project has been stalled due to security troubles and concerns surrounding preservation of ancient Buddhist ruins in the area. The progress of the project remains uncertain today.
The untapped resources in Afghanistan are attractive to China, which faces growing domestic demands for energy and primary commodities. However, Beijing is aware that mining ventures into Afghanistan would be a long shot, requiring many pieces to be put in place first, such as security guarantees and proper infrastructure.
While the Taliban recently stated that they will ensure the security of Chinese investors, the security threat remains high as there are other militant rivalries and activities on the ground that threaten China’s interests. As in early October, the Islamic State Khorasan linked their suicide bomb attack on a mosque in Kunduz, Afghanistan, as retaliation for the Taliban’s close cooperation with Beijing, which the ISK regarded as mistreating the Uyghurs.
Until security and safety for Chinese projects and personnel can be guaranteed, Chinese firms are unlikely to rush into business in Afghanistan.
What incentives can the Taliban offer to secure Chinese investment?
The Taliban would need to demonstrate that they have abolished ties with other terrorist organizations. Another incentive is to cut down on drug trafficking. This may prove to be a tough ordeal given the Taliban’s reliance on drug revenue for its operations.
The Taliban can adopt Pakistan’s example of deploying special security forces to safeguard Chinese ventures and personnel. Another option is for Chinese companies to hire security from Chinese private security companies, who already have a presence in the region. If these private security companies enter Afghanistan, it will be interesting to contemplate their potential affiliations to the Chinese government and whether their presence would symbolize, to some extent, a kind of military involvement by Beijing.
We have to be realistic about how much Beijing is willing to invest. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s overseas financing and BRI activities had begun to slow down. Furthermore, when we look at China’s previous successful projects in Afghanistan, we see that they were mostly smaller scale, lower risk infrastructure projects like housing and laying of fiber optic line. Larger and longer-term projects often failed due to the precarious security situation, which eroded investors’ confidence.
Assess the geostrategic implications of China’s presence in Afghanistan and potential impact on U.S. interests in the region.
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China is still waiting for the international community to confer diplomatic recognition to the Taliban, and its next move will likely be determined by international responses. It’s clear that China does not want to shoulder the burden of rebuilding Afghanistan alone. In the short term, Beijing will continue to provide humanitarian aid, participate in low-risk projects, and maintain cordial relations with the Taliban.
In the long run, if security stabilizes, the expansion of China’s presence in Afghanistan through commercial ventures would embolden Beijing in asserting its economic interests more openly. On the regional power play dynamics, it would be interesting to contemplate if China sees Central Asia and Afghanistan as “tributary” states for natural resource extraction, or does it see these countries as working partners to build a bloc against the Western powers?
Another development to look out for is the Afghanistan-China-Pakistan axis. Beijing has previously played a positive role in helping to bridge differences between Kabul and Islamabad while Pakistan has helped to facilitate Russian and Chinese contacts with the Taliban. There is likely to be deeper strategic cooperation between China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, and Iran, on counterterrorism efforts and crackdown on illegal drug trade.
As the U.S. has shifted its attention to the Indo-Pacific, American presence in the region is likely to dwindle further, and its influence remains palpable only through cooperation with regional states to stabilize Afghanistan.
Despite differences in China-U.S. relations, both parties do not want Afghanistan to become a “hotbed” for terrorism and violence. The COVID-19 pandemic has limited the spread of terrorism and violence as countries tightened their borders, but when borders open up in the post-pandemic era, new security challenges and militant activities may spread. Thus, the common objective for a stable Afghanistan would likely pull U.S. and China together to collaborate on reconstruction, counter-terrorism and regional security.
8. O'Donnell: America’s First Christmas that Changed the Course of History
O'Donnell: America’s First Christmas that Changed the Course of History
Breitbart · by Patrick K. O'Donnell · December 24, 2021
December 1776 was one of the darkest times for America: hyperinflation gripped the economy, Washington’s army lost one battle after another, the mood of the country changed from optimism to defeat. But on Christmas Day, Americans amid a raging Nor’easter crossed an impassable ice-filled river, surprised and killed an expertly trained enemy, and changed the course of history.
Thomas Paine epically captured the days leading up to Christmas 1776 in “The American Crisis.”
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Paine wrote. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
Washington’s army had lost one battle after another. The economy had tanked. And the paper money the United States printed seemed worthless. Americans were abandoning the cause in droves.
During the fall of 1776, the British issued an amnesty proclamation that offered pardon and protection to rebels who signed an oath of loyalty to the king within sixty days. Thousands of Americans, including several members of Congress, clambered to sign the oath. One disgusted American Patriot recalled, “To the disgrace of the country and human nature, great numbers flocked to confess their political sins to the representative of Majesty, and to obtain pardon. It was observed, that these consisted of the very rich and the very poor, while the middling class held their constancy.” Making matters worse, the enlistments for the Continental Army expired in December and January 1, 1777.
Most Americans could read, and the pamphlet immediately raised the morale of both the military and civilians. The looming prospect of disaster seemed to spur Americans into action, and some even believed that such a crisis was necessary to give people the proper motivation to fight. “Our republic cannot exist long in prosperity,” Doctor Benjamin Rush later wrote in a letter to John Adams. “We require adversity and appear to possess most of the republican spirit when most depressed.” The crisis had a direct positive effect that steeled resolve. That December 245 years ago marked a period where Americans from all stripes came together to alter the course of history in a great counteroffensive on Christmas night.
On the eve of the battle, General George Washington sat in his tent on the banks of the Delaware River and methodically wrote the same three words over and over on several small pieces of paper. He had decided on a daring plan: crossing the ice-choked Delaware River and mounting a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison there. Knowing that the assault could not hope to succeed if word of the plan reached the enemy, he detailed a Virginia The to serve as sentries around the Patriot camp. The general himself selected the password for the night, and that was what he was writing on scraps of paper for distribution to the unit commanders.
While the surgeon general of the Continental Army was visiting Washington, one of the slips happened to fall to the floor. “I was struck with the inscription on it,” the physician wrote. “It was ‘Victory or Death.’”
Contrary to the myth perpetuated by many children’s books, the Hessians in Trenton were neither drunk nor idle. Their experienced commander, Colonel Johann Rall, the hero of White Plains Chatterton’s Hill and the breakthrough at Fort Washington, kept his men in constant readiness and on patrol. A series of raids by the local militia in the prior days had put them on edge, and the men slept dressed and armed.
Rall realized the precarious nature of the Trenton outpost and frequently demanded reinforcements—to no avail. In exasperation, he complained, “Scheiszer bey Scheisz! [shit on shit] Let them come. . . . We will go at them with the bayonet.” British spies had warned of an impending attack on Trenton, but no one knew the exact day and time. The intelligence, combined with the raids, put Rall and his men in a perpetual state of alert and began to fray their nerves.
Washington settled on a complicated plan to envelop Rall’s garrison. The main force, which included the elite troops from Maryland, would cross at McConkey’s Ferry. The unflappable John Glover and his Marblehead Mariners led the assault river crossing on the Delaware. Asked if the plan was doable, he confidently reassured Washington “not to be troubled about that as his boys could manage it.” I tell their untold story along with the story of America’s founding in my bestselling book, The Indispensables: Marblehead’s Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware. The book is a Band-of-Brothers style treatment of this unique group of Americans who changed the course of history.
In December 1776, Washington turned to the only group of men he knew had the strength and skill to deliver the army to Trenton. The Marblehead men miraculously transported Washington and the bulk of his army across the Delaware in the heart of the raging storm. He ordered two additional groups of American troops to cross the river below Trenton to cut off the enemy’s retreat. These groups not guided by the Marbleheaders found the icy river impassable. But the courage and nautical talent of The Indispensables enabled the battle that changed the course of the Revolutionary War.
When the main body reached the crossing point as the sun was setting on Christmas night, the water had begun to freeze near the shore, and even sections in the center of the river were covered in ice. Yet the men followed Washington. One participant recalled, “Our General halted his Army and raising on his stirrups made us such an animating speech that we forgot the cold, the hunger and the toil under which we were ready to sink and each man seemed only to be anxious for the onset. The Snow & Slush ice covered the firm ice in the River, yet when our brave commander gave the word and turned his horse’s head across the stream, no one complained or held back, but all plunged in emulous who should next touch the Jersey shore after our beloved.”
The army was in pitiful condition as one American officer remembered, “It would be a terrible night for the soldiers who have no shoes. Some have tied old rags around their feet; others are barefoot, but I have not heard a man complain.”
By 11:00 p.m., a massive storm pelted the men with snow, sleet, and biting wind as they crossed the Delaware in Durham boats. For the troops, many of whom could not swim, falling over the side would likely have meant death in the icy currents.
Despite the risk of frostbite and hypothermia, the indefatigable Continental Army pressed on. Washington was out front leading the operation, “I have never seen Washington so determined as he is now. He stands on the bank of the river, wrapped in his cloak, superintending the landing of troops. He is calm and collected, but very determined…the storm cuts like a knife.”
Miraculously, the Americans didn’t lose a single soldier in the initial crossing. However, the storm had put them far behind their original timetable. Washington had planned to have everyone over the river by midnight, but his army wasn’t reassembled on the far side of the Delaware until nearly four in the morning. Not knowing that the two other groups had not made it across, Washington ordered his exhausted, shivering men to proceed at once on the nine-mile march to Trenton.
Through snow and sleet driven nearly horizontal by the punishing winds, the men and horses trudged through drifts and slid across the icy roads. As always, the Americans were poorly equipped, and few had clothing equal to the conditions. “Many of our poor soldiers are quite barefoot and ill clad,” wrote one of the officers on the scene. “Their route was easily traced, as there was a little snow on the ground, which was tinged here and there with blood from the feet of the men who wore broken shoes.” Another man recalled, “Our Army was destitute of shoes and clothing — . . . It was snowing at this time and the night was unusually stormy. Several of our men froze to death.”
Not wanting to lose any more of his troops, Washington shouted encouragement to the men: “Soldiers, keep by your officers. For God’s sake, keep by your officers!” Throughout the night, the commander in chief remained determined; adversity brought forth his best qualities. “Press on! Press on, boys!” he shouted as he rode up and down the line.
The Americans arrived on the outskirts of Trenton just before eight o’clock in the morning. Thanks to the reduced visibility from the storm, they approached within two hundred yards before the sentries sounded the cry, “Der feind! Heratus! Heratus!” (The enemy! Turn out! Turn out!).
Shots were fired, and the Americans charged, some yelling “These are the times that try men’s souls!” the famous words penned by Thomas Paine, as their battle cry. The Hessians, disorganized, fell back from the onslaught that seemed to come from all around them. Small groups clashed throughout the city in the house-to-house fighting. Soon smoke from the cannons and muskets filled the streets and, combined with the continuing storm, added to the confusion and lack of visibility.
Very quickly after entering Trenton, Washington’s army captured several Hessian artillery pieces. In the thick of the fighting, Rall ordered his men to retake the guns because their loss was considered a dishonor to the regiment.
With kettle drums beating, Rall shouted, “All who are my grenadiers forward!”
By this time, the Americans had infiltrated the entire city, and marksmen took up secure positions in houses and behind fences where they could pick off the enemy fighters. American artillery, commanded by Bostonian Colonel Henry Knox, pummeled the oncoming Hessians. Knox later wrote, “Here succeeded a scene of war, of which I had often conceived but never saw before.” Another participant captured the macabre melee: “My blood chill’d to see such horror and distress, blood mingling together, the dying groans, and ‘Garments’ rolled in ‘blood’ the sight was too much to bear.”
After retaking his artillery, Rall tried but failed to rally his men. Acting on faulty intelligence, he assumed that his only escape route, a bridge across the Assunpink Creek (a tributary of the Delaware River that flows through Trenton), had been captured by the Marbleheaders. He ordered the Hessians to retreat through an orchard to the southeast.
At that moment, two bullets struck the commander in the side. Mortally wounded, he “reeled in the saddle.” His men attempted to evade the Patriot forces, but the Americans pursued. On horseback, Washington led the attack, urging the Marylanders and his other troops forward, shouting, “March on, by brave fellows, after me!”
Hit from three sides, the Hessians, now leaderless, lowered their guns and their flags around 9:00 a.m.
Word of the surrender soon spread to the Continental forces throughout Trenton. A huge shout shook the town as the triumphant Americans threw their hats into the air and cheered the victory. In short order, they found forty hogsheads of rum and cracked them open. By the time Washington found out about the alcohol and ordered the casks destroyed, “the soldiers drank too freely to admit of Discipline or Defense.”
Washington had intended to continue his push forward and to attack Princeton and New Brunswick after Trenton, but these plans for a further offensive had be scotched due to the state of the army. The victorious, drunken men rowed back across the icy Delaware.
The blizzard continued to rage, and this crossing was even more treacherous than the first, costing the lives of three men. It was noon the next day before all the Americans got back to their camp, some having been awake and fighting against the elements and the enemy for fifty hours.
The Americans had killed 22 Hessians, severely wounded 84, and took 896 prisoners, while suffering few losses of their own. Equally important, they captured “as many muskets, bayonets, cartouche boxes and swords,” as well as the artillery, swelling their supplies.
The Americans had won a great victory, but they had little time for rest. Washington needed to capitalize on the victory at Trenton by eliminating the other British troops garrisoned in New Jersey.
But for that he would need troops. The enlistment period for the bulk of Washington’s men expired on New Year’s Day, and they had every right to return home, having fulfilled the terms of their enlistment.
What was left of the Continental Army went into formation and stood at attention as Washington mustered his oratorical prowess and appealed to the men to continue fighting. “My brave fellows, you have done all I asked you to do and more than could be reasonably expected,” he began. “But your country is at stake, your wives, your houses, and all that you hold dear. . . . If you will consent to stay one month longer, you will render that service to the cause of liberty and to your country which you probably can never do under any other circumstances.”
Moved by the general’s words and his “most affectionate manner,” men slowly stepped forward from the ranks, more soldiers followed, as the majority of the army decided to continue fighting. Many of those who stepped forward would help turn the tide in the coming battles to win us the liberty we enjoy today. While the sacrifice was great, many of those volunteers died in battle or from smallpox, America’s resolve is at its strongest in its darkest hours.
Patrick K. O’Donnell is a bestselling, critically acclaimed military historian and an expert on elite units. He is the author of twelve books including The Indispensables, Washington’s Immortals, and The Unknowns. O’Donnell served as a combat historian in a Marine rifle platoon during the Battle of Fallujah and speaks often on espionage, special operations, and counterinsurgency. He has provided historical consulting for DreamWorks’ award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers and for documentaries produced by the BBC, the History Channel, and Discovery. PatrickODonnell.com @combathistorian
Breitbart · by Patrick K. O'Donnell · December 24, 2021
9. US delays intelligence center targeting foreign influence
Troubling. But another indicator that we cannot compete in the political warfare space. Of course this is but one capability that we need. Dealing with malign influence is not exclusively an intelligence problem. We need policy, strategy, and plans and while the intelligence community provides support to those disciplines it cannot develop them or play the lead role in them. But it must support them with capabilities such as that outlined here.
There is a congressional requirement for DOD (Sec. 1299L, 2021 NDAA) for a report on a Functional Center for Security Studies in Irregular Warfare. This center has the potential to ensure the proper focus on irregular warfare in the Department and beyond. It could provide real focus encompassing “offensive and defensive capabilities, both covert and overt, currently dispersed across the U.S. government, including the irregular warfare capability of the U.S. military and complementary capabilities among a multitude of diplomatic, intelligence, homeland security, and other organizations.” (Excerpted from LTG (R) Charles Cleveland’s RAND study on The American Way of Irregular War, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PEA300/PEA301-1/RAND_PEA301-1.pd, page 217)
US delays intelligence center targeting foreign influence | AP News
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · December 23, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — As Russia was working to subvert U.S. elections and sow discord among Americans, Congress directed the creation of an intelligence center to lead efforts to stop interference by foreign adversaries. But two years later, that center still is not close to opening.
Experts and intelligence officials broadly agree the proposed Foreign Malign Influence Center is a good idea. The U.S. has lacked a cohesive strategy to fight influence operations, they say, with not enough coordination among national security agencies. Adversaries that tried to interfere in the last two presidential elections continue to bombard Americans with disinformation and conspiracy theories at a time of peril for democracy in the U.S. and around the world.
But the intelligence community and Congress remain divided over the center’s mission, budget and size, according to current and former officials. While separate efforts to counter interference continue, a person identified this year as a potential director has since been assigned elsewhere and the center likely will not open anytime soon.
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“It really is just giving a gift to Russia and China and others who clearly have their sights set not only on the midterm elections but on ongoing campaigns to destabilize American society,” said David Salvo, deputy director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
The nation’s top intelligence official had advocated for the center before taking office. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines last year co-chaired a German Marshall Fund task force supporting it. In a statement, spokeswoman Nicole de Haay said the director’s office “is focused on creating a center to facilitate and integrate the Intelligence Community’s efforts to address foreign malign influence.”
But some lawmakers are concerned about further expanding the mission of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ODNI was originally envisioned as a small coordinating body to address the intelligence-sharing failures preceding the Sept. 11 attacks. It has several centers that critics say are well-meaning attempts to solve problems but end up causing unnecessary duplication.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner said that while he supports the center, there were “legitimate questions about how large such an organization should be and even about where it would fit” with existing government efforts to fight foreign interference.
“We want to be sure that this center enhances those efforts rather than duplicating them or miring them in unnecessary bureaucracy,” the Virginia Democrat said in a statement. “I don’t have any real doubt that we will ultimately stand the center up in the relatively near future, but we need to be sure we get it right.”
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Experts on democracy have long warned that what the government refers to as “malign influence” is a national security threat. Social media has helped make disinformation a cheap and powerful tactic for adversaries who can push false or altered stories, videos and images, and amplify falsehoods already circulating among Americans to promote their own interests and create chaos.
Experts say the new center can warn Americans about interference and produce better information for policymakers. While the FBI, the National Security Agency and several other government agencies have long worked on foreign interference, “we are not organized in a way where we are building a coherent threat picture,” said Jessica Brandt, an expert on foreign interference and disinformation at the Brookings Institution.
But there are risks in the intelligence community ramping up its monitoring of what Americans see and read. The FBI and NSA have been accused of unlawfully spying on Americans. That history contributes to many Americans’ distrust of the intelligence community, as do Trump’s attacks on intelligence professionals and what he has derided as the “deep state.”
Opponents note the U.S. also has a history of covert interference in other countries and has helped overthrow governments seen as anti-American. A column published by the Kremlin-backed RT.com alleged the proposed center “is just official cover for American intelligence interference in domestic politics.”
The intelligence community also risks being seen as political or infringing on First Amendment rights if it takes the same untruths spread by Americans and labels them as foreign interference when they’re spread by an adversary.
The center “is going to have to figure out this enormous challenge to convey threats to American elections, American democracy, at a time when there seem to be two completely different realities,” said Salvo of the German Marshall Fund.
Congress authorized the center in late 2019 and directed ODNI to create it. Several people who worked in intelligence matters at that time, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions, say they didn’t know of any effort by the Trump White House to stop the center. Instead, leaders within ODNI disagreed on how to structure the new center or whether it should be a “virtual center” without an office.
According to one of the people, William Evanina, the former chief of ODNI’s counterintelligence center, offered to take the malign influence center under his authority, but the office ultimately did not choose that option. Evanina declined to comment.
After President Joe Biden took office, ODNI presented a plan for a small center with a few dozen staff members to the intelligence and appropriations committees in the House and Senate. But even as Congress required the center’s creation, key lawmakers from both parties have expressed concerns about the plan.
A proposal to fund the center this summer failed and it is unlikely to be completed while the government is operating with temporary funding. The center may now be included if a full spending plan is approved in early 2022.
Suzanne Spaulding, an election security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, called for the U.S. government to act quickly.
“Time is not on our side,” Spaulding said. “Disinformation is a national security threat and should be treated with the urgency that a national security threat engenders.”
AP · by NOMAAN MERCHANT · December 23, 2021
10. No time for war: Russians see no chance of conflict
Somehow I do not think the people's views hold much sway with Putin. But I hope they are right.
No time for war: Russians see no chance of conflict
By Pavel Aksenov
BBC Russian defence correspondent, Moscow
Published
1 hour ago
Russians are gearing up for their New Year and Christmas holiday and have little time for talk of conflict
There may be hope of US-Russia talks in the new year but the build-up of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border has led to fears of an invasion and all-out war. Commentators and experts in Moscow are as alive to the risk as their Western counterparts, but for most Russians there is little interest.
To gauge the public mood, I asked Muscovites if they were worried by the prospect of conflict or further economic sanctions. The EU, UK and US have all warned Moscow of a harsh economic response and President Joe Biden has threatened President Putin with "sanctions like he's never seen".
'Putin will resolve this'
For Roman this is no time for war and he wants relations to improve.
"The situation in the country is quite complicated as it is. Then again," he glances up at the Kremlin, "up there they might have a different view."
Amalia believes the Kremlin will ultimately take the right course of action.
BBC
I think a war cannot be ruled out. But [Mr Putin] acts very wisely in many situations and he will definitely resolve this, too. The main problem now is a lack of understanding
Amalia
Moved to Moscow from Tajikstan
Despite the hope of talks in the coming weeks, the rhetoric is at a high pitch and defence analysts and journalists here agree there is a risk of conflict, even if Russia's troop movements can be explained away by routine exercises. That could also indicate preparations for some form of invasion later.
Sanctions were imposed when Russia seized and then annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. Although they were targeted at individuals and key sectors of the economy, Moscow hit back with an import ban on an array of products.
So far, Roman has not noticed the change.
Image caption,
Roman says his life has not been affected by sanctions imposed since Crimea was annexed
"Food is getting more expensive but I think that's a global trend and not linked to sanctions against Russia," he told me.
Sergey is unimpressed by all the talk of a possible conflict. All the reports of a Russian troop-build-up are merely an attempt to provoke Moscow, he believes.
BBC
I don't believe there'll be a war. In our time it is simply not possible
Sergei
Muscovite
Off camera people are more willing to talk but their opinions are little different.
'Protect our borders'
Vladimir, a pensioner, is convinced Russia would not start a war but believes, in the event of a conflict, all the Ukrainians living in Russia would have to leave and Moscow would have to provide rebel-held areas of Ukraine with money and arms.
Arsen, a biologist, sees no reason for a war: "The official explanation is that the troops are there for the drills, so why not?"
An IT expert, also called Vladimir, has little time for Western reports of a planned Russian invasion but he is concerned by unsubstantiated Russian media claims that Ukraine has sent a large part of its army to the front line. "We need to protect our borders. If Ukraine has pulled its troops close to the border, why can't we do the same?"
The story is very different on Russian social media and that is where you will find most anti-war sentiment.
'Stop this madness'
Facebook user Tatyana Volnova from Moscow backed a small anti-war rally in the city of Kirov last weekend, accusing Russian authorities of "mass brainwashing people who are ready to eat rubbish and to send their sons and grandsons to war".
"We are Russians and we don't want a war," proclaims Olga Mazurova on a public Facebook group entitled Peaceful Resistance St Petersburg. "The world and our country have to hear this."
Accusing Russian authorities of indulging in bellicose rhetoric, she calls on compatriots in cities and villages to "stop this madness".
Some have posted pictures of their own individual protests on Facebook.
Posted by Вера Лаврешина on Sunday, December 19, 2021
Twitter user Alexei Vladimirovich finds the idea of fighting neighbouring Ukraine absurd: "Our brothers and sisters are there. It's like fighting ourselves. Russia will lose everything!"
Some social media users have been trying to work out when an invasion could take place, with some discussion around 23 January.
And there is support for a Russian invasion too.
Pro-Kremlin blogger Anatoliy Shariy, originally from Ukraine, predicts "an immediate triumph for Russia", and suggests defence officials expected a swift and painless war.
'Perhaps war is a way out'
On the streets Russians are reluctant to talk about any potential confrontation with the West, but military action has become a regular theme on Russian state TV.
For some weeks, daily political shows have focused on the West's "hysteria" over Ukraine.
During a fiery TV discussion with a Ukrainian analyst, Margarita Simonyan - the editor in chief of Russia's leading propaganda channel RT - accused Ukraine of killing innocent civilians in the rebel-held east.
"We can also conduct a non-hybrid war, we can conduct a normal war," she said on the nightly 60 minutes show on the Rossiya-1 channel.
Ukraine was to blame for the unrest dragging on in its eastern regions and if Russia could not sort it out by diplomatic means, then it should find another way to protect it citizens under fire, she said.
Getty Images
I don't want a war, as a normal woman - a mother of three. But the war is ongoing and if a small war can stop this butchery that's gone on for seven years perhaps it's a way out
Margarita Simonyan
Editor in chief, RT
It has become a common theme for Russian state media to accuse Ukraine of using violence against civilians ever since the conflict began between Ukraine's military and Russia-backed separatists in April 2014. TV reports purporting to show evidence of such incidents have been aired but regularly debunked as fabricated and fake.
State TV habitually refers to Ukraine as "a colony of the West", with the US accused of "continuing to arm Ukraine".
Ukraine's government and president often come under attack.
Whatever the Kremlin may be planning on Ukraine's borders, the rhetoric you hear on TV does not appear to be widely echoed on the streets of Moscow.
Image caption,
Kamaliya told the BBC she trusted her government and president to do the right thing
A woman called Kamaliya summed up the views of many who said she hoped it would not happen and just wanted a normal life.
"I hope they'll have enough wisdom and understanding of the possible consequences to prevent a catastrophe that could become not just local but global."
Additional reporting by Yaroslava Kiryukhina, BBC Monitoring, Moscow, and Kateryna Khinkulova.
11. Putin's Asymmetric Blind Spot
Lead with influence. Another form of resistance.
Excerpts:
The most powerful asymmetric response to a Russian military invasion of Ukraine, however, will not be launched by any government, it will be the visceral reaction of civil society to injustice given voice through a vibrant free press and media-savvy population. The Russian regime’s attempts to control Russians’ access to information exposes Putin’s greatest fear, the fear of all authoritarians, his own people. He is right to worry; his war talk is wearing thin at home. The greatest threat to his plans, especially if they involve war, is that he will not be able to prevent people talking over his head to communicate directly with the Russian population, and he will pull out all the stops to prevent that.
Western governments will in turn, do their best to penetrate Russia’s information blockade in the event of a conflict, but the most successful efforts will undoubtedly arise spontaneously from the crowd-sourced ingenuity of independent actors impassioned by displays of brutality who will find inventive ways to link up with like-minded Russians to discover the truth. These will not be governments, but the same sorts of people and organizations who investigated the MH-17 shootdown, the poisonings of Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny, and the Panama Papers. Putin will have difficulty defending against this dynamic because he is inherently unable to understand it. To him, civil society is something that is guided by the state, not the other way around. Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution” and 2014 “Maidan” uprising were in his mind not spontaneous popular events provoked by egregious political blunders, but “operations” or “projects” carried out by foreign special services that were deliberately designed to undermine Russia. He believes this because that is what he does. In that sense, this would be the purest form of asymmetrical response, one that Vladimir Putin is incapable of seeing.
Putin's Asymmetric Blind Spot
OPINION — Perhaps it is just a reckless Khrushchevesque opening gambit, but Russia’s recent security demands suggest that Vladimir Putin’s condition for avoiding military action against Ukraine is Western acquiescence in converting Ukraine into a Russian vassal state. Given he also demands NATO roll back deployments of personnel and equipment to its 1997 positions, before Poland or the Baltic republics joined the alliance, it is not just Ukraine he wants to see neutered.
Russian officials never hesitate to raise their country’s genuinely horrific suffering at the hands of the Nazis during World War II when justifying their need for a cordon sanitaire at their borders, but their historical self-righteousness is highly selective. What they fail to mention, but what Russia’s neighbors will never forget, is that in 1932-33, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin precipitated a politically driven famine, the “Holodomor,” which killed nearly 5 million Ukrainians. This was followed by the 1937-38 Anti-Kulak campaign (NKVD Order 00844), resulting in the execution of another 400,000 people. The concurrent anti-Polish campaign (NKVD Order 00485) resulted in the execution of 100,000 ethnic Poles, and the Anti-Latvian campaign (NKVD Order 49990) killed more than 16,000 Latvians. Over a 15-month period, these hundreds of thousands of non-Russians were executed for the alleged crime of being “anti-Soviet.” Most were dispatched by a gunshot to the back of the neck and buried in unmarked mass graves. Many thousands more were imprisoned or deported to Siberia or Central Asia.
To this unimaginable slaughter, add the 1939 Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland and the execution of 22,000 captured Polish officers, the 1940 Soviet occupation and annexation of the Baltic states, and the 45 years of imposed communist rule in Central Europe after World War II and crushing of multiple uprisings against it. Can it be surprising that these post-Soviet states, once freed, would gravitate toward a defensive alliance for collective security? Perhaps their worries would have been alleviated had Russia cleanly broken with its Soviet past after 1991, but after halting steps under Boris Yeltsin, Putin turned back the clock on the expansion of civil liberties and candor about the Soviet past, which increasingly glorifies Stalin’s role.
Putin’s focus on NATO is disingenuous. Remember in 2013, Russia pressured then-President Viktor Yanukovych to terminate Ukraine’s steps toward an association agreement with the EU, seeking an economic not a military alliance. This prompted the “Maidan” uprising which ousted Yanukovych, quickly followed by Russia’s use of military force in the Donbas and outright annexation of Crimea. Only after the killing of Ukrainians and occupation of their territory by Russia did joining NATO become a serious Ukrainian national objective. Putin can blame himself for this.
Putin’s real fear, however, is not NATO. He knows its decisions are made by consensus, i.e., unanimously by all member states, thus the prospect of offensive military action by NATO against Russian aggression is negligible. His actual fear is that Ukraine will succeed in developing into a Europe-oriented democracy where state power is limited by a free press, independent judiciary, and the rule of law. Success in this endeavor by Ukraine, so close to Russia culturally and linguistically, would serve as an intolerable contrast to Putin’s authoritarian, state-centric vision for Russia’s future, and he must therefore prevent it.
The West understands it cannot afford another Munich moment by allowing fear of armed conflict to lead to passivity while an independent country seeking to join the European family is broken by an authoritarian hegemon intent on blocking its way. The Western democracies, and Central Europeans in particular, vividly remember the harsh lessons of the last century that Russia minimizes and will see Putin’s gambit for what it is. The U.S. and Europe will not negotiate behind Ukraine’s back to sell out its independence, and Putin will then likely move to achieve his objectives by military force.
Western leaders have already ruled out direct military intervention if Russia invades. Ukrainians will do the fighting and dying. The West will respond asymmetrically, but most of the asymmetric options in their playbook are predictable and have been telegraphed over the years by politicians and pundits, so they have already been factored into Russia’s plans. The most obvious are economic sanctions, an area of chronic asymmetric weakness for Russia, whose economic output is about the same as the state of New York. The West has gone to the sanctions well many times over the years, choosing this over the so-called ‘nuclear-level’ responses that include blocking the Nordstream-2 gas pipeline or evicting Russia from the SWIFT financial transactions system. These would indeed bite hard, but a Russian invasion of Ukraine would justify their use.
Other, harder government-led asymmetric options would include providing the Ukrainians with more capable military technology and a deeper sharing of intelligence information and collection capabilities. Yet these too are predictable, and the Russians likely assess they can overcome them. If this was purely a tabletop exercise, the Russian logic in theory, is unassailable. However, real-life conflicts unleash powerful human factors that inject far greater uncertainty. Russians fight like lions to defend their motherland but selling an invasion of Ukraine to Russian soldiers and the Russian public as “liberation” will be harder when they find themselves fighting Ukrainians and not NATO. Putin’s casus belli is weak. It may resonate with the Russian national security elite, but the narod are no fools and are tired of being lied to. They will see that in this case, it is the Ukrainians defending their land, homes, and independence who are the lions.
The most powerful asymmetric response to a Russian military invasion of Ukraine, however, will not be launched by any government, it will be the visceral reaction of civil society to injustice given voice through a vibrant free press and media-savvy population. The Russian regime’s attempts to control Russians’ access to information exposes Putin’s greatest fear, the fear of all authoritarians, his own people. He is right to worry; his war talk is wearing thin at home. The greatest threat to his plans, especially if they involve war, is that he will not be able to prevent people talking over his head to communicate directly with the Russian population, and he will pull out all the stops to prevent that.
Western governments will in turn, do their best to penetrate Russia’s information blockade in the event of a conflict, but the most successful efforts will undoubtedly arise spontaneously from the crowd-sourced ingenuity of independent actors impassioned by displays of brutality who will find inventive ways to link up with like-minded Russians to discover the truth. These will not be governments, but the same sorts of people and organizations who investigated the MH-17 shootdown, the poisonings of Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny, and the Panama Papers. Putin will have difficulty defending against this dynamic because he is inherently unable to understand it. To him, civil society is something that is guided by the state, not the other way around. Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution” and 2014 “Maidan” uprising were in his mind not spontaneous popular events provoked by egregious political blunders, but “operations” or “projects” carried out by foreign special services that were deliberately designed to undermine Russia. He believes this because that is what he does. In that sense, this would be the purest form of asymmetrical response, one that Vladimir Putin is incapable of seeing.
Read more expert-driven national security perspective, analysis and opinion in The Cipher Brief
12. Russian Brinkmanship Meets Weaponized Finance: Prepare for Deterrence to Fail
Excerpts:
World leaders have historically struggled with such questions of geoeconomics. The Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck thought that lack of capital would not make Russia more peaceful. Bismarck was only partly exaggerating when he claimed that the Russians would “spend the necessary money for railways and wars whether they have it nor not.” Throughout its history, Russia’s most notable liberal finance ministers—from Mikhail von Reutern (under Alexander II) to Aleksei Kudrin (under Putin) have battled the nexus of interests pushing protectionist, military-industrial and imperial expansion winning a few policy struggles while usually losing the long game.
Putin fits the pattern of Russian rulers who have prioritized military-industry and resource dominance ahead of rational economic development. This pattern is integrated into Putin’s personalist autocratic system and Moscow’s attachment to the role of ambitious great power. Like Joseph Stalin, Putin is convinced that the weak get beaten, not just on the battlefield but in every domain of major power competition. Moreover, the Russian defense sector, as other parts of the economy’s commanding heights, is largely owned and run by regime insiders and not easily coerced by sanctions. Thus, it’s puzzling why the former director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control still asserts that the United States should sanction Russian oligarchs to “increasingly pressure a regime to change its behavior by picking off those people who support” it.
...
It’s unclear how many times the Kremlin can go to the brink without tripping itself and others off the cliff deliberately or inadvertently. Two days after a video call between Putin and Joe Biden, which Washington hoped would defuse the crisis, Moscow was still increasing the pressure. On December 9, TASS quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as warning that East-West tensions over Ukraine could turn into a rerun of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The same day it quoted Putin as saying that the events in the Donbass conflict zone in eastern Ukraine “increasingly resembled genocide.”
Putin and others in his circle believe Russia is strong enough militarily to create situations in Ukraine in which it can impose its preferences. For the Kremlin, permanently losing Ukraine— even a Ukraine whose domestic politics it can no longer shape—is synonymous with Russia losing the power to influence European security and its own identity as a European great power. As the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is upon us, the United States, Ukraine, and the Western allies should prepare for what comes next. Paradoxically, the common thread in approaches, that the worst outcome—nuclear escalation—is unthinkable, increases the likelihood of conflict rather than dampening it.
Russian Brinkmanship Meets Weaponized Finance: Prepare for Deterrence to Fail
Deterrence failure would likely lead first to proportionate cross-domain escalation involving Russian cyberattacks against U.S. infrastructure, with the expectation of containing the risks of vertical escalation.
Vladimir Putin, the “Tsar of Brinkmanship,” is escalating pressure on Ukraine and its NATO supporters on a scale well beyond the events in 2014, not unlike how Nikita Khrushchev used to squeeze West Berlin. In recent months, Russia has been massing a deployment of joint forces significantly more capable and exceeding 100,000 troops, five to ten times the size of the combat battalions available in 2014-2015. Moscow is signaling it will not give up Ukraine without a fight. In a well-publicized November speech to senior Foreign Ministry officials, Putin warned that although NATO continues to ignore Russia’s “red lines” about not bringing its “military infrastructure” “next to our borders,” the “tension” created by Russia’s brinkmanship is now producing “a certain effect.” Putin asserted “it is necessary that this state persists for them as long as possible” until they reverse course and provide Russia with long-term security guarantees.
On cue, the Foreign Ministry handed to the Biden administration last week and published on their website Moscow’s far-reaching demands—which include rescinding a 2008 commitment to Ukraine and Georgia that they would one day join NATO, banning all new weapons and force deployments in eastern Europe, and negotiation of a new treaty on European security. Although NATO’s pledge to these former Soviet republics was a strategic blunder that depended on Russia never recovering the power and will to contest it, the United States and its allies can never back down under such pressure. Even if talks begin to search for a mutually acceptable bargain, Russia’s military timeline to run offensive operations against Ukraine is shorter than any plausible space for diplomacy, demonstrating that the Kremlin is preparing to go to the wall.
For Putin, like Khrushchev, a competition in risk-taking appears to offer a beguiling opportunity to solve multiple international and domestic challenges simultaneously, forcing others to compromise in unwanted tests of wills. Putin is clearly dissatisfied with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s unwillingness to deliver policies favorable to Moscow, the failure of the Minsk process to reboot Russia’s influence in Ukraine, and the growing military role of the United States and other Western countries in and around Ukraine, despite its nonmember status in NATO. For the Kremlin, Ukraine has also become the pivot point to redress Russia’s lost structural power in matters of European security. There is no later point in Putin’s thinking; it’s now or all will be lost forever.
The Ukraine crisis resembles Khrushchev’s confrontation with a West German leadership bolstered by economic recovery, increasingly serious in its nuclear ambitions, and eager for reunification on Western terms. Khrushchev also faced challenges to his authority at home and elsewhere in the communist world. Putin, similarly, seems to be worried that a Ukraine anchored in the West will eventually become a prosperous democratic country and lead Russians to challenge their own stagnating crony capitalist system. Like Khrushchev, Putin has also staked his domestic legitimacy, in part, on geopolitical reversals of fortune, first Crimea, and now undoing the terms of European security. For the West, leaving Ukraine in limbo was as much a mistake as leaving West Berlin as an indefensible outpost.
The Kremlin’s determination to stop the advance of Euro-Atlantic institutions was signaled in a smaller campaign against Georgia in 2008 before Russia moved to fracture Ukraine and seize Crimea. Although Western policymakers expected that Russia’s arrangements with transatlantic institutions like the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act would promote stability, Moscow could never permanently accept a minuscule “limited relationship“ with the expanding Euro-Atlantic institutions of NATO and the EU that dominated the continent and were controlled by other powerful actors, not Russia. Putin stiffly repeated this week his 2014 warning that “We have reached a point beyond which we cannot retreat.”
The trend line of closer military, political, and economic associations between Kyiv and Washington and other Western countries, even in the absence of a NATO membership action plan, is the final straw. The Kremlin fears the United States, in particular, is creating facts on the ground, in the air, and in the seas that give the impression that America’s stakes in this region rival those of Russia’s. This would represent a major departure from President Barack Obama’s opposite conclusion that “Ukraine is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do” because Russia has higher stakes there. Obama explained that “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for” although “there’s always going to be some ambiguity.” This time around, with U.S. domestic politics scarred by Russia’s gray area influence operations and the ongoing war in Ukraine, Washington feels more committed to Ukraine and wants to frighten Putin into believing his brinkmanship will boomerang, but that outcome is far from certain. The Biden administration talks about the spigot of arms flowing to Ukraine, but there is no mention that Americans will fight to uphold Ukraine’s sovereignty as a fellow democracy, despite assurances provided to Kyiv in 1994 in exchange for it giving up the nuclear arsenal it inherited when the USSR collapsed.
As Thomas Schelling explains, brinkmanship “is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation.” Schelling would describe the dynamic that Putin has imposed in Ukraine as the “rationality of irrationality”: Putin has been purposefully generating risk and “exploiting the danger that somebody may inadvertently go over the brink, dragging the other with him.”
Moscow expects to demonstrate not that it possesses greater aggregate power than the United States and Ukraine’s other Western partners, but that it is more willing to commit the power needed to achieve its objectives. Although the Kremlin prefers to avoid a costly protracted war, it is signaling a willingness to fight to deny Ukraine complete autonomy in its international policies and to deny Kyiv’s Western partners a new transatlantic beachhead on Russia’s western border.
A casus belli can always be found, and a one-on-one fight involving Russia against Ukraine is not likely to go well for Kyiv on the battlefield; even Ukraine’s generals fear they would be “overwhelmed.”
In March 2015, a year after the annexation of Crimea, Putin signaled during a television broadcast that he had been ready to raise the alert level of Russian nuclear forces to ensure the West did not intervene. Even discounting Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling, Russia has plausible horizontal escalation options both to deter direct Western intervention and to retaliate against Western economic sanctions. Moscow would likely consider proportionate escalation to include cyber-attacks on critical civilian infrastructure or against the U.S. financial sector.
Economic and Financial Swords are Poor Coercive Instruments
Unwilling to commit U.S. forces, the Biden administration has resurrected Obama’s deterrence playbook, but in changed conditions. Washington is probably miscalculating that threats of punishing financial sanctions will deter Russian military escalation. Coercion by punishment, including by sanctions, rarely succeeds. The International Monetary Fund estimated in 2019 that sanctions had curbed Russian growth by 0.2 percentage points between 2014 and 2018, but Russia is unlikely to ever willingly relinquish Crimea. Washington has also threatened more extreme sanctions, such as turning off Russia’s access to the SWIFT financial messaging system, targeting the issuance of sovereign debt and the full range of derivative products, and hitting Russian banks. The transatlantic community also warns that Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany may be closed down.
The problem is that current policymakers exaggerate the impact that such threats had on dissuading Putin from expanding the war against Ukraine in 2014-15. The Kremlin was then assimilating new information about the lack of enthusiasm among eastern Ukrainians to fight alongside the Russian-supported separatists in support of restoring Novorossiya. There were additional concerns about the likelihood of Russian popular opposition in the event of high casualties. Today, Putin is still not unconstrained domestically, but the impact of higher levels of repression and censorship should not be discounted. U.S. policies that wound the Russian economy would also likely generate perverse outcomes, such as allowing the regime to shift the blame for the economic downturn to the West and perhaps encouraging Putin to move further to the right and incorporate extreme nationalists in his ruling coalition.
World leaders have historically struggled with such questions of geoeconomics. The Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck thought that lack of capital would not make Russia more peaceful. Bismarck was only partly exaggerating when he claimed that the Russians would “spend the necessary money for railways and wars whether they have it nor not.” Throughout its history, Russia’s most notable liberal finance ministers—from Mikhail von Reutern (under Alexander II) to Aleksei Kudrin (under Putin) have battled the nexus of interests pushing protectionist, military-industrial and imperial expansion winning a few policy struggles while usually losing the long game.
Putin fits the pattern of Russian rulers who have prioritized military-industry and resource dominance ahead of rational economic development. This pattern is integrated into Putin’s personalist autocratic system and Moscow’s attachment to the role of ambitious great power. Like Joseph Stalin, Putin is convinced that the weak get beaten, not just on the battlefield but in every domain of major power competition. Moreover, the Russian defense sector, as other parts of the economy’s commanding heights, is largely owned and run by regime insiders and not easily coerced by sanctions. Thus, it’s puzzling why the former director of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control still asserts that the United States should sanction Russian oligarchs to “increasingly pressure a regime to change its behavior by picking off those people who support” it.
Over the last decade, the United States has sharpened its extraterritorial financial swords to punish international actors that violate U.S. laws and international norms, and such sanctions did encourage Iran to negotiate the original Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. These include sectoral sanctions which make capital markets an important battleground. But Russia is a major power, unlike Iran, boasting the world’s sixth-largest economy (measured in purchasing power parity; eleventh in market rates), a current account in surplus, and a war chest of more than $625 billion in financial reserves. Moscow also adeptly managed to resume issuing Eurobonds in 2016 and again in 2018 with provisions for repayments not just in U.S. dollars, but in some circumstances in euros or Swiss francs, and even Russian rubles at the U.S. dollar exchange rate set by the Russian Central Bank. This puts Western bondholders at risk of a substantial haircut if sovereign debt sanctions trigger a Russian “alternative payment currency event” in repayments. U.S. banks have been barred from participating in the primary market of Russian government debt issuances since August 2019, but Russia continues to sell Eurobonds. Some experts further underscore how more extreme sanctions on Russian foreign debt will negatively impact Western financial institutions while Russian authorities restructure their liabilities.
If Putin escalates the war over Ukraine, and the United States counterattacks with financial weapons, Russia will suffer severe economic costs. Yet both the regime and the nation will survive, just as they did after four previous economic shocks all experienced by Putin’s generation—most notably the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union when the stagnating Soviet economy was hit by a perfect storm triggered by a collapse of world oil prices, the depletion of Soviet currency reserves, and the country’s final death spiral. Weeks then separated the country from bankruptcy, nonpayment of its foreign debt, and severe food shortages. Among the documents that Yegor Gaidar unearthed for his landmark study, Collapse of an Empire, was one from the Vneshekonombank [Foreign Economic Bank of the Soviet Union], which notified the leadership that the Soviet state had not one cent remaining in its coffers. This calamity was followed by the 1998 currency shock and Russian default, the 2007 global financial crisis, and a fourth economic shock in 2015 coinciding with a plunge in oil prices and the value of the Russian ruble, and the imposition of Western sanctions.
It is also worth remembering that when Putin assumed power in 1999, Russia had less than $13 billion in hard currency reserves and faced $133 billion of foreign debt. More than most leaders, Putin understands there is a lot of ruin in a nation and how to come out on the other side. Among other steps, the Russian leader is undoubtedly instructing Russia’s competent and experienced Central Bank head, Elvira Nabiullina, to prepare to ensure macroeconomic stability as she did in 2015 with a textbook orthodox response to navigate the financial and economic crisis.
Blowback: Weaponization of Finance Pushes Russia and China Closer
The United States should plan for the contingency that its deterrence by weaponized finance may fail if Russia’s brinkmanship goes to the wall this time. Former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev and other elites have described cutting Russia off from SWIFT as tantamount to a “declaration of war.” Deterrence failure would likely lead first to proportionate cross-domain escalation involving Russian cyberattacks against U.S. infrastructure, with the expectation of containing the risks of vertical escalation. The wielding of financial weapons will also provoke a new sense of urgency in Russia and China to accelerate their decade-long effort to build alternatives to the dollar-dominated currency world, including further steps to internationalize the renminbi to serve as a unit of account and medium of exchange in cross-border payments.
In a meeting with foreign experts in 2014, Putin underscored the certain blowback that would result, asserting that sanctions are reinforcing the inclination of many countries to become “less dependent on the dollar” and to set up alternative financial and payments systems and reserve currencies. Putin insisted that the United States does not have a monopoly on financial statecraft, warning “I think that our American partners are quite simply cutting the branch they are sitting on.”
Together with China, Russia has spent the last decade hardening its financial infrastructure and building parallel systems. Besides large hard currency reserves, each has its own financial messaging system. Although more rudimentary than China’s cross-border interbank payment system CIPS, Russia’s financial messaging network system similarly operates according to the same standards as SWIFT. There are plans to link it to China’s and possibly a future payment system being developed by India (all one-time targets of U.S. sanctions).
It’s unclear how many times the Kremlin can go to the brink without tripping itself and others off the cliff deliberately or inadvertently. Two days after a video call between Putin and Joe Biden, which Washington hoped would defuse the crisis, Moscow was still increasing the pressure. On December 9, TASS quoted Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as warning that East-West tensions over Ukraine could turn into a rerun of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The same day it quoted Putin as saying that the events in the Donbass conflict zone in eastern Ukraine “increasingly resembled genocide.”
Putin and others in his circle believe Russia is strong enough militarily to create situations in Ukraine in which it can impose its preferences. For the Kremlin, permanently losing Ukraine— even a Ukraine whose domestic politics it can no longer shape—is synonymous with Russia losing the power to influence European security and its own identity as a European great power. As the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union is upon us, the United States, Ukraine, and the Western allies should prepare for what comes next. Paradoxically, the common thread in approaches, that the worst outcome—nuclear escalation—is unthinkable, increases the likelihood of conflict rather than dampening it.
Cynthia Roberts is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College, CUNY, and a Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University. Her most recent book (with L. Armijo and S. Katada) is The BRICS and Collective Financial Statecraft (Oxford, 2018). In 2019, Prof. Roberts served as a policy adviser at the Joint Staff, Department of Defense in J-5, Strategy, Plans, and Policy.
Image: Reuters.
13. Russia accuses Ukraine of an 'act of terrorism' over Molotov attack
Looking for an excuse? Or fabricating one?
Russia accuses Ukraine of an 'act of terrorism' over Molotov attack
Russia accuses Ukraine of an 'act of terrorism' over Molotov cocktail attack on its embassy in Lviv as satellite images reveal Putin has moved HUNDREDS more tanks to border
- The Kremlin has demanded an apology from Kiev today after attack on consulate in Ukrainian city of Lviv
- Footage shows a man hurling a petrol bomb at the embassy and Ukrainian police have launched a probe
- It comes as new satellite images revealed Vladimir Putin has moved troops and tanks to the Ukrainian border
- Russian troops engaged in frenzy of 'exercises' including precision shooting at the Ukrainian border yesterday
- Comes amid reports 'mass graves', each capable of holding 100 bodies, are being prepared along the border
- Russia has been massing thousands of troops at Ukraine's border since October after a small buildup in April
PUBLISHED: 10:21 EST, 24 December 2021 | UPDATED: 12:12 EST, 24 December 2021
Russia has accused Ukraine of an 'act of terrorism' over a Molotov cocktail attack on its embassy in the city of Lviv amid soaring tensions after satellites revealed Vladimir Putin has moved hundreds of tanks to the border.
The Kremlin said Friday that an attacker hurled a petrol bomb at the Russian consulate in the eastern Ukrainian city, formally protesting and demanding apologies from Kiev.
Footage of the incident shows a man throwing a Molotov which appears to bounce off the walls of the building before exploding on the ground. The attacker then sprints away.
Ukrainian police in Lviv said they had launched an investigation over the incident, which they referred to as 'hooliganism'.
It comes as newly-published pictures dated December 13 show a new brigade-level unit comprised of several hundred armoured vehicles massed at a Russian base in Bakhchysarai, Crimea, around 110 miles from the Ukrainian border.
An October 7 satellite image of the same garrison showed the base was half empty, showing that the Kremlin has continued to build up its forces near Ukraine in recent weeks while pressing the United States for talks over security guarantees.
More Maxar Technologies images taken yesterday from the Crimea show an entire Russian battle group taking part in military exercises at the Opuk training area, between 150 and 160 miles from the border.
Tensions along Europe's eastern border have been simmering since Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea back in 2014, and have been threatening to boil over ever since Moscow began massing forces in the region starting in October after an earlier brief buildup in April this year.
Putin, speaking at his annual end-of-year conference on Thursday, said that Russia wanted to avoid conflict, but needed an 'immediate' response from the United States and its allies to its demands for security guarantees.
The Kremlin said Friday that someone had hurled a petrol bomb at the Russian consulate in the eastern Ukrainian city, formally protesting and demanding apologies from Kiev. Footage (above) of the incident shows a man hurling the Molotov which appears to bounce off the walls of the building before exploding on the ground. The attacker then sprints away
The assailant is seen hurling the petrol bomb at the consulate before he darts away. Ukrainian police in Lviv said they had launched an investigation over the incident, which they referred to as 'hooliganism'
— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) December 24, 2021
AFTER: Newly-published pictures dated December 13 show a new brigade-level unit comprised of several hundred armoured vehicles massed at a Russian base in Bakhchysarai, Crimea, around 110 miles from the Ukrainian border
BEFORE: A satellite image of the same garrison in Bakhchysarai, Crimea, taken on October 7 showed the base was half empty
Moscow has for weeks been massing tens of thousands of troops, tanks and artillery pieces along its eastern flank, sparking fears of an invasion, though the Kremlin has insisted it is merely a defence force (pictured, Russian forces currently massed in border regions)
The Kremlin reiterated on Friday that it reserves the right to move its own forces on Russian territory as it sees fit and that Western countries were carrying out provocative military manoeuvres near its borders.
It comes after more than 1,000 Russian troops held a frenzy of military exercises including precision firing tests, mobile defence drills and practice flights along the Ukrainian border on Thursday.
And in another twist the drills come amid claims 'mass grave' sites, each capable of accommodating 100 bodies, are being prepared along the Ukrainian border ahead of a possible invasion by Russian forces.
Maxar said the new unit at the Bakhchysarai garrison includes BMP-series infantry fighting vehicles, tanks, self-propelled artillery and air defence equipment.
'Over the past month, our high-resolution satellite imagery has observed a number of new Russian deployments in Crimea as well as in several training areas in western Russia along the periphery of the Ukraine border,' Maxar said in a statement.
It cited increased activity at three sites in Crimea and at five sites in western Russia.
When asked on Friday about the build-up of Russian troops near Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said Moscow was acting to defend its own security.
'Russia is moving its own troops around on its own territory against the backdrop of highly unfriendly actions by our opponents in NATO, the United States and various European countries who are carrying out highly unambiguous manoeuvres near our borders,' said Peskov.
'This forces us to take certain measures to guarantee our own security.'
Older Maxar images showed a build-up at the Soloti staging ground in Russia close to the Ukrainian border, with photos shot at the start of December showing a larger concentration of military hardware than in September.
Other pictures showed continuing build-ups at Yelnya, a Russian town around 160 miles (260 km) north of the Ukrainian border, and at the Pogonovo training ground near the southern Russian city of Voronezh.
More Maxar Technologies images taken yesterday from the Crimea show an entire Russian battle group at the Opuk training area, between 150 and 160 miles from the border, on Wednesday
A satellite image take on December 22 shows a Russian battle group deployed at Opuk training area in the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014
A satellite image take on December 22 shows a Russian battle group taking part in a manoeuvre amid a frenzy of military exercises the same day as President Putin held his annual end-of-year press conference in Moscow
It came a day after Putin on Thursday accused NATO and the US of planning to deploy hypersonic missiles - which have not yet been successfully developed - to Ukraine.
The Russian strongman blamed NATO's militarisation of former Soviet states, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, since the end of the Cold War for the current crisis and threatened that Russia 'can do anything at any cost' to protect itself.
In the Black Sea Sukhoi Su-27SM3 fighter jets stationed in Krasnodar drilled on challenging Western or Ukrainian warships seen as threatening the Russian border, defence sources said.
'In the course of training flights, Su-27SM3 duos escorted Sukhoi Su-34 fighter bombers and practised airborne duty, detection and following of mock transgressor ships demonstrating an intention to illegal cross the Russian sea border,' said a fleet statement.
Separately, the sprawling central military district announced a 50 per cent increase in drills for 2022, amounting to almost one every day.
Video shows a batch of five ultra modern MiG-31BM interceptor fighters which were deployed in the district. And in Kemerovo, tanks conducted mobile defence drills involving 500 troops.
A report on the exercises stated: 'The simulated enemy made an attempt to break through the defences with the help of heavy armoured vehicles.
'The crews of tank units destroyed the enemy using mobile defence tactics, a feature of which is the preparation of several positions at different lines for each combat vehicle.
'At the same time, after each shot, the tank changes its position.
'The crews of the combat vehicle, by changing the firing positions, imitate the fire of more equipment and force the enemy to respond, thereby revealing themselves for the vehicles in ambush, which open fire in a volley at the detected targets.'
Central district commander, Colonel General Alexander Lapin, said: 'We will continue to build up the combat potential of the district's troops and maintain it at a level that ensures the military security of Russia and its allies.'
In Volgograd more than 1,000 infantry troops trained in missile and artillery fire with 152mm Msta-S self-propelled howitzers, Tornado-G rocket launchers, and T-90A tanks.
In Buryatia, motorised riflemen on infantry fighting vehicles thwarted the offensive of an 'enemy' in temperatures as low as minus 40C. In Ulyanovsk, Russian airborne troops were drilling in a 'high-precision shooting championship'.
On Ukraine's western border in the Moldovan separatist region of Transnistria, Russian forces stationed in the territory drilled in 'radiation, chemical and biological protection', it was reported.
In the Arctic, Russian forces were deployed setting up a communications system in harsh deep winter conditions at a firing range in Murmansk region.
'The drills have been arranged and are taking place with the participation of troops and military hardware to upgrade firing and driving skills and to continue tactical and special training,' said Russian military news agency Interfax-AVN today.
Mass burial sites were being dug along the Ukraine border as a 'priority', Russian outlet MK reported, citing leaked legal documents.
The graves are being constructed near to crematoriums, according to the documents, which come into force on February 1.
Russian troops engaged in a frenzy of 'exercises' on the Ukrainian border yesterday hours after Vladimir Putin told US and NATO to 'go to hell', stoking fears of an invasion
Five ultra modern MiG-31BM interceptor fighter jets (pictured) practiced yesterday amid claims 'mass grave' sties, each capable of accommodating 100 bodies, are being prepared along the Ukrainian border
More than 1,000 troops were involved in firing exercises in five regions yesterday while tanks conducted mobile defence drills involving 500 soldiers
In the Arctic, Russian forces were deployed setting up a communications system in harsh deep winter conditions at a firing range in Murmansk region
Last week, Moscow submitted draft security documents demanding that NATO deny membership to Ukraine and other former Soviet countries and roll back the alliance's military deployments in Central and Eastern Europe.
A key principle of the NATO alliance is that membership is open to any qualifying country.
The US and its allies have said they will not give Russia the kind of guarantee on Ukraine that Putin wants but American officials are conferring with European allies in advance of the Geneva talks.
Putin said Thursday that Washington has been willing to discuss the proposals and talks could happen at the start of next year in Geneva.
A senior US official said Washington was ready for talks 'as soon as early January'.
Putin said: 'There must not be any eastward NATO expansion... The ball is in their court. They need to provide us with some answer,' he added: 'Overall we see a positive reaction.'
'US partners told us that they are ready to begin this discussion, these talks, at the very start of next year in Geneva,' Putin said, adding that representatives from both sides have been appointed.
The growing tensions peaked this week when Putin vowed that Russia would take 'appropriate retaliatory' military steps in response to what he called the West's 'aggressive stance'.
Mr Putin likened the build-up of Nato forces in countries which once belonged to the Soviet Union to Russia establishing a military presence in Canada and Mexico.
He said: 'Is it us who are putting missiles near the US borders? No, it's the US who came to our home with their missiles.
'Is it some excessive demand not to place any offensive systems near our home?
'We have clearly and precisely let them know that any further Nato expansion eastward is unacceptable. And it is you [the West] who must give us guarantees and give them immediately, and not have idle talk about it for decades.'
Mr Putin claims that at the end of the Cold War Nato assured Russia it would respect its territorial heritage and made promises not to expand the alliance into central and eastern Europe.
But many eastern European nations feared they would be absorbed back into a greater Russia or become its client states again, losing new-found freedoms.
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined Nato in 1999, followed in 2004 by Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
In subsequent years, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia also joined, bringing Nato's membership to 30 nations.
14. Has the Myth of the ‘Good War’ Done Us Lasting Harm?
Excerpts:
Samet has taught soldiers who served in 21st-century wars, and she forces us to confront the fact that these wars were consumed as myths back home. Even as a relatively small number of Americans served, the rest of the nation participated through flag lapel pins, flyovers at football games and feel-good videos of troops returning home (often before another deployment). Media outlets such as Fox News celebrated our military prowess while ignoring its limitations and vilifying the wars’ critics. As the promised victories failed to materialize, our culture became dominated by comic book movies and our politics were overtaken by an authoritarian movement with a nativist and nostalgic appeal: “Make America Great Again.”
A big and diverse nation like the United States inevitably encompasses the complexity and contradictions of humanity. This was on display in the final days of our war in Afghanistan. As young Americans at Kabul’s airport struggled to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans who believed in the stories we told them about freedom and democracy, far more were left behind. The final known American act of violence was a drone strike that exemplified the reach of our military power but killed seven innocent children while serving no strategic purpose.
America’s victory in World War II should always be celebrated, particularly its defeat of fascism; a nation naturally seeks to embrace its best story as a source of common identity. But at a time when mythmaking and misinformation dominate swaths of our discourse, those scenes from Kabul remind us that we can only see the humanity in one another — whether it is an American soldier asked to make life-or-death decisions at that airport, or an Afghan child denied the most basic right to live — if we choose to live honestly in the world as it is.
Has the Myth of the ‘Good War’ Done Us Lasting Harm?
nonfiction
The correspondent Ernie Pyle (center) talking with marines on a U.S. Navy transport in March 1945. Credit...Associated Press
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LOOKING FOR THE GOOD WAR
American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
By Elizabeth D. Samet
Watching the tragic end of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, Americans could easily have forgotten that the war began in a spasm of triumphalism. Days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush pledged that Al Qaeda and its allies would “follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism” to “history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” Fast-forward 20 years. Abroad, the United States has been chastened in its post-9/11 wars. At home, American democracy is riven by division and endangered by creeping authoritarianism.
How did this happen? In her magisterial new book, “Looking for the Good War,” Elizabeth Samet, a professor of English at West Point, finds answers in the same historical wellspring that Bush tapped into: our mythologizing of war, particularly our triumph over fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism in the 20th century. Samet leaves little doubt about where she stands in the wording of the question that frames her book. “Has the prevailing memory of the ‘Good War,’ shaped as it has been by nostalgia, sentimentality and jingoism, done more harm than good to Americans’ sense of themselves and their country’s place in the world?”
We all know the prevailing memory of the “Good War.” Abroad, Americans from all walks of life came together to defeat tyranny and free the oppressed. At home, Americans were united in fidelity to the cause. And there is a cinematic quality to the images that Samet revisits, projected into our collective memory like a black-and-white newsreel: our troops distributing chocolate to children, receiving kisses from Frenchwomen and liberating concentration camps while the arsenal of democracy hummed back home. To Samet, this mythmaking reached its apotheosis around the turn of the century, with the publication of books by Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. It is hard not to blush a little when Samet quotes Brokaw’s declaration: “This is the greatest generation any society has ever produced.”
Of course, there is nobility in celebrating the U.S. victory in a just war and honoring those who served. Samet reaffirms that truth while forcing our attention on a more complicated reality. A sizable “America First” movement sympathized with aspects of Hitler’s ideology, which borrowed from our history of white supremacy. Americans were reluctantly drawn into war only after Pearl Harbor, and liberating the Jews was never a priority. Racism permeated our military forces — most obviously in mandated segregation, and in the restoration of Confederate war heroes in the naming of military facilities and the narrative of national greatness. In the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, the United States was indiscriminate in its use of violence. For U.S. troops who fought, the war was often something to be endured and not celebrated.
Samet draws on American voices who offered a more nuanced portrayal of the war and its meaning. She begins with reporters like Ernie Pyle, who embedded with U.S. troops and was killed in the Pacific in 1945. As early as September 1944, when it appeared the war in Europe had been won, Pyle was cautioning against triumphalism, blending his deep admiration for the Americans who fought with a reminder that our victory had many factors, including the enormous sacrifices of British and Soviet allies, and our vast natural resources. His words read like a prebuttal to the postwar brand of American exceptionalism. “We did not win it because destiny created us better than all other peoples.”
Much of the book elevates for praise Americans like John Hersey, Chester Himes, William Styron, Reinhold Niebuhr, Studs Terkel and Joan Didion, who wrestled with complexity and resisted mythmaking. Samet also focuses extensively on film, particularly postwar noir — movies like “Daisy Kenyon” (1947) and “Sudden Fear” (1952) — which centered on the disaffected veteran who cannot forget his past intimacy with violence. This version of the American antihero is ambivalent about organized society and accepts moral ambiguity. Samet makes a compelling case that “noir’s sordid world of drifters, grifters and con artists sounds a steady counterpoint to the mainstream Cold War narrative of American righteousness and self-satisfaction.” Still, the prevailing national story embraced the dangerous lesson that there is “an innate, exceptional goodness” in the use of military force by the United States — a false truth that anticipates Vietnam.
The downside of “Looking for the Good War” is that it occasionally becomes a bombardment of cultural references, as if Samet cannot help finding validation for her arguments everywhere; stretches of the book are devoted to film and book summaries. But the strength of this approach is to remind us that there has always been an alternative to the simplistic mythmaking around World War II and its impact on our national psyche. Instead of embracing a more realistic complexity, Samet maintains, we have been burdened by the impossibility of living up to a myth of our own construction. “We continue to search in vain for a heroic plot comparable to the one woven out of our experience in World War II.”
For all of its own intricacies, the Cold War did offer the outlines of such a plot. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the re-emergence of World War II nostalgia embodied by Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” took place in the decade between the fall of the Soviet Union and the attacks of 9/11. And it’s clear that the more recent War on Terror was colored from the outset by World War II’s grip on our national consciousness, even if its reality has tracked closer to the nuanced accounts of war explored by Samet’s canon of countercultural voices.
The beginning of the Afghan war saw Al Qaeda cast as an heir to Nazism, a move that elided the differences between a totalitarian state and a terrorist organization. President Bush, in his effort to justify an invasion of Iraq, branded terrorist organizations, Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” repurposing the label given to World War II’s Axis powers despite the lack of any alliance among these forces, while reprising President Reagan’s casting of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” as if a patchwork of U.S. adversaries could be defeated by rhetorical clarity. Critics of these wars were likened to “appeasers”; arguments for a more restrained foreign policy drew comparisons to Neville Chamberlain’s ill-fated summit in Munich.
Samet has taught soldiers who served in 21st-century wars, and she forces us to confront the fact that these wars were consumed as myths back home. Even as a relatively small number of Americans served, the rest of the nation participated through flag lapel pins, flyovers at football games and feel-good videos of troops returning home (often before another deployment). Media outlets such as Fox News celebrated our military prowess while ignoring its limitations and vilifying the wars’ critics. As the promised victories failed to materialize, our culture became dominated by comic book movies and our politics were overtaken by an authoritarian movement with a nativist and nostalgic appeal: “Make America Great Again.”
A big and diverse nation like the United States inevitably encompasses the complexity and contradictions of humanity. This was on display in the final days of our war in Afghanistan. As young Americans at Kabul’s airport struggled to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans who believed in the stories we told them about freedom and democracy, far more were left behind. The final known American act of violence was a drone strike that exemplified the reach of our military power but killed seven innocent children while serving no strategic purpose.
America’s victory in World War II should always be celebrated, particularly its defeat of fascism; a nation naturally seeks to embrace its best story as a source of common identity. But at a time when mythmaking and misinformation dominate swaths of our discourse, those scenes from Kabul remind us that we can only see the humanity in one another — whether it is an American soldier asked to make life-or-death decisions at that airport, or an Afghan child denied the most basic right to live — if we choose to live honestly in the world as it is.
15. The Art of Losing
Very much worth a weekend read. I just ordered her book as well. (LOOKING FOR THE GOOD WAR American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness By Elizabeth D. Samet)
The Art of Losing - The American Scholar
Paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne boarding a C-17 at the Kabul airport on August 30, 2021, marking the end of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan (American Photo Archive/Alamy)
Like English professors everywhere, I suppose, I love to teach “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle about “the art of losing.” I teach it to first-year cadets at West Point every spring, even though I have the impression that the poem’s deepest anxieties are largely lost on 18-year-olds. They tend to fixate on Bishop’s first few examples of things lost—misplaced keys and forgotten names are proof to them only of their elders’ tedious muddles—while passing over the losses that follow: the “realms,” the rivers, the continent, the beloved “you” of the final stanza. The dread of metaphysical loss is alien to them. As a result, they tend at first to miss the gradual amplification of the speaker’s insistent refrain, “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” until it becomes impossible to ignore the catastrophe of accumulated deprivation. Bishop’s alchemy turns loss into literary gain, but the mastery achieved by the poem’s end is not in any obvious way a victory. The villanelle is a form of stalemate, a testy negotiation between despair and the need to carry on. It is a blueprint for the inconclusive.
Then, too, I suspect my problem is exacerbated by the fact that I teach this poem about loss to a bunch of winners. My students are learning how to live and work within military culture—how to figure out exactly what it is—a culture that seems unable, by virtue of both temperament and circumstance, to contemplate the possibility of losing: noble sacrifice, betrayal from within or sabotage from without, yes—losing, no. I’m not sure it could be otherwise, nor do I think it would be prudent to nurture defeatist attitudes in those who are preparing to be soldiers. The stakes of war are too high, the odds of survival too low, for that. But there is a grotesque cost to imagining that every scenario is winnable or that the troubles of this world can be distilled into wins and losses, its people into winners and losers. And the failure to acknowledge that cost on the part of those institutions that bear authority for sending people to war strikes me as the height of irresponsibility.
Of course, war seems to many observers the arena in which such winnowing is easiest to do, but that’s no longer the case (if it ever really was). War, an increasingly murky activity that has its own perilous momentum, unfolds a story with an end that seems, maddeningly, to be in constant retreat. This was clearly the case in Afghanistan, where the opening gambit to destroy al-Qaeda and punish its Taliban protectors drifted, almost haphazardly, into a series of ill-fated priorities, all of which have now been abandoned in the wake of the American withdrawal from the Kabul airport, concluded at the end of August. Subsequent missteps led many in uniform and out to believe that the original mission might have had a discrete, achievable end, but the intervening years have obscured even that certainty. My colleagues and former students used to measure victory by not losing anyone in their commands; the new metric seems to be the number of people we were able to evacuate. Anything to avoid calling the whole enterprise a defeat.
Among the many revelations contained in the Afghanistan Papers, the cache of interviews and memos The Washington Post began to publish in 2019, was the fact that military and civilian officials continued for years to prosecute a war some privately acknowledged to be unwinnable. The reasons behind this apparent mendacity must have been many and various: cynicism, delusion, self-preservation, a desire for advancement, ideological zeal, perhaps even a strange kind of naïveté. But underneath them all lies what might be described as a psychological compulsion—strong in Americans but overwhelming in American military culture—to perform optimism.
“Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.” On my way to work the day after Colin Powell’s death was announced on October 19, I drove by a digital billboard tribute emblazoned with this quotation, one of his favorites. It appears at the end of his autobiography, My American Journey, as one of “Colin Powell’s Rules.” Perpetually optimistic leadership, Powell once explained to an audience at Whitworth University, can make a “force more powerful than the design of the force would suggest it is.” Americans seduced by the idea that optimism is magic can find Powell’s maxim for sale everywhere on the Web: on refrigerator magnets, T-shirts, aluminum signs, coffee cups, totes, bottle openers, even facemasks. I don’t doubt that Powell’s faith in optimism was genuine. I have heard less eloquent versions of this philosophy from countless military officers over the years. In part, it is informed by old codes of masculine honor and prowess, but it also reflects a mentality that must prepare itself to meet apparently insuperable odds. The cult of optimism makes failure seem, always, a matter of will or choice.
And as much as the military seeks refuge in its legal status as an instrument of civilian policy, don’t think for a minute that all that optimism doesn’t have policy consequences when it infuses the advice given to civilian leaders. As Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, and Adam Goldman reported in The New York Times in August, “Part of the problem, according to former officials, is that the can-do attitude of the military frequently got in the way of candid accurate assessments of how the Afghan security forces were doing. Though no one was blind to desertions or battlefield losses, American commanders given the task of training the Afghan military were reluctant to admit their efforts were failing.” On the subject of this reluctance, one friend who served in Afghanistan observed, “Do you think anyone was going to get promoted if they ‘left Afghan forces worse than they found them,’ even if it amounted to just correcting a report? My suspicion is that something like that logic played out a thousand times. We had no great battlefield loss, just death by a thousand little lies and omissions.”
The mid-20th-century cultural critic Robert Warshow illuminated American optimism from a different angle when he examined the phenomenon of the gangster film in a 1948 essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” The genre offered a tragic counterpoint to what Warshow regarded as a national commitment “to a cheerful view of life,” common to all modern egalitarian political systems. “If an American … is unhappy,” he argued, “it implies a certain reprobation of his society, and therefore … it becomes an obligation of citizenship to be cheerful; if the authorities find it necessary, the citizen may even be compelled to make a public display of his cheerfulness on important occasions.”
Warshow recognized that an anxiety lurked beneath the forced smile of American optimism: “Whatever its effectiveness as a source of consolation and a means of pressure for maintaining ‘positive’ social attitudes, this optimism is fundamentally satisfying to no one, not even to those who would be most disoriented without its support.” Warshow read the gangster film as part of “a current of opposition,” expressive of the “sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create.”
Warshow’s anatomy of the gangster picture suggests the depths of self-deception necessary to preserve American optimism. Nowhere is this need more powerful or more potentially tragic than in military culture. The Post’s series on the Afghanistan Papers accused officials of “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” I would suggest a more complicated dynamic: that some officials knew or could admit in certain circumstances that the war could not be won but felt it their duty to say otherwise—that it would have constituted a betrayal of those who had already died to conclude that they had “died in vain.” In some cases, the blindness might have been willful, but in others, I believe, it was simply a product of successful cultural indoctrination.
To the perpetual optimist, war is a deadly endurance sport that can be won if only we possess the virtue and stamina to keep on playing the game. “Winning Matters,” Army Chief of Staff James C. McConville likes to say: “We win with our People doing the right things the right way.” After all, the army’s mission is “to fight and win our Nation’s wars.” In 2019, shortly after being sworn in, McConville told the Army News Service, “When we send the United States Army somewhere, we don’t go to participate, we don’t go to try hard. We go to win. That is extremely important because there’s no second place or honorable mention in combat. … We’re a contact sport,” in which soldiers “need to make sure that they can meet the physical and mental demands.”
Analogies between sport and war have become commonplace in U.S. military culture. Americans borrowed this idea from the British. One popular expression of it can be found in Sir Henry Newbolt’s terrible 1892 poem “Vitai Lampada.” Newbolt takes us from a public-school cricket pitch to an unspecified desert of the Empire. Each situation calls for the same refrain: “Play up! play up! and play the game!” This is the kind of sensibility that turns certain descriptions of war, to borrow the military historian John Keegan’s phrase, into “jolly genre scene[s].”
It is the Duke of Wellington, the victor at the Battle of Waterloo, who is most often thought of in connection with this sentiment. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, several formulations are attributed to him, and even though they are generally considered to be apocryphal, they have unequivocal staying power. The first attribution dates from 1856, when Wellington is said to have declared on a visit to Eton, “It is here that the battle of Waterloo was won!” The sentimental musings of old Etonians have always been ripe for ridicule, and the Dictionary traces a line of critics from Matthew Arnold to George Orwell.
Arnold alluded implicitly to Wellington in “An Eton Boy,” an essay on the “harm” of English secondary schools published in 1881 in The Fortnightly Review. Among the products of these schools Arnold describes is a figure he calls the “aged Barbarian.” This hidebound, uncultured traditionalist was in his “far more amiable stage” a beautiful, exuberant Eton boy who excelled in the steeplechase or became Master of the Beagles. Should he survive into old age, this man will “mumble to us his story how the battle of Waterloo was won in the playing-fields of Eton. Alas!” Arnold laments, “Disasters have been prepared in those playing-fields as well as victories; disasters due to inadequate mental training—to want of application, knowledge, intelligence, lucidity.” During World War II, Orwell, discerning “the decay of ability in the ruling class,” pulled on the same thread: “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”
Jan Willem Pieneman’s painting of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo. The Duke of Wellington is in the center of the canvas. (Prisma Archivo/Alamy)
At West Point, the connection between sport and war is epitomized in former superintendent Douglas MacArthur’s observation: “Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds that, upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory.” I most recently saw this old saw on an academy social media account accompanying the photograph of a football player. Those who employ the analogy are oblivious to its original connections to class and empire, although I’m quite certain the aristocratically minded MacArthur well understood them.
And for those who do not find congenial the orotund sentiments of a MacArthur, there is always the earthier style of George Patton, preferably in the version to be found in the 1970 biopic, at the beginning of which George C. Scott, as Patton, appears before a giant American flag to harangue the troops in his unforgettable baritone. Some of my acquaintances remember watching the film’s opening scene during their first West Point summer. In the midst of the Vietnam War, thousands of moviegoers witnessed Scott deliver these lines:
Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war, because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.
I cannot omit a counterpoint, all the more surprising because it comes from another American proponent of sport, war, and winning, Theodore Roosevelt, who always proves to be more complicated than he seems. Despite his boyish zest for sport, cultivated during a sickly childhood, and an often-unseemly enthusiasm for war, Roosevelt did not, at least privately, confuse the two endeavors. Indeed, he expressed a certain mistrust of the primacy of sport in a 1903 letter to his son Ted, who had written urgently to report his being cut from the second squad of the Groton football team (and who would go on to a successful military career). “I am delighted to have you play football,” the president told his son. “I believe in rough, manly sports. But I do not believe in them if they degenerate into the sole end of any one’s existence.” The father continued:
I need not tell you that character counts for a great deal more than either intellect or body in winning success in life. Athletic proficiency is a mighty good servant, and like so many other good servants, a mighty bad master. Did you ever read Pliny’s letter to Trajan, in which he speaks of its being advisable to keep the Greeks absorbed in athletics, because it distracted their minds from all serious pursuits, including soldiering, and prevented their ever being dangerous to the Romans? … A man must develop his physical prowess up to a certain point; but after he has reached that point there are other things that count more. … I am glad you should play football; I am glad that you should box; I am glad that you should ride and shoot and walk and row as well as you do. I should be very sorry if you did not do these things. But don’t ever get into the frame of mind which regards these things as constituting the end to which all your energies must be devoted, or even the major portion of your energies.
This is not a Roosevelt most at West Point would immediately recognize. It is not the Roosevelt of the centennial commencement address at the military academy in 1902, in which the president chose to include a jolly genre scene with a happy ending that demonstrates the magical power of optimism. A cadet “having his holiday” from the academy had joined Roosevelt’s regiment in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. Shot in the stomach before an assault, the cadet declared, “ ‘All right, Colonel, I am going to get well.’ I did not think he was,” Roosevelt continued, “but I said, ‘All right, I am sure you will,’ and he did; he is all right now.”
“Winning Matters.” Of course it does. But what happens when you lose? And I’m not talking about losing your spot on the football squad at Groton.
West Point’s rhetorical emphasis on winning intensified during the war on terror and seems only to have increased since our engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq began increasingly to look like failures. People used to speak of pursuing excellence; now all the talk is about winning. Fostering “a winning culture” is a prominent part of the academy’s character development program. We are enjoined to help cadets learn how “to pursue excellence and win in a manner consistent with Army Values and good sportsmanship.” Pursuing excellence seems to me a far richer, more expansive (even Aristotelian) idea than winning. But the obsession with winning—especially with winning in athletics—has become all the more energetic as a strategy for not talking about losing.
Everything has become something that can be won. Devotees of the cult have long signed their emails, ended their speeches, and greeted each other with “Beat Navy!” “Beat Someone!” or “Beat Everyone!” Nor is this rhetoric confined to sporting events, where it has at least the potential to create esprit de corps. It bleeds into other realms, a reflexive coda even in those circumstances when such exhortations seem at best sophomoric, at worst inappropriate. Cadets are encouraged to do well academically, as if studying itself were a kind of sport, with the phrase “Beat the Dean!”
During the pandemic, a virus, too, has been turned into something that can be beaten the way a conventional adversary might be: “Stay Positive! Test Negative! Beat Everyone!” read one mass email I received. Another praised cadets for adhering to safety protocols by likening their situation to that of Joshua Chamberlain making his stand at Little Round Top. They were instructed to remain vigilant against a lurking enemy. “As Chamberlain did at Gettysburg,” it closed, “we must hold the line!”
Pursuing excellence seems a far richer, more expansive idea than winning. But the obsession with winning has become all the more energetic as a strategy for not talking about losing.
A great deal is eclipsed by a worldview that imagines we can always secure a win, for it confuses the ambiguities of life with the clarity of sport. Commentators have often remarked on our inclination to turn every problem into a war: the war on crime, the war on poverty, the war on cancer, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Covid-19. As the philosopher Rebecca Gordon notes, this tendency isn’t unique to the United States. But it is very strong with us, and it carries with it a host of implications, ranging from the ethical to the practical.
What licenses this rhetorical move in the first place is an understanding of war as a deadly sport that can always be played to a decisive conclusion, rather than a violent, indeterminate collision of vast and uncontrollable forces. Some wars end in draws; others in Pyrrhic victories; still others, as seems to be the case with our recently concluded expedition in Afghanistan, almost where they began, with little to show but losses: of life, treasure, reputation, and moral standing.
But almost no one is talking about that. When acquaintances ask me what my students and colleagues are saying about events in Afghanistan, I have little to report. Sometimes it almost feels as if it never happened, so deep is the silence, which runs all the way to the top.
Around the time of our nearly coincident late August departure from Afghanistan and the 20th anniversary of September 11, senior Department of Defense leaders sent the force-wide messages customary on such occasions. Billed as opportunities for “reflection,” these messages typically end up in self-congratulation. They can begin on a somber note, but they must always end in optimism. They take pride in sacrifice: “The sacrifices you’ve made,” declared one, “will be a lasting legacy of honor and commitment for all to remember.” The September 11 “attacks,” it continued, “reminded us of the true strength of our Nation and our military.” Sensitive to the fact that some “teammates” might “be struggling with the unfolding events,” it urged solidarity in a “tough time,” but it also reminded readers that they had joined “the best Army in the world.”
Another message to the force also alluded to “challenging times” before turning attention to patriotic achievement: “Together, wrapped in the cloth of our Nation, you project strength, safeguard peace, and carry compassion throughout the globe.” An emphasis on “compassion” and protection is characteristic of such letters, which tend to divert attention away from the fundamentally destructive nature of the military’s work. Declaring that “our military mission” in Afghanistan “has come to an end,” this message assured its readers that “you can hold your head high” by asserting unequivocally (and without evidence) that the military had “prevented an attack on the United States homeland.” A third missive similarly called attention to the humanitarian aspects of the military’s work: “Our service members … provided medical care, food and water, and compassion to people in need. They flew tens of thousands of people to safety, virtually around the clock. They even delivered babies.”
It is safer to abstract particular “acts of bravery and sheer determination” from the longer narratives of which they form a part. By focusing on the heroic efforts of military personnel during the evacuation itself, these messages didn’t have to address the many missteps that landed them there: “Your actions honor the sacrifice of our brothers and sisters in arms who lost their lives or were wounded in Afghanistan.” The success or failure of the larger mission becomes beside the point when the purpose of every military action is defined as honoring a previous soldier’s sacrifice.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin came the closest to admitting that something went wrong: “As we look back as a nation on two decades of combat and struggle in Afghanistan, I hope that we will do so with as much thoughtfulness and humility as we can muster. And I know that we will wish for a brighter future for the Afghan people—for all their sons, and for all their daughters.” But then came the obligatory coda: “I am proud of the part that we played in this war.”
Animated by a faith in American exceptionalism and a belief in the inherent virtue of democracy’s military might, validated by our victory in World War II, Americans will one day weave stories about Iraq and Afghanistan similar to those that have grown up around Vietnam, which some construe as a winnable war betrayed by a lack of American will, squeamishness on the part of civilian leaders, or a disloyal press. Congressional oversight hearings on the withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer have already started to shape that narrative. For example, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma seized on the revelation that the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, informed his Pentagon superiors of the need for additional troops on the ground. “Clearly,” Inhofe concluded, “President Biden didn’t listen to all the military advice.”
Explanations of failure tend to conclude that Afghanistan simply wasn’t ready for democracy. In September, Secretary Austin told Congress that despite the bravery of many Afghan soldiers, “in the end, we couldn’t provide them with the will to win. At least not all of them.” Here, too, was a celebration of the quantifiable success of the evacuation itself: Although plans had been made for the evacuation of between 70,000–80,000 people, the number of evacuees eventually exceeded 124,000. “At the height of this operation, an aircraft was taking off every 45 minutes. And not a single sortie was missed for maintenance, fuel, or logistical problems. It was the largest airlift conducted in U.S. history, and it was executed in just 17 days.” Such enumeration focuses on the local at the expense of the systemic.
A friend who served in Vietnam anatomized the winner’s tragic predicament this way:
The Army avoids talk of loss by never leaving the battlefield. The Army lost lives but never a battle. In Vietnam the Army lost its reputation but never a battle. In the last 20 years, the Army lost the strength to tell itself the truth and to tell that truth to the civilian leadership, but the Army never lost a battle. Endless military victories cannot prevent losing. They perversely prolong the fighting and magnify the loss. I fear that the Army will forever welcome the opportunity to prove its prowess and will avoid the Washington truth-telling that may—just may—prevent otherwise inevitable loss, truth-telling that puts Army leaders at far greater risk than they would ever face on the battlefield. And, of course, the Army has no medal for that kind of courage.
Fostering a “winning culture” is a prominent part of West Point’s character development program. (World Politics Archive (WPA)/Alamy)
Is this inevitably what happens to a culture consumed with winning when it is confronted by loss? Must it search for wins wherever it can? Does a sort of shock set in? I cannot help but think of the Athenians after their disastrous Sicilian Expedition, undertaken in 413 BCE during the war with Sparta. Thucydides, a participant in and a historian of that war, records that the Athenians were ignorant of the terrain as well as of the nature of the island’s inhabitants, both Hellenic migrants and (non-Greek) barbarians. They were also too ready to believe in reports of the magnificent spoils awaiting them. Thucydides notes their confused, even disingenuous motivations: “The Athenians were now bent upon invading; being ambitious in real truth of conquering the whole, although they had also the specious design of aiding their kindred and other allies in the island.”
Thucydides paints the Athenian decision to go to Sicily as a contest between an optimist, the charismatic, unscrupulous Alcibiades, and a pessimist, the experienced commander Nicias. The glory-seeking Alcibiades reassures his countrymen of the unworthiness of their prospective opponents, the Syracusans, while the dour Nicias reminds his countrymen that they have only just had “respite” from both a plague and an intense phase of the war with Sparta. Too far away to be a threat, the enemy, he explains, is likewise too numerous to be conquered.
Plutarch, a Greek writing in a Roman world 500 years later, notes that Alcibiades convinced the Athenians that Sicily was the key to expanding their empire to Carthage, Libya, and—most appealing to a city whose pride was its navy—“the seas as far as the Pillars of Hercules.” Once these conceits of glory had fired the Athenians’ imaginations, Nicias’s warnings that Alcibiades was embroiling the city in “foreign dangers and difficulties, merely with a view to his own private lucre and ambition … came to nothing.” Roused to war, the Athenians prove incapable of hearing reason. Alcibiades’s cavalier attitude sorts perfectly with their blind self-regard. And Nicias ultimately miscalculates. Thinking to dissuade his countrymen by emphasizing the expedition’s magnitude, he succeeds only in obtaining carte blanche to organize as large a force as he requires. And for his pains, he is appointed alongside Alcibiades as joint commander of the expedition.
Thucydides paints the Athenian decision to go to Sicily as a contest between an optimist, the charismatic, unscrupulous Alcibiades, and a pessimist, the experienced commander Nicias.
Before the Sicilian Expedition, Nicias’s success as a commander had been considerable. He had proved himself strategically astute and devoted to his country. In Sicily, however, he makes a series of poor decisions and exhibits a superstitious overreliance on soothsayers. The Athenian military disintegrates over the course of the expedition. Regarding the invasion as the watershed event of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides calls it “the most brilliant of successes for the Syracusans,” “the most calamitous of defeats” for Athens, and altogether “the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history.” Athens would never be the same, nor would the balance of power between it and Sparta.
A series of miscalculations leads to the complete demoralization of the Athenians. After losing a naval battle to the Syracusans, the Athenians, “defeated at sea, where defeat could never have been expected,” are “plunged deeper into bewilderment than ever.” Eventually the sailors are “so utterly overcome by their defeat as no longer to believe in the possibility of success.” They won’t even obey Nicias’s orders to reboard their ships to attempt an escape. As a result, the entire force is condemned to retreat overland.
On the march, the debilitated Athenians left behind not only the dead but also the wounded, who, according to Thucydides, cried out and clutched desperately at the retreating survivors so as not to be abandoned. Repeatedly attacked on the march by the Syracusans, an exhausted remnant of the Athenian force meets its gruesome and chaotic end at the Assinarus River. Eager to escape their attackers, the Athenians trample and drown one another in their attempts to ease their thirst at the river and then to ford it to safety. They make easy targets for the enemy, positioned atop the steep bank, and Athenian bodies ultimately lie in heaps in the streambed.
By the end of this expedition, the Athenians no longer know who they are; they began it by failing to understand whom they were fighting. For the first time, the people they were trying to subdue did not want what they were selling—namely, Athenian democracy as opposed to Spartan oligarchy. “These were the only cities that they had yet encountered, similar to their own in character, under democracies like themselves, which,” Thucydides explains, “they had been unable to divide and bring them over by holding out the prospect of changes in their governments.”
When I read this passage recently, I could not help but think of something the friend who served in Afghanistan shared with me. He told me about an insult frequently thrown around by Americans there: “You can’t buy an Afghan,” it ran, “but you can rent one.” This insult about Afghan ethics—about the fickleness of their loyalties—entirely missed the point while also ignoring our own corruption in trying to buy loyalty. “Why should it be the case,” my friend asked, “that the Afghans should want what we were selling in the first place? Why should we condemn them for refusing a bargain they never asked for?”
There is a coda to the tragedy of the Sicilian Expedition. It may not be factual, but it has the undeniable virtue of human interest. The survivors of the Athenians’ calamitous retreat were penned in stone quarries by the victorious Syracusans. Exposed to the elements, forced to subsist on a daily ration of half a pint of water and a pint of grain, the Athenians had to endure the stench of the piled-up bodies of those who succumbed. It is Plutarch, trying to come to terms with Athens’s transformation from republic to deluded empire, who appends the coda. He records that some Athenians were sold into slavery—branded, too, with the image of a horse on their foreheads—yet some
were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose poetry, it appears, was in request among the Sicilians more than among any of the settlers out of Greece. And when any travelers arrived that could tell them some passage, or give them any specimen of his verses, they were delighted to be able to communicate them to one another.
It is just like Plutarch to provide us with this piece of information—and it is the promise of such gems that keeps a literature professor reading him so enthusiastically—but, also characteristically, he doesn’t tell us what to do with it, what to make of the fact that the enemy’s love of Greek poetry is the means to Athenian salvation:
Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how that some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems, and others, when straggling after the fight, had been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics.
Absent a larger point, it is difficult to explain Plutarch’s digression. The tale has no organic significance to the narrative beyond highlighting a symptomatic difference between the Athenians and those peoples they would swallow up. In political as well as military disarray by the time of the Sicilian Expedition, the Athenians have allowed ambition to lead them far away from themselves and from the potentially instructive mirror of their own cultural achievements, while their enemies manifest at once military superiority and sophisticated literary taste. Plutarch wants his reader to know that it was to the writer of tragedies, the exiled Euripides—and not to the city, by then engulfed in its own tragedy—that the Athenian survivors owed their eventual repatriation.
The Sicilian Expedition is on my mind not because it provides a perfect analogy to Afghanistan—it emphatically does not—but because it anatomizes a psychology of loss. The narratives of Plutarch and Thucydides dramatize the shock of defeat and its potential for producing not only a military but also a social, cultural, and political unraveling. When I read them now, in the wake of our losses (different in degree and kind), I cannot help but wonder whether there is some middle course between the paralysis of the Athenian forces, on the one hand, and on the other the present-day insistence on salvaging wins from the wreckage.
An 1890 print depicting “The Retreat of the Athenians from Syracuse,” in “the most calamitous of defeats” for Athens (The Print Collector/Alamy)
The Sicilian Expedition is also on my mind because I’ve been reading it with cadets in a seminar. As it happens, this class, a survey of ancient to early modern literature organized around the idea of barbarians and borderlands, is all about loss. The collisions it creates for me almost daily between the ancient world and our own are so many and so various that I have felt exceedingly self-conscious all semester because I don’t normally gear my teaching to current events, and I have always rejected choosing texts solely for their direct relevance to the news as a shortsighted strategy that does not play to my discipline’s strengths. Early last spring, when I was designing this course, I didn’t know what the summer would bring.
I have long been aware of the pedagogical (to say nothing of the political) limits of analogy. When things are going well, we like to think we have outstripped the past. But analogies always return with a vengeance in eras of change and upheaval. And nothing attracts the analogists like a crisis: Afghanistan is like Vietnam, war is like a sport. Analogy is a natural way to connect our own particular experience to someone else’s. But analogies are slippery, and the flaw is that such tests often yield a false positive for universals. We can hardly avoid drawing analogies; it seems to be part of our hardwiring. Yet we can be on our guard against being misled by them. The ancients themselves depended on the process of reasoning through analogy to make sense of their universe, but they also recognized its limitations. Plutarch, whose own biographies were predicated on the idea of analogy—of parallel Greek and Roman lives—acknowledged the ease with which historians misconstrue accidental resemblance as evidence of meaningful “design.”
And so I understand the texts I selected—Thucydides, Plutarch, Sappho, and Virgil among them—as presenting a world full not of analogies but of imperfect parallels, which, when read in a thoughtful rather than a superstitious way, show us to ourselves in an unfamiliar mirror if only we have the courage to look. It is the Aeneid, more than any of these texts, that haunts me. I first worked to understand this poem at school in the original Latin, and while my translation skills have deteriorated over the years, my connection to the poem has only intensified.
I have never found it at once so difficult and seductive as I have on this encounter because it discloses with a clarity unmatched by anything I have ever read what it means to lose. Throughout much of the poem, the Trojans’ labors are almost entirely profitless. Despite occasional infusions of intelligence and treasure from sources human and divine, the Trojan enterprise operates at a nearly constant loss. Aeneas himself must lose everything—honor, family, friends, an entire city and with it his cultural identity—before he can gain an empire for his descendants. In the end, it is by no means clear to me that this victory in prospect offers anything like adequate compensation.
Winning is inextricable from losing. My students have been particularly struck with Aeneas’s transformation in the second half of the poem from a dutiful, rather cool and restrained protagonist to an enraged berserker who adorns his chariot with the decapitated heads of his enemies. Virgil’s feat, as the critic David Quint has eloquently argued, is to turn losers into winners. But the emblem of Aeneas’s victory is a sword plunged “in fury” into the chest of his enemy, Turnus, and the poem’s last line is devoted to the indignant flight of Turnus’s soul from his groaning body to “the gloom below.”
Aeneas is harried throughout by the supernatural wrath of Juno, who while unable to derail destiny does her utmost to delay its fulfillment and to increase its price. He is confronted repeatedly with tantalizing prophecies that are misread, partially understood, or somehow true in unanticipated ways. Robert Fitzgerald, whose translation we have been reading, repeatedly uses the word baffling to describe the world in which Aeneas operates.
I find my world baffling just now, and periodically, prompted by one ancient text or another, I have tried to discuss that fact with my students. But they do not—or cannot—immediately hear all those resonances that strike me so profoundly. Each day in the classroom this semester, after a year of remote teaching, I have had to navigate an alarming silence about all that has recently transpired. The military establishment writ large has signaled its reluctance to speak of it. The cadets, for their part, certainly have questions and concerns, but some seem reluctant to ask their instructors, many of whom have spent so much of their careers engaged in this war, while my colleagues, as several have confirmed, need to talk about it but feel constrained and thus do so privately, almost surreptitiously, absent institutional support or context for such discussions. The consequences of not talking about what has just happened—of making it seem less like a loss and more like the triumph of military virtues over circumstance—strike me as grave.
One friend who remembers watching the opening of Patton when he first arrived at West Point as a new cadet also screened Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers together with the entire corps in the early 2000s in the largest auditorium on post. Black Hawk Down in particular, he notes, “fed something in cadets who were struggling to imagine what their futures might look like. Of course, the point of making us watch films that dramatized these tactical and strategic losses was that they weren’t actually losses,” he adds.
They sublimated loss into moral victory, romanticizing the Shakespearean band-of-brothers mythology. … It’s a point that eluded many of us for a long time (some still haven’t caught on). It’s a very insidious—and sentimental—form of indoctrination. I didn’t fully apprehend the extent to which it had captured my imagination until my third deployment, when I finally saw that “mythology” for what it always was, and I discovered that this consoling narrative had been a fiction all along. It’s why I’m so skeptical of the rhetoric surrounding the Afghanistan withdrawal. So dangerous. It’s not hyperbole to say that it almost destroyed me—was a greater trauma than any of the death or violence I encountered.
Few of us have the poet’s ability to reckon with the loss that inevitably surrounds us. We live now amid even greater loss than usual—losses tangible and intangible; losses permanent and temporary, which will nevertheless leave enduring traces; losses occasioned by a pandemic; losses brought about by two decades of bootless warfare. And so when I teach Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” again in the spring to a roomful of the military’s newest members, it will be with a consciousness of the need to grapple with loss and our almost total incapacity to do so. We are confronted with an opportunity to speak honestly and openly about the truth that there are things that cannot be won, losses that cannot be undone by calling them victories. And in the process, maybe we can reduce the odds of finding ourselves once again in this particular game, in which nothing but poetry can help us find our way home.
The editorial views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.
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16. Opinion | China is testing the West. We shouldn’t back down.
Opinion | China is testing the West. We shouldn’t back down.
In early October, the Chinese military launched its most threatening moves against Taiwan to date, spreading panic there. But the real target of Beijing’s ire that week was not Taiwan, but rather the United States and the five other allied navies that were conducting unprecedented joint exercises in nearby waters. The strategic situation in the western Pacific is changing fast as Beijing tries to assert its dominance over the region and define the terms of our engagement. We can’t let China bully us into not responding.
Between Oct. 1 and 4, China’s air force flew nearly 150 war planes into Taiwan’s airspace; the 56 fighters, bombers and submarine hunters that flew on Oct. 4 were the largest ever one-day contingent sent near the island. The Biden administration condemned China’s actions, calling them “provocative” and “destabilizing” and warning that they ”undermine[d] regional peace and stability.” But not wanting to exacerbate an already tense situation, the Biden administration didn’t disclose that Beijing’s moves were very likely a response to the largest ever U.S.-led joint naval drills happening in the nearby Philippine Sea at the same time.
Two U.S. naval carrier strike groups, one British carrier group, three large Japanese ships and naval forces from Canada, New Zealand and the Netherlands had convened on the region in a massive show of force. The exercises were meant to send a signal of resolve, telling China firmly but not publicly that the United States and its allies intend to preserve open freedom of movement in areas of the Pacific Ocean that Beijing claims as its own. Their proximity to Taiwan was sure to get Beijing’s attention.
The exercises were not even announced until several days later. That’s because the United States and its partners were trying to strike a delicate diplomatic balance: sending a clear signal to China without sparking a public kerfuffle. But rather than expressing its opposition to the exercises quietly, the Chinese government opted for a severe and very public reaction, causing a crisis.
In the moment, there was no direct communication between the two sides, owing to the general deterioration of U.S.-China military relations. So China and the West were talking to each other with ships and warplanes, leaving both sides unsure how their messages were coming through.
“This clearly was aimed to send a message, and clearly we think the timing wasn’t coincidental," a senior defense officials told me about the Chinese air force flights near Taiwan. “They are definitely flexing, to send a strong signal to Western powers to stay out of the way.”
Taiwan heard Beijing’s message loud and clear – and responded with equal clarity. The Taiwanese defense forces scrambled planes to respond to the Chinese air force’s aggression. Taiwan’s leaders increased their calls for the international community to rally around a defense of Taiwan’s sovereignty amid the increasing threat from China.
Inside the U.S. government, officials differed about how dangerous the situation in the Pacific became that week. They noted that U.S. intelligence cannot confirm exactly why Beijing responded to the joint exercises so forcefully. But all agreed that the two events were linked and that both sides are trying to establish new positions in a rapidly changing security environment without clear lines of communication — which could be dangerous.
Many China-watchers inside and outside the U.S. government believe that Beijing, by overreacting to moves such as the joint exercises, is trying to pressure us to do exactly nothing as it strives to assert its dominance over the region. China wants to encourage fears among some in the West who believe that standing up to Beijing will inevitably lead to conflict.
“We need to be careful not to let the Chinese determine our actions or have a veto over what we do to maintain stability in the region,” said Michael R. Auslin, distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution. “That would simply create more space for them to continue shifting the balance of power in their favor.”
China is rehearsing an invasion of Taiwan and training its troops to attack U.S. aircraft carriers, but it throws a tantrum when the United States increases the scope of joint naval operations in return. We must not play into that tactic.
The joint exercises show that the United States is not alone in its concern about China’s efforts to change the balance of power in Asia. Our allies are at a point where they know much more needs to be done to respond to China’s military expansion in the region. But they still are worrying too much about ruffling Beijing’s feathers.
The best way to demonstrate to China that tantrums and bullying won’t work is to continue apace with our efforts to build up our alliances and capability to keep the region free — including readiness to come to Taiwan’s defense, if necessary. The risk of escalation is real, but we can’t let that paralyze us. In the face of aggression, inaction is the most dangerous course of all.
17. Who’s more likely to win Myanmar’s raging civil war?
And what is the international community going to do?
Excerpts:
Against this dangerously fluid backdrop, Myanmar’s beleaguered coup regime has every interest in rapidly exploiting those advantages it still enjoys. Over the dry season months through May 2022, army commanders can be expected to throw the full weight of their forces against PDFs with a focus on Sagaing where the armed revolt is most advanced.
Failure to contain it risks exacerbating vulnerabilities that later in 2022 could yet tip a precarious strategic balance sharply against the Tatmadaw with consequences that are difficult to predict.
Who’s more likely to win Myanmar’s raging civil war?
2022 will bring more clarity to whether the Tatmadaw or PDFs will prevail in an escalating struggle viewed by both as existential
BANGKOK – As consequential as was 1948, the year of Myanmar’s independence from colonial tutelage, 2021 and its popular revolt against military rule has marked a second critical watershed in the nation’s modern history
But at the end of a tumultuous year, the future of a struggle that has plunged the country into bloodshed pitting popular democratic forces against an unblinking military regime hangs in a precarious balance.
In recent months, journalistic shorthand has typically described the current conflict as a “stalemate.” The reality is more fluid nut given the wide geography of the Myanmar heartland and a stark lack of independent reporting, it is still impossible to define the trajectory of the war’s material and psychological forces with confidence.
The key strengths and weaknesses of the central protagonists – both dominated by Myanmar’s majority ethnic Bamar – have though emerged clearly enough. And the year ahead will almost certainly bring clarity to the overarching question of which side is likely to prevail in a struggle viewed by both as existential and which outside mediation is highly unlikely to mitigate let alone resolve.
On one side of the divide is a plethora of People’s Defense Forces (PDFs), which in April emerged from the harsh suppression of mainly peaceful anti-coup protests. In the months that followed, they proliferated on a wave of popular anger over the military’s harsh and often lethal clampdown and attempt to reassert its stranglehold on national politics.
There were at one point at least 150-200 separate PDFs claiming to operate across virtually all major townships of central Myanmar as well as in some ethnic minority regions. Reorganization and attrition since mid-year have since reduced that number to perhaps 50 apparently reasonably well-established groups.
Their resistance campaign has brought the country to its knees. Daily targeted killings of military-appointed officials and suspected collaborators by PDF gunmen that have escalated to drive-by attacks on military bases and police stations have crippled local government in many parts of the country.
The ubiquitous use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that initially targeted government offices and troop convoys has meanwhile broadened to hit infrastructure targets such as railways, bridges, and Tatmadaw-owned mobile phone transmission towers.
Members of the Karenni People Defense Force (KPDF) taking part in military training at their camp near Demoso in Kayah state, July 7, 2021. Photo: AFP / Stringer
The northwestern region of Sagaing has emerged as the epicenter of current hostilities. A rural backwater where longstanding support for the ousted National League of Democracy (NLD) government of Aung San Suu Kyi and bitter grassroots opposition to the coup runs deep, Sagaing and neighboring townships of Magway Region have seen violent unrest escalate into an organized PDF insurgency that has clearly alarmed the Tatmadaw command.
Since early November, an ongoing military offensive dubbed “Alaung Min Taya” has involved military sweeps, raids backed by airstrikes and heliborne assault operations, but has failed conspicuously to quell resistance.
Nevertheless, after nine months of conflict that has also swept Chin state on the western border with India and Kayah in the east abutting Thailand while roiling major urban centers across the nation, it is clear that notwithstanding overwhelming popular support the PDFs face two looming challenges.
The first is sufficient access to modern weaponry. Since April, many groups have supplemented traditional hunting rifles with automatic weapons purchased from sympathetic ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) based in Myanmar’s rugged borderlands.
Not least has been the 10,000-strong Kachin Independence Army (KIA), which in northern Kachin state manufactures its own small arms and has provided assistance to some PDFs in Sagaing. In the east, ethnic Karen and Karenni EAOs have channeled supplies smuggled in from Thailand.
But PDF attacks on the military remain largely hit-and-run affairs with larger operations constrained by an ongoing lack of support weaponry – the machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and mortars needed to overrun army outposts and seize more weaponry and ammunition.
Makeshift rocket launchers and mortars manufactured by some enterprising groups since October highlight rather than solve the problem. Even the use of IEDs, the one weapon that has become a PDF hallmark, appears to be treading water tactically and technically.
With most devices apparently based on low-yield black-powder (potassium nitrate and sulfur-based), there has been a curious failure to develop harder-hitting IEDs, particularly devices composed of easily accessible ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO), which Malay-Muslim insurgents in neighboring Thailand have deployed to considerable effect, not least when configured as car-bombs.
The PDFs’ second critical requirement is coordination and the strategy needed to direct it. Since the middle of the year, numerous township-based groups have forged spontaneous links with their neighbors. But broader operational alliances that could exert a strategic impact within or between regions are still embryonic where they exist at all.
Moving resistance to a higher level will almost certainly hinge on the capacity of the anti-junta resistance’s shadow administration, the National Unity Government (NUG), both to reinforce its relationships with local PDFs and to provide them with strategic direction, funds and, where possible, munitions. Failure to do so risks PDFs being isolated and reduced piecemeal in systematic and targeted Tatmadaw suppression drives.
Protesters hold posters in support of the National Unity Government (NUG) during a demonstration against the military coup on ‘Global Myanmar Spring Revolution Day’ in Taunggyi, Shan state, May 2, 2021. Photo: AFP / Stringer
Since September when it declared a “people’s defensive war” on the military regime, the NUG has won the allegiance of many PDFs, and in Yangon at least, supported coordinated attacks bringing together key PDF cells under a NUG banner. Whether those efforts can keep pace with waves of intelligence-driven raids and arrests by the security forces in the country’s largest city is not clear.
On the other side of Myanmar’s divide is a Tatmadaw leviathan viewed by many policymakers in regional capitals and beyond as simply too big to fail. Its organization, cohesion, resources and centrality to the modern, post-colonial state appear to dictate that the military will continue by default to dominate an ethnically and politically fractious national stage.
In short, Myanmar without the Tatmadaw ruling caste is inconceivable. There are undeniably solid grounds for such a perspective and major powers, not least India and China, have largely predicated their policy towards the Myanmar crisis on this basis.
But as the military ratchets up its war effort, it also confronts critical vulnerabilities that at best will severely tax its capabilities, and at worst could push it towards fragmentation and conceivably even collapse.
The first is a manpower crisis. A volunteer rather than conscript force, the Tatmadaw has never publicized its strength, but in media reporting, it is usually – and uncritically – described as a force of between 350,000 and 400,000 personnel. Calculated on the basis of an army force structure at full strength and including the air force and navy, such estimates are dangerously misleading.
Since a headlong expansion of the army’s order-of-battle in the 1990s, under-manning has been endemic with a typical infantry battalion numbering fewer than 200 troops and often as few as 100 – as against the 600-700 in a typical modern military. Problems of forced recruitment and recruitment of teenage “child soldiers” have been pervasive and widely recognized.
As a veritable state within a state, the Tatmadaw has also grown a long and bloated tail of administrative, technical, medical, educational, judicial, commercial, industrial and agricultural units that add little or nothing to its counterinsurgency capabilities.
Critical analysis of its structure suggests that as a boots-on-the-ground fighting force the army today fields significantly fewer than 100,000 troops divided roughly between regional commands and a centrally commanded praetorian intervention force of ten Light Infantry Divisions (LIDs), the tip of the Tatmadaw spear. A largely para-military police force of questionable utility in offensive combat operations adds perhaps a further 80,000 men.
Even before the coup, this force was already severely overstretched confronting a patchwork of ethnic rebel pocket-armies – Rakhine, Kachin, Karen, Shan and Wa – scattered around the borderlands. This year, turmoil escalating into insurgency across the national heartland has dramatically compounded the pressure.
Arakan Army soldiers take aim from an undisclosed location in Myanmar. Photo: Arakan Army Video
As a result, Naypyidaw’s command has drafted engineering units and air force personnel into static urban security duties; has recalled retired servicemen; and has raised a new and mostly untrained and undisciplined plain-clothes civilian militia force. In an early December move that strikingly illustrated the extent of the crisis, the military mandated small-arms training for the teen-aged children and wives of serving personnel.
The Tatmadaw’s second major liability turns on morale. Anecdotal evidence suggests that at the end of 2021 army morale might best be described as “uncertain” – somewhere between “brittle” at the negative of the spectrum and “robust” at the positive end. In the field, it is generally sustained by superior numbers and firepower in clashes with a guerrilla enemy still relying on hit-and-run attacks.
But daily IED blasts and shootings targeting troop movements and guard posts appear to have induced a corrosive sense of siege. Among less experienced units facing ambushes in Sagaing that mood has been reflected in increasing calls for close air support – which is seldom available.
Equally, recent reports of officers in rear-echelon staff posts paying significant bribes in US currency to avoid transfer to field units hardly suggest combat confidence.
Exacerbating strains on morale is the military’s third liability – legitimacy as a national institution that has essentially evaporated since the coup. Aside from the impact of popular hatred and disdain on the Tatmadaw’s collective psyche, the collapse of its political legitimacy raises a major question mark over the ruling State Administration Council’s plans for elections in August 2023.
Reiterated by commander-in-chief and lead coup-maker Senior General Min Aung Hlaing as recently as December, this roadmap conditional on domestic stability appears increasingly disconnected from the chaotic polarization that is Myanmar’s current reality.
In the short term through the coming dry season, Tatmadaw liabilities will likely prove manageable. In the longer term – the second half of 2022 and beyond – they risk becoming serious, even critical, vulnerabilities in one or both of two scenarios, neither of which is a certainty.
The first would require the PDF resistance to succeed in gradually accessing improved weaponry and using it in pursuit of strategic objectives aimed at further extending and bleeding already overstretched security forces.
The second would involve an escalation or renewed eruption of conflict with ethnic armed organizations, compounding the operational and psychological pressures on the military.
Myanmar soldiers on the march amid an anti-coup protest. Image: Getty via AFP / Hkun Lat
Escalating hostilities with ethnic rebels pose a real threat in at least three regions. One is northeastern Kokang, a remote enclave on the Chinese border in northern Shan state where since early November local insurgents have already tied down elements of at least two Tatmadaw LIDs in blistering battles that have reportedly involved heavy casualties and required repeated close air support.
The second is along the eastern border with Thailand where in recent days Tatmadaw efforts to target PDF sanctuaries and training bases have triggered extended clashes with the army’s oldest foe, the Karen National Union (KNU), driving a new wave of refugees into Thailand.
Finally, and potentially most critically, a year-long ceasefire between the Tatmadaw and the powerful ethno-nationalist Arakan Army (AA) in Rakhine state on the strategic western seaboard began to fray in November and December amid threats and tensions.
Any renewal of major hostilities with the AA would confront the military with a stark choice between diverting at least two LIDs from other fronts or risk losing what little effective control it retains over the state.
Against this dangerously fluid backdrop, Myanmar’s beleaguered coup regime has every interest in rapidly exploiting those advantages it still enjoys. Over the dry season months through May 2022, army commanders can be expected to throw the full weight of their forces against PDFs with a focus on Sagaing where the armed revolt is most advanced.
Failure to contain it risks exacerbating vulnerabilities that later in 2022 could yet tip a precarious strategic balance sharply against the Tatmadaw with consequences that are difficult to predict.
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.
