Mark Mitchell is stepping down as the acting assistant defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, a position he has held since late June, a defense official confirmed on Tuesday.
No information was immediately available about why Mitchell decided to resign. His last day will be Nov. 1 and he will be replaced by Thomas Alexander, who is currently leading the Defense Department's counternarcotics efforts, the defense official told Task & Purpose.
Mitchell assumed the role as the Pentagon's top special operations official after his predecessor
Owen West resigned on June 22 to spend more time with his family. West was in the job for just over a year and six months.
An experienced Army special operator, Mitchell was one of the first service members who deployed to Afghanistan in 2001, where he received the first Distinguished Service Cross awarded during the post 9/11 wars for his heroism during the Battle of Qala-I Jangi in Mazar-e Sharif from Nov. 25-28, 2001.
"Major Mitchell ensured the freedom of one American and the posthumous repatriation of another,"
according to his award citation, which is posted on the Military Times Hall of Valor website. "His unparalleled courage under fire, decisive leadership and personal sacrifice were directly responsible for the success of the rescue operation and were further instrumental in ensuring the city of Mazar-e-Sharif did not fall back in the hands of the Taliban."
Mitchell went on to simultaneously command 5th Special Forces Group and a joint special operations task force in Iraq in 2010-2011, his official biography says. He later served on President Barack Obama's national security council, where he oversaw a review of hostage policy that led to significant changes.
In December 2018, Mitchell said in an interview for West Point's Combating Terrorism Center that both military and civilian leaders believed that deploying special operations forces was a catch-all solution to just about every problem.
"Not every hard problem has a good SOF solution,"
Mitchell told Brian Dodwell. "Special Operations, while they are an important part of achieving our national security objectives, can very rarely be the sole solution."
2. Eight-pound part falls from special ops aircraft and lands at US air base on Okinawa
An MC-130J Commando II, assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Group, taxis at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, in June 2017.
GREG ERWIN/U.S. AIR FORCE
By MATTHEW M. BURKE AND HANA KUSUMOTO | STARS AND STRIPES
Published: October 22, 2019
CAMP FOSTER, Okinawa - An 8-pound aircraft part that fell off a special operations MC-130 has been found on a U.S. military installation, Air Force officials said Tuesday.
The part, described as a torque tube from the landing gear, was missing during an aircraft inspection Friday morning at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan's Mainichi newspaper reported. Mainichi cited officials from the Okinawa Defense Bureau, which represents Japan's Defense Ministry on the island.
The part was later found on a U.S. airfield, believed to be Kadena, the paper said. It remains unclear when the part was located. No injuries were reported.
A torque tube is part of the aircraft's main landing gear, the newspaper reported. It is believed the 35-inch-long by 3-inch-wide part fell off during takeoff or landing.
Kadena's 18th Wing confirmed the incident Tuesday but referred questions to the 353rd Special Operations Group, which did not immediately respond to emails seeking information or comment.
"On Friday, Oct 18th, the 353rd Special Operations Group notified US Forces Japan that an object dropped off an MC-130 most likely over a US-controlled airfield or water," said the wing statement Tuesday. "As of [Monday] afternoon, the 353rd SOG reports the part has been recovered from a US-controlled airfield."
After the part was discovered missing, the 353rd Special Operations Group notified U.S. Forces Japan, which in turn notified the U.S. Embassy, which informed the Japanese government, Mainichi reported. Okinawa prefectural officials found out about the incident from the Japanese government Friday night and informed the media Monday afternoon.
Spokespeople from the Okinawa prefectural offices and defense bureau were not available to comment Tuesday because of a Japanese holiday.
Several incidents in recent years of parts falling from U.S. aircraft on or around Japan's southern island prefecture have drawn condemnation from residents and local officials.
On Aug. 27, a Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter lost a cabin window over open water off the Okinawa coast, U.S. military officials reported at the time. No injuries or property damage was reported.
In December 2017, a 3-foot-by-3-foot window fell from a Super Stallion based at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma and landed on an elementary school sports field near the base fence line. More than 50 schoolchildren were playing nearby at the time.
3. Nerd Revolution: Using Data, Not Bullets, To Defeat ISIS
Interesting story from the Philippines.
As an aside, I was listening to a young millennial from Hong Kong yesterday talking about data. He who has access to and controls the data, wins. When we first deployed to Mindanao and Baslian in 2001-2002 the first thing our teams did was manually collect data throughout the area using a 67 question checklist. It was manually collected and manually analyzed and used to inform priorities of effort and resources. I wish we had the advanced techniques for data collection and analysis that are available today.
Excerpts:
These programs worked well. But they were successful because we had good data. Look, I get it: this is usually the point in the story when people roll their eyes. "Data" doesn't make a great war cry or recruiting pitch. You're not going to get people to sit up straighter in their seats by talking about surveys. But they ought to-because it's the only viable, long-term way for the US and her allies to win the global war on terrorism. Absent better-informed decisions, we will always be playing a game of whack-a-mole with terrorist organizations-hitting them hard from time to time, only to have them pop back up whenever they please.
Additionally, technology gives us a leg up we've never had before. As I was transitioning out of the military, I did a two-year stint with a Silicon Valley tech company that focuses on data gathering. And it's the tools and techniques I learned there that helped me figure out that you can talk to 12,000 people in [time] and then figure out exactly what they need. It's because of technology that we could get good data and it's because of good data that we could make an actual difference.
After just eight months of this work, ISEA's influence disappeared from this community. The Philippine Army had killed Abu Dar but his group lived on, weakened, but still a threat and relocating to yet another far flung municipality. I've seen with my own eyes and hands how he and terrorists like him can be defeated. And the crux of the strategy isn't bullets or bombs or better munitions-it's getting as rigorous about how we collect information in these areas as we are about how we deploy US service-members to them. Data and the right projects can defeat ISIS and we need to make these efforts in the vulnerable parts of the world a priority before it's too late.
Nerd Revolution: Using Data, Not Bullets, To Defeat ISIS
The US withdrawal from Syria has led the media to start paying attention again to a subject they had all but abandoned: the terrorist group ISIS.
A few years ago, you couldn't turn on the news without seeing the black flag of ISIS rising above a low-slung building in a far-off place. Then US domestic politics exploded, Russia and China stole all the column inches, and the pundits decided ISIS was yesterday's news. With no large-scale terrorist attacks on Western targets in the headlines, people began to ignore them.
The black flag of the Islamic State raised over the Butig municipal hall, Lanao del Sur, Philippines in early 2017.
For those of us who served in the Global War on Terrorism, we knew it was only a matter of time before ISIS was back on our front pages. Because those of us who have been in combat know the limits of military force and we know all too well, that one drone strike here or one successful raid there doesn't end a terrorist movement. Terrorists simply slink away, lick their wounds, and regroup. They have the one thing we don't: the time to wait for US forces and their allies out until our public or our leaders decide they've had enough.
I've seen this firsthand. I was deployed to the Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) in 2009-my fellow soldiers and I were tasked with helping the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) track and neutralize terrorists, while building stability in communities. We were after a high-value targets like Isnilon Hapilon, who we never found. He took refuge in the hinterlands of the Philippines and in the communities there protected him. Ten years after my deployment, he reappeared as the head of the Islamic State in East Asia (ISEA). He had time, we did not.
Hapilon's re-emergence on the scene drove me crazy. What had the men I served with died for if this guy could just go into the wilderness and stroll back later to ascend his throne? What had we all suffered for if a high-level terrorist leader could just decide to put his fight on hold for a while, until the US military pulled up stakes?
I'm not the only one who has experienced this frustration. Almost everyone I know who has worn a uniform has at least one moment during their service when they see the utter futility of fighting terrorists with conventional warfare. Sometimes it's a terrorist leader you can't kill. Sometimes it's watching the guys you were shooting at shaking hands and snapping photos with politicians just a few months later. Sometimes it's seeing local warlords get rich because of US "involvement" in a region. Most of the time, you laugh and move on-it's just a macabre part of military life. The military makes you superb at doing pointless work and doing it with a smile.
But Hapilon's comeback tour as a terrorist leader was different for me.
For one thing, it was personal: I hated that the guys I served in the Philippines with died in vain. For another, it was odd. Hapilon was leading tribes that despised each other. How could that be? How had these far-flung groups-none of which swore allegiance to a single ISIS caliphate-suddenly managed to unite around one guy who hadn't been on the scene in a long time?
For our purposes, I'll give you the short answer: while Hapilon was waiting us out, he tapped into a big group of frustrated young men, some of whom had been radicalized while studying in the Middle East and Indonesia. They came back ready to recruit, and the communities they recruited from were poor and vulnerable. Because the US and others weren't paying attention anymore, Hapilon and his acolytes could teach radical Islamism in schools far from city centers. They could convince bored, out-of-work young men that they needed to join their cause. And they could promise pay and purpose to people who had little of both.
The Filipino military tried to fight him with some small successes. But he and his cohort just melted back into the jungles. I know this because I was there. I was leading an NGO that does work around the world in vulnerable communities. And because I was a glutton for punishment, I wanted to finish the business I had started in this region when I wore a uniform. This time, I came in civilian clothes, with a small group trying to figure out how to defeat Hapilon and end ISIS influence in the region.
The biggest lesson I've learned in my transition from the military to civilian aid and resiliency work is this: it's very hard to talk to and understand people when you have a rifle in your hands. Most people who serve in the US military mean to do right by the communities they deploy to but we're always behind the eight ball. People are so suspicious of the uniforms and the guns. It's rare that you get to the actual root cause of anything and by the time you get close, your deployment is done and you're going home.
Want to know what happens when you listen to communities? You learn things. For instance, I learned that the communities that Hapilson and ISEA had taken hold of didn't want him there. They weren't radical Islamists. They didn't like their young men hanging out with his forces. They didn't particularly agree with what was being taught in his schools. But they did like the money he doled out, and the young men in the area liked the fact that he gave them something to do and a message to rally around. Their farms had failed and the government didn't make an effort to reach out to the far flung communities where ISIS had sought safe haven. They were young men without an identity or a future, and because they, like all young men, want to be viable mates one day, they styled themselves as terrorists. Better to tell a great story to a future mate-or at least, a better story than saying you were an out-of-work farmhand.
My organization does extensive survey work in these remote areas to understand problems at the root level, to better address them with our projects. We do a lot of numbers-crunching, and more importantly, we talk to huge groups of people and get qualitative information. We spoke to over 12,000 people in this region over the past few years, face-to-face, person-by-person, in their communities that often lack cellular connectivity. By the end, we had a pretty good plan of attack. If we could fix the livelihoods and governance issues in the community, bring in some high-quality rice, and get a teacher back so the boys could call themselves students, a lot of the appeal of ISEA would disappear. While Hapilon was killed a few months prior, his successor, Abu Dar, had taken up safe haven in Pagayawan, recruiting young men to his cause, thinking that like always, no one would pursue him into the safe haven and give his recruitment targets an alternative. He was incorrect.
It wasn't easy. We had to scrape, borrow, beg and steal. We had some good partners in the Filipino military, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the US Civil-Military Support Element (CMSE) led by Angela Smith, and an NGO called the Spirit of America. Together, we got money, protection, rice and other necessary goods. Humanitarian assistance distributions are always tougher than they appear. You can't just show up to a place and give aid away. No security? You'll cause a riot or lose your own people. No beneficiary registration? You'll give the aid out to the wrong people. No local government present? You could undermine the legitimacy of the groups that will be working in this community years after you're gone.
But we knew all this and we planned ahead. We also didn't just hand stuff out. We worked with the local leadership to build a cooperative to manage the various projects and govern the water use (now flowing because of new water pump provided by the CMSE through Spirit of America), and we brought pipes and reservoirs so they could store for the future. That had an important secondary benefit: the community was learning how to work together toward a common purpose. They were building strength and self-sufficiency. They were in charge-not us. Many of use had done water projects all over the world, but those wells had failed to impact the stability of the local community, often because it created another resource to fight over. This water project in Padas, Pagayawan, Philippines was different. It was a governance project, that just happened to supply water. And through that governance, the community learned to work together again.
Impl. Project local handing out humanitarian aid to families displaced by fighting with the Islamic State in Padas, Philippines.
These programs worked well. But they were successful because we had good data. Look, I get it: this is usually the point in the story when people roll their eyes. "Data" doesn't make a great war cry or recruiting pitch. You're not going to get people to sit up straighter in their seats by talking about surveys. But they ought to-because it's the only viable, long-term way for the US and her allies to win the global war on terrorism. Absent better-informed decisions, we will always be playing a game of whack-a-mole with terrorist organizations-hitting them hard from time to time, only to have them pop back up whenever they please.
Additionally, technology gives us a leg up we've never had before. As I was transitioning out of the military, I did a two-year stint with a Silicon Valley tech company that focuses on data gathering. And it's the tools and techniques I learned there that helped me figure out that you can talk to 12,000 people in [time] and then figure out exactly what they need. It's because of technology that we could get good data and it's because of good data that we could make an actual difference.
After just eight months of this work, ISEA's influence disappeared from this community. The Philippine Army had killed Abu Dar but his group lived on, weakened, but still a threat and relocating to yet another far flung municipality. I've seen with my own eyes and hands how he and terrorists like him can be defeated. And the crux of the strategy isn't bullets or bombs or better munitions-it's getting as rigorous about how we collect information in these areas as we are about how we deploy US service-members to them. Data and the right projects can defeat ISIS and we need to make these efforts in the vulnerable parts of the world a priority before it's too late.
Justin Richmond is the Executive Director of Impl. Project and spends most of his time traveling the world looking for people to assist in jousting windmills. He has been slightly more successful than his muse, Don Quixote.
4. The US is losing the war against tyranny
Excerpts:
The current situation in many enemy regimes is strikingly similar, and their needs are the same.
The "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, Venezuela, and China can succeed if our enemies cannot turn around their failed systems and embrace our successful experiment with freedom. Therefore, we need to endorse and support a revolutionary campaign against our enemies in the name of freedom.
Our campaign againstMikhail Gorbachev's failed tyranny succeeded because the Russians had had enough of his muddled policies. The same strategy will work against our current enemies.
We are at war, under siege from a global alliance that runs from Pyongyang to Havana and Caracas. At the moment we are losing, having failed to bring down the leaders of our main adversaries: Kim Jong Un in North Korea, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, and Ali Khamenei in Tehran, despite monster demonstrations in the latter two countries. We have also failed to support the huge crowds clamoring for greater freedom in Hong Kong, although the regime in Beijing has canceled its law enabling it to transfer dissidents to the mainland.
We are losing because there is a growing sensibility on the conservative side of the political spectrum that the United States is simply too precious and good to sacrifice lives and coin to save failed (and continuously failing) cultures from themselves.
It is not in our national interest to be aggressively internationally engaged, they claim. This attitude is exacerbated by the sensibility on the extreme left-wing, which is increasingly defining the Democratic Party, that American ideals are a myth, its founding an act of injustice and original sin, and the projection of power on their basis an immoral fraud. Namely, it is not in the interests of the world for the U.S. to be aggressively engaged.
These two camps now converge on a common idea: The U.S.'s global presence and power is to be replaced by isolation - as seen by conservatives as an American fortress, as seen by the Left as a berated kid sent to stand isolated in the corner for misbehavior.
The dominance of the public debate by these two camps advocating a diminished international role for the U.S. is easily observed by our nemeses, who take great heart at the silence of some, departure from office of others, and tired repetitiveness of yet more of those who advocate a more muscular foreign policy. Absent the U.S., no great power stands in their way, and the regional allies which could have reinforced American power are left hunkering down in defensive postures.
There is much to commend the current administration for questioning basic assumptions and forcing a stress test on our policies. Indeed, the absence of discussion as to what our interests actually were had long given way to dogmatic assertions anchored to no more than inertia, and so too are the defense of the institutions and policies based on them.
But this process of house cleaning has also left a vacuum, which the conservative side has failed to fill with a reinvigorated and powerful argument for continued global engagement and presence. As a result, the legitimately felt exhaustion over such decades-long sacrifice without clearly defined enemies or victory and the facile arguments about retrenchment become irresistible.
The inevitable gap which thus emerges between unwillingness to maintain active and forward global engagement and the continued, and still valid, but unarticulated need for the maintenance of a world order which upholds our way life has seduced us into stopgap measures which create the illusion of an effective and strong policy, but in reality only tread water.
In various shades, therefore, the U.S. has retreated into two basic policies, both elements of which are presently pursued by the current administration: financial pressure (mostly sanctions) and a willingness to sit down and talk to our enemies. The last several administrations have engaged in both with different weighting, but this administration has added unprecedented and increasing levels of sanctions as leverage. The current president promised to end American foreign military involvement during the 2016 presidential campaign, and he intends to honor those promises, leaving the battlefield to the locals.
In short, American foreign policy rests on President Trump's convictions, reinforced by a populist sentiment ineffectively answered by our foreign policy elites, that we need to disengage from action on the battlefields, and that our enemies will welcome this change and make deals with us. But is there hope the current administration's recipe will produce the results the president hopes for?
It doesn't look that way.
Our enemies are currently acting as if the U.S. has no will to resist their hostile efforts, and they will simply pursue us. The Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington taught us that the confidence and the immense power of our nation and geographical distance from our enemies would ensure the conflict would remain over the horizon proved an illusion. Our enemies came as far as they were indulged, even into our cities.
Sadly, the events since have shown us that managing and seeking to "incentivize" rather than defeat our enemies left us two decades later still facing them and their unabated enmity. They seek every opportunity to remind us of that.
The Taliban celebrated those Sept. 11 attacks last month with an explosion at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, shortly after an armed attack that killed an American soldier.
Will they negotiate with Trump? Of course they will, but they are not likely to make his kind of deal. Why should they? He does not threaten their regimes. He does not support those of their own citizens who want an end to the oppressive tyranny under which they suffer. He does not retaliate when they attack us or our allies. Instead, he or the secretary of state warn our enemies that the U.S. is preparing to take decisive action against them.
However, the decisive action does not come, even though it is constantly promised. The action required must threaten the leaders directly, just as it did the Soviet regime when Reagan was president of the United States.
The current situation in many enemy regimes is strikingly similar, and their needs are the same.
The "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran, Venezuela, and China can succeed if our enemies cannot turn around their failed systems and embrace our successful experiment with freedom. Therefore, we need to endorse and support a revolutionary campaign against our enemies in the name of freedom.
Our campaign againstMikhail Gorbachev's failed tyranny succeeded because the Russians had had enough of his muddled policies. The same strategy will work against our current enemies.
Michael Ledeen is freedom scholar at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He has written 38 books. David Wurmser was senior adviser to the National Security Council.
5. China Sharpens Hacking to Hound Its Minorities, Far and Wide
Excerpts:
Because the hacks targeted Android and iPhone users - even though Uighurs in Xinjiang don't commonly use iPhones - Mr. Adair said he believed that they had been aimed in part at Uighurs living abroad.
"China is expanding their digital surveillance outside their borders," he said. "It seems like it really is going after the diaspora."
Another group of researchers, at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, recently uncovered an overlapping effort, using some of the same code discovered by Google and Volexity. It attacked the iPhones and Android phones of Tibetans until as recently as May.
Using WhatsApp messages, Chinese hackers posing as New York Times reporters and representatives of Amnesty International and other organizations targeted the private office of the Dalai Lama, members of the Tibetan Parliament and Tibetan nongovernmental organizations, among others.
Lobsang Gyatso, the secretary of TibCERT, an organization that works with Tibetan organizations on cybersecurity threats, said in an interview that the recent attacks were a notable escalation from previous Chinese surveillance attempts.
For a decade, Chinese hackers blasted Tibetans with emails containing malicious attachments, Mr. Lobsang said. If they hacked one person's computer, they hit everyone in the victim's address books, casting as wide a net as possible. But in the last three years, Mr. Lobsang said, there has been a big shift.
"The recent targeting was something we haven't seen in the community before," he said. "It was a huge shift in resources. They were targeting mobile phones, and there was a lot more reconnaissance involved. They had private phone numbers of individuals, even those that were not online. They knew who they were, where their offices were located, what they did."
China Sharpens Hacking to Hound Its Minorities, Far and Wide
Uighur teenagers on their phones in Kashgar in China's Xinjiang region. Chinese hackers have secretly monitored the cellphones of Uighurs and Tibetans around the globe.CreditGilles Sabrié for The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO - China's state-sponsored hackers have drastically changed how they operate over the last three years, substituting selectivity for what had been a scattershot approach to their targets and showing a new determination by Beijing to push its surveillance state beyond its borders.
The government has poured considerable resources into the change, which is part of a reorganization of the national People's Liberation Army that President Xi Jinping initiated in 2016, security researchers and intelligence officials said.
China's hackers have since built up a new arsenal of techniques, such as elaborate hacks of iPhone and Android software, pushing them beyond email attacks and the other, more basic tactics that they had previously employed.
The primary targets for these more sophisticated attacks: China's ethnic minorities and their diaspora in other countries, the researchers said. In several instances, hackers targeted the cellphones of a minority known as Uighurs, whose
home region, Xinjiang, has been the site of a vast build-out of surveillance tech in recent years.
"The Chinese use their best tools against their own people first because that is who they're most afraid of," said James A. Lewis, a former United States government official who writes on cybersecurity and espionage for the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. "Then they turn those tools on foreign targets."
China's willingness to extend the reach of its surveillance and censorship was on display after an executive for the National Basketball Association's Houston Rockets tweeted support for protesters in Hong Kong this month. The response from China was swift, threatening a range of business relationships the N.B.A. had forged in the country.
In August, Facebook and Twitter said they had taken down a large network of Chinese bots that was spreading disinformation around the protests. And in recent weeks, a security firm traced a monthslong attack on Hong Kong media companies to Chinese hackers. Security experts say Chinese hackers are very likely targeting protesters' phones, but they have yet to publish any evidence.
Some security researchers said the improved abilities of the Chinese hackers had put them on a par with elite Russian cyberunits. And the attacks on cellphones of Uighurs offered a rare glimpse of how some of China's most advanced hacking tools are now being used to silence or punish critics.
Google researchers who tracked the attacks against iPhones said details about the software flaws that the hackers had preyed on would have been worth tens of millions of dollars on black market sites where information about software vulnerabilities is sold.
On the streets in Xinjiang, huge numbers of high-end
surveillance cameras run facial recognition software to identify and track people. Specially designed apps have been used to screen Uighurs' phones, monitor their communications and register their whereabouts.
Gaining access to the phones of Uighurs who have fled China - a diaspora that has grown as many have been locked away at home - would be a logical extension of those total surveillance efforts. Such communities in other countries have long been a concern to Beijing, and many in Xinjiang have been sent to camps because relatives traveled or live abroad.
The Chinese police have also made less sophisticated efforts to control Uighurs who have fled, using the chat app WeChat to entice them to return home or to threaten their families.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to a request for comment. China has denied past claims that it conducts cyberespionage, adding that it, too, is often a target.
Security researchers recently discovered that the Chinese
used National Security Agency hacking tools after apparently discovering an N.S.A. cyberattack on their own systems. And several weeks ago, a Chinese security firm, Qianxin,
published an analysis tying the Central Intelligence Agency to a hack of China's aviation industry.
Breaking into iPhones has long been considered the Holy Grail of cyberespionage. "If you can get inside an iPhone, you have yourself a spy phone," said John Hultquist, director of intelligence analysis at FireEye, a cybersecurity firm.
The F.B.I. couldn't do it without help during a showdown with Apple in 2016. The bureau paid more than $1 million to an anonymous third party to hack an iPhone used by a gunman involved in the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif.
Google researchers said they had discovered that iPhone vulnerabilities were being exploited to infect visitors to a set of websites. Although Google did not release the names of the targets, Apple said they had been found on about a dozen websites focused on Uighurs.
"You can hit a high school student from Japan who is visiting the site to write a research report, but you are also going to hit Uighurs who have family members back in China and are supporting the cause," said Steven Adair, the president and founder of the security firm Volexity in Virginia.
In recent weeks, security researchers at Volexity uncovered Chinese hacking campaigns that exploited vulnerabilities in Google's Android software as well. Volexity found that several websites that focused on Uighur issues had been infected with Android malware. It traced the attacks to two Chinese hacking groups.
Because the hacks targeted Android and iPhone users - even though Uighurs in Xinjiang don't commonly use iPhones - Mr. Adair said he believed that they had been aimed in part at Uighurs living abroad.
"China is expanding their digital surveillance outside their borders," he said. "It seems like it really is going after the diaspora."
Another group of researchers, at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, recently uncovered an overlapping effort, using some of the same code discovered by Google and Volexity. It attacked the iPhones and Android phones of Tibetans until as recently as May.
Using WhatsApp messages, Chinese hackers posing as New York Times reporters and representatives of Amnesty International and other organizations targeted the private office of the Dalai Lama, members of the Tibetan Parliament and Tibetan nongovernmental organizations, among others.
Lobsang Gyatso, the secretary of TibCERT, an organization that works with Tibetan organizations on cybersecurity threats, said in an interview that the recent attacks were a notable escalation from previous Chinese surveillance attempts.
For a decade, Chinese hackers blasted Tibetans with emails containing malicious attachments, Mr. Lobsang said. If they hacked one person's computer, they hit everyone in the victim's address books, casting as wide a net as possible. But in the last three years, Mr. Lobsang said, there has been a big shift.
"The recent targeting was something we haven't seen in the community before," he said. "It was a huge shift in resources. They were targeting mobile phones, and there was a lot more reconnaissance involved. They had private phone numbers of individuals, even those that were not online. They knew who they were, where their offices were located, what they did."
Adam Meyers, the vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike, said these operations were notably more sophisticated than five years ago, when security firms discovered that Chinese hackers were targeting the phones of Hong Kong protesters
in the so-called Umbrella Revolution.
At the time, Chinese hackers could break only into
phones that had been "jailbroken," or altered in some way to allow the installation of apps not vetted by Apple's official store. The recent attacks against the Uighurs broke into up-to-date iPhones without tipping off the owner.
"In terms of how the Chinese rank threats, the highest threats are domestic," Mr. Lewis said. "The No. 1 threat, as the Chinese see it, is the loss of information control on their own population. But the United States is firmly No. 2."
Chinese hackers have also used their improved skills to attack the computer networks of foreign governments and companies. They have targeted internet and telecommunications companies and have broken into the computer networks of foreign tech, chemical, manufacturing and mining companies. Airbus recently said China had hacked it through a supplier.
In 2016, Mr. Xi consolidated several army hacking divisions under a new Strategic Support Force, similar to the United States' Cyber Command, and moved much of the country's foreign hacking operation from the army to the more advanced Ministry of State Security, China's main spy agency.
The restructuring coincided with a lull in Chinese cyberattacks after a 2015 agreement between Mr. Xi and President Barack Obama to cease cyberespionage operations for commercial gain.
"The deal gave the Chinese the time and space to focus on professionalizing their cyberespionage capabilities," Mr. Lewis said. "We didn't expect that."
Chinese officials also cracked down on moonlighting in moneymaking schemes by its state-sponsored hackers - a "corruption" issue that Mr. Xi concluded had sometimes compromised the hackers' identities and tools, according to security researchers.
While China was revamping its operations, security experts said, it was also clamping down on security research in order to keep advanced hacking methods in house. The Chinese police recently
said they planned to enforce national laws against unauthorized vulnerability disclosure, and Chinese researchers were recently banned from competing in Western hacking conferences.
"They are circling the wagons," Mr. Hultquist of FireEye said. "They've recognized that they could use these resources to aid their offensive and defensive cyberoperations."
Nicole Perlroth and Kate Conger reported from San Francisco, and Paul Mozur from Shanghai.
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6. The 2022 Winter Olympics and Beijing's Uyghur Policy: Sports in the Shadows of Concentration Camps
Make human rights a national security issue in China.
The 2022 Winter Olympics and Beijing's Uyghur Policy: Sports in the Shadows of Concentration Camps | Uyghur Human Rights Project
Contact: Dr. Kevin Carrico (Skype) kevinjcarrico (Email)
[email protected]
Contact: Uyghur Human Rights Project
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In 2015, Beijing was awarded the rights to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. While the government of the People's Republic of China has overseen preparations for the 2022 Games under the motto of "joyful rendezvous upon pure ice and snow," the same state has also overseen the development of a network of concentration camps in East Turkestan (also known as Xinjiang).
In a case of blatant profiling, inmates are detained not due to any crime, but solely due to their ethno-religious identity. Guilt is presumed for anyone of Uyghur, Kazakh, or other Turkic backgrounds. Camp inmates have been held without trial and without a sentence: in effect, indefinite secret detention. In addition, reports are emerging of a growing number of Uyghurs being sentenced to 10 or more years in prison, often without trial.
The Olympic Charter lists as one of the movement's goals "the preservation of human dignity." Such policies of racial profiling and arbitrary detention would be an outrage in any country participating in the Olympic movement, much less the host country.
In a new
policy brief written for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, Dr. Kevin Carrico, Senior Research Fellow at Monash University, calls for urgent international attention to this looming challenge for the international community.
Entitled The 2022 Winter Olympics and Beijing's Uyghur Policy: Sports in the Shadows of Concentration Camps, it outlines the political implications of the Olympic Games for the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing's open contravention of the principles contained in the Olympic Charter, and actionable recommendations to the international community.
Dr. Kevin Carrico told UHRP: "Precisely because the Olympics and other mega-events have been so essential to the Chinese Party-state's image management, the Games, with all of their symbolic weight, remain one of the few points of entry for the global community to apply pressure on the CCP. It is now well past time for the international community to use this leverage to push for change in China."
The International Olympic Committee and the global community should not allow the Olympic Games to be used as a promotional celebration by a dictatorial regime holding millions in concentration camps based on their ethnicity. Instead, the international community needs to use the Olympic Games to push for substantial and verifiable change in China's policy.
Among several recommendations, the policy brief calls on:
The International Olympic Committee to:
· Immediately inform China that its policies in Xinjiang are in violation of the ideals of the Olympic Charter.
National Olympic committees and political leaders of countries around the world to:
· Inform the IOC that current policies in Xinjiang are incompatible with the Olympic Charter, and inform China that participation in the 2022 Olympic Games is not feasible without substantial change in Xinjiang.
The general public to:
· Sign the "
No Rights, No Games 2022" petition urging the International Olympic Committee to take action to ensure that the Games are not held in a country holding millions in concentration camps.
· Clearly voice opposition to current Chinese government policies in Xinjiang to the International Olympic Committee, national Olympic committees, governments, and advertising sponsors of the 2022 Winter Games
"Beijing needs to hear from athletes, coaches and corporate sponsors. Hosting a global event requires meeting international standards, especially human rights. The Olympics cannot be put in the position of whitewashing the Chinese Communist Party's crimes under international treaties that it has itself ratified," said UHRP Director, Omer Kanat.
Mr. Kanat added: "For the International Olympic Committee to be handing out medals while Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples remain in ethno-religious concentration camps would be a historical mistake. The International Olympic Committee, National Olympic committees, political leaders, and concerned individuals need to act now to persuade China to close the camps and avert a train wreck.
Bibliography of select news reports & academic works
Compiled by Professor Magnus Fiskesjö
UAA & UHRP Reports
The 2022 Winter Olympics and Beijing's Uyghur Policy: Sports in the Shadows of Concentration Camps Oct 21, 2019
For immediate release
October 21, 2019 5:20 pm EST
New Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) report details how the Chinese government is engaged in a systematic and widespread campaign to intimidate and silence Uyghur Americans. Aug 28, 2019
UHRP calls for greater protection of Uyghur Americans against Chinese state harassment.
UHRP BRIEFING: UHRP Presentation, Senate Human Rights Caucus, July 24, 2019 Jul 29, 2019
Presentation by UHRP Director Omer Kanat at the July 24, 2019 U.S. Senate Human Rights Caucus Briefing "Religious Freedom in China: Assessing the Role of Surveillance Technology in Abuses Against the Uyghurs and Across China"
UHRP BRIEFING: The Mass Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques by China: Remarks by UHRP Director Omer Kanat Jul 23, 2019
International Religious Freedom Ministerial Side Event: The Mass Destruction and Desecration of Uyghur Mosques by China. Remarks by Omer Kanat, Director, Uyghur Human Rights Project
UHRP UPDATE: 435 Intellectuals Detained and Disappeared in the Uyghur Homeland May 21, 2019
Since April 2017, the Chinese government has interned, imprisoned, or forcibly disappeared at least
435 intellectuals as part of its intensified assault on Uyghurs and erasure of their culture.
UHRP SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting Chinese Linguistic Imperialism: Abduweli Ayup and the Movement for Uyghur Mother Tongue-Based Education May 16, 2019
A new special report published by the Uyghur Human Rights Project highlights the politically motivated linguicide of the Uyghur language
7. China and US in trillion-dollar tech war
Excerpts:
Enter Huawei again, and its role as the worldwide leader in 5G infrastructure.
More than 20 times quicker than existing 4G, these ultra-fast networks will power 'smart' manufacturing and the AI-linked factories of the future, as well as the Internet of Things.
"The leader of 5G stands to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade, with widespread job creation across the wireless technology sector,"
the Defense Innovation Board, a group of American business leaders and academics, stated in a 2019 study for the US Department of Defense.
"The country that owns 5G will own many of these innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world. That country is not likely to be the United States [as] China has taken the lead in 5G development through a series of aggressive investment[s]," the report, co-authored by Milo Medin, the vice-president of wireless services at Google, added.
Now, you can google that.
Asia Times | China and US in trillion-dollar tech war | Article
There is no point in Huawei googling it as the answer is the problem.
For China's high-tech juggernaut, finding a long-term fix to a nearly
US$1-trillion conundrum will be crucial to its operational model.
In the first five months of 2019, the poster child of the "Made in China 2025"
program sold 100 million smartphones. Last year, it shifted 206 million handsets and raked in $52.5 billion in revenue with nearly half shipped to overseas markets.
But that was
before it was placed on a blacklist in the United States after being branded a "national security threat," stripping the group of Google software and services.
"We can continue to use the Android platform since it is open-source," Joy Tan, the head of media relations at Huawei, told the Financial Times last week. "But we cannot use the services that help apps run on it."
Google has the app market sewn up
tighter than its global search business. Without it, the Shenzhen-based company has nothing more than a high-priced telephone for foreign customers.
Since May, Huawei has been trying to seal the cracks after being blocked from access to its American suppliers. While it has filled the semiconductor, or chip, shortfall with domestic shipments, there is literally nothing the privately-owned firm can do in the short-term about the Google dilemma.
"The company is facing a live-or-die moment," Ren Zhengfei, the founder of the business and a former People's Liberation Army officer, said in a memo, during the summer.
"If you cannot do the job, then make way for our tank to roll ... And if you want to come on the battlefield, you can tie a rope around the 'tank' to pull it along, everyone needs this sort of determination," he added, underscoring the military metaphors.
For the first nine months of 2019, spending jumped 10.6% compared to the same period 12 months ago, the National Bureau of Statistics reported on Thursday.
Last year, China's overall funding for research and development surged by 11.8% year-on-year to 1.97 trillion yuan ($275 billion). Significantly, that was the third
consecutive double-digit annual rise and at the forefront was technology.
In March, a government study revealed that Beijing would increase science and technology spending by 13% to 354.3 billion yuan ($52.88 billion) in 2019, despite the economy showing signs of stress.
Nothing, it appears, will derail the "MiC 2025" project and the plan for at least 70% of related high-tech materials and products, such as semiconductors, to be made domestically by 2030.
"
'Made in China 2025,' seeks to make China dominant in global high-tech manufacturing. The program aims to use government subsidies, mobilize state-owned enterprises, and pursue intellectual property acquisition to catch up with - and then surpass - Western technological prowess in advanced industries," James McBride and Andrew Chatzky, of the New York-based think tank,
the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a report earlier this year.
Worldwide leader
Enter Huawei again, and its role as the worldwide leader in 5G infrastructure.
More than 20 times quicker than existing 4G, these ultra-fast networks will power 'smart' manufacturing and the AI-linked factories of the future, as well as the Internet of Things.
"The leader of 5G stands to gain hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade, with widespread job creation across the wireless technology sector,"
the Defense Innovation Board, a group of American business leaders and academics, stated in a 2019 study for the US Department of Defense.
"The country that owns 5G will own many of these innovations and set the standards for the rest of the world. That country is not likely to be the United States [as] China has taken the lead in 5G development through a series of aggressive investment[s]," the report, co-authored by Milo Medin, the vice-president of wireless services at Google, added.
Now, you can google that.
8. U.S. Officials Ignored Trump on Syria and We Are All Paying the Price
U.S. Officials Ignored Trump on Syria and We Are All Paying the Price - War on the Rocks
Republicans, Democrats, and European leaders are united in their outrage with President Donald Trump. This time, it is for his effective endorsement of a Turkish invasion of northeastern Syria to put a boot on the neck of Kurdish militants who fought with the United States to defeat the Islamic State.
But this anger is misplaced. Trump has been clear about his intentions in Syria. As he
told the world in April 2018, after years of fighting foreign wars, in his view it was time for the United States to withdraw from Syria, passing responsibility for the mission to hold territory taken from the Islamic State to regional states. I was listening, and
wrote in War on the Rocks that the longer the president's own staff continued to treat the world's most powerful man like an infant, the more likely it became that he would simply order a hasty withdrawal. This chaotic U.S. exit from Syria was obviously coming, for anyone paying attention to the opinion of the man who matters most in the United States: the president.
Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reached a ceasefire agreement with Turkey, which grants its core demand of a 32-kilometer "safe zone" between the towns of Ras al Ayn and Tel Abyad. But it remains outrageous that senior U.S. officials found themselves in the position of having to travel to Turkey to negotiate under pressure while Turkish troops remained on the offensive in Syria. For over a year, it was obvious Trump wanted to leave Syria and, as I wrote in April 2018, Trump "has made his preferences for U.S. policy in the Middle East clear" and it was time "for his national security staff to listen to him and to devise a sequential drawdown policy that fits with the spirit of the president's demands, but takes deliberate and uncomfortable steps to protect U.S. interests." This did not happen.
Rather than plan and begin to implement a coordinated withdrawal, the president's appointed envoy for Syria and the Department of Defense worked to ensure Washington could stay, and ignored the reality that Trump would eventually order an American withdrawal. Such delusions have not served the United States and its friends well.
There was a responsible way to leave Syria. The United States also still has options to make the most out of this terrible situation, but that requires sober decision-making about U.S. goals and how to impose costs on Russia and manage Turkey. It is not clear if this administration is up to the task, and the problem is not just the president.
Let Trump Be Trump: Managing Up
After three years in office, it should come as no surprise that Trump
does not read briefing books; that he is
unstable and prone to doing things against the wishes of his national security bureaucracy; and that he believes the United States should not be overly involved in the Middle East, as he has insisted since he
first contemplated running for president in the 1980s. Despite this knowledge, the president's own staff sought to pull an end-run around him. And the United States and its erstwhile Kurdish partners are paying the price for his staff's failure to provide Trump with the
one thing he wanted: a plan to withdraw American forces from Syria.
When Trump had a phone conversation with a shrewd and hostile leader the president's staff expected him to advocate for a policy he does not support. Failure ensued. This should not surprise anyone. He did the same thing in December 2018, during a phone call with the same leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In a conversation intended to stop a Turkish invasion of northeast Syria that month, Trump instead told Erdogan he would stand aside. The office of Ambassador Jim Jeffrey, the State Department's special representative on Syria, and elements of U.S. Central Command and the Joint Staff managed to convince the president to reverse course, and the shocking statement may have caught Erdogan off-guard. But once Trump told Erdogan he wouldn't stop an invasion, Washington lost all leverage with Ankara and the clock was ticking for the next phone call, when the Turkish leader would demand his slice of northern Syria.
History repeated itself. Trump told Erdogan he would stand aside, in much the same way that U.S. officials had told their Turkish interlocutors for much of 2018 as Ankara amped up its invasion rhetoric. And this time, there was no walking it back. This farce of a process should be condemned, and Trump lambasted for his inability to take seriously the lives the U.S. forces asked to deploy in Syria. In America's haste to withdraw, Turkey has
fired on a U.S. base in Kobane and hostile Turkish-backed militias
approached U.S. ground forces in a since-vacated base, raising concerns about the U.S. forces in Syria taking casualties as they were trying to leave. Absurdly, it seems like Trump's talking point about
"taking the oil" of Middle Eastern nations is about to become a reality if the administration
follows through on a leaked plan to keep 200 hundred troops at a small base in eastern Syria. The worst part of this collective, predictable, and predicted failure is that, despite the thousands of hours people spent to try and shape a policy around Trump's incoherent Twitter feed, and to stage-manage an increasingly angry Turkey committed to invading (whether Trump sanctioned it or not), Washington never seriously grappled with how to leave Syria in a way that satisfied Trump and maximized U.S. interests.
What Could Have Been
Given that the president signaled early and often that the U.S. troop presence in Syria had an expiration date, the administration's national security officials should have pursued two complementary lines of effort: a broader agreement with Russia, and pressing the YPG and the Syrian Democratic Forces to negotiate with the Assad regime before the leverage of the U.S. troop presence evaporated. This would have required the
establishment of a separate political track, designed to facilitate a Kurdish-Assad regime agreement in line with a shared Russian-American consensus for the future of the country.
This arrangement would have cut Turkey out of the broad political details and left America's Kurdish partners likely better off, while still preserving some
key Turkish goals: Namely a demilitarized zone, perhaps with Turkish forces present in a few observation posts, based on the terms of Ankara's
1998 Adana Agreement with Damascus. The Adana Agreement outlines protocols for Turkish security operations inside a 5-kilometer band along the border and is
Moscow's basis for negotiations with Turkey on the future of its presence in Syria. This approach would have required alignment with Moscow on a narrow set of overlapping goals, including managing Turkish intervention and ensuring that cross-border military operations would not upend gains made against the Islamic State - as Turkey's most recent offensive has indeed done. Pursuing these two lines of effort would have required hard trade-offs that would not have been pleasant to implement, but they were necessary given the countdown to Trump's withdrawal order.
But since key American officials proceeded as if the president's oft-stated preferences were not relevant, Ankara was able to break the partnership between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the United States through force, and in the absence of an agreement that looked after American and Syrian Kurdish interests, such as keeping the Islamic State from regrouping. Further, while Turkey's buffer zone seems unlikely to serve as a zone to return refugees, the Turkish presence on the ground has positioned Ankara to deal directly with Moscow on the future of Syria. A coherent and focused U.S. approach would have pursued a similar outcome, wherein Washington would be positioned to try and negotiate an end to the war. And while any U.S.-Russian agreement on Syria would have had to recognize the limits of U.S. influence in this conflict, those limits are not more severe than they might have otherwise been had U.S. officials not attempted to ignore Trump's stated aims.
Now America's ability to influence outcomes in Syria will be even more limited than before the hasty withdrawal order. Even if the United States takes the absurd decision to leave behind a small force to hold Syrian oil fields, the end result will be the same as it would be if every American soldier departed Syria in the near future: The United States has little leverage moving forward. It would be strategically wise to accept this obvious fact and think more broadly about how to take advantage of Moscow's "victory." But, then again, nothing about how the United States has handled Syria policy after the territorial defeat of ISIL has been strategically smart.
The brunt of U.S. diplomatic work on the Syria conflict over the past few years has been with Turkey,
to work out an arrangement with Ankara to forestall an invasion, to protect American troops in the country. The entire premise of this diplomatic effort was at odds with Trump's core beliefs. If Trump wanted to leave, and signaled such action in
April and
December 2018, why focus so much on a mechanism to stay? There are legitimate reasons to engage Turkey. It is a NATO ally. But the U.S. focus on patrols along the Turkish-Syrian border tied up resources on a problem that Trump wanted nothing to do with. And it distracted from what should have been happening: negotiating favorable terms for a U.S. exit.
Focusing on What the United States Can Do Now
An open-ended military presence in Syria is not in America's interest. The post-9/11 wars have taken a toll on the American armed forces. Responsibly winding down U.S. wars in the Middle East to allow for more time for training and to rehab elements of the force makes good sense, particularly as the United States continues to plan to fight Russia and China.
Russia and Turkey now own Syria, along with the costs of Assad's future rule, and will be left to split the spoils of "victory." This is a fact. Therefore, the question for Washington should be: How does the United States impose upon Moscow a cost for all that it has won? And this question should be rooted in a clear strategic imperative: Force Russia to spend finite defense dollars in areas that are of little interest to the United States - like Syria - so as to tie Russian forces up in securing the peace in a conflict of little importance to NATO.
This coercive approach should focus on areas where Moscow is at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the West, namely its continued support for a war criminal, Bashar al Assad, and Russia's provision of diplomatic cover for
Bashar's violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty. This action should be multilateral, requiring European support, and grounded in the very real fact that the Syrian regime retains chemical weapons and has used them, despite pledging in 2013 to destroy its stockpiles. The Syrian military is dependent on Russian spare parts, making those aircraft industries a worthwhile target of American and European punitive action. Beyond this, Europe should pledge now that no money will be given to aid in reconstruction. That cost is Russia's to bear, if it chooses. If Moscow does not choose to finance Syria's reconstruction, that is its choice, but the United States should encourage Russians to stay in the country. Russian deployments in Syria are not very expensive, but they are not cost-free. It is, therefore, a shared Western interest for Moscow to spend its rubles in Syria (even if kept to a minimum) because that means less money for things that matter more to the defense of Europe.
As for Turkey, it might seem like the immediate victor, but it has taken on an even bigger strategic mess. Beyond the near-term victory against the United States, Ankara has few options left to escalate in Syria. In fact, it is now poised to be on the receiving end of a Russian and Assad regime escalation in Idlib that it cannot stop. Ankara is not immune from the broader dynamics in the civil war and will have to debate how and when to reconcile with Bashar al Assad. This, now, should frame how the West engages with Turkey.
The United States should wall off its disagreements with Turkey over Syria from operations inside NATO. The alliance is too valuable to be poisoned by Ankara's adventure in a country NATO should not be heavily focused on. The goal, therefore, should be to not "over sanction" Ankara, but to use tools already available to sanction Turkey in the right way - should Congress feel the need to exact a cost on Ankara for its invasion of Syria. It may seem odd, but the best outcome in this current moment is for the Trump administration to sanction Turkey using the
Countering of America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, or CAATSA. This legislation mandates secondary sanctions on countries or entities that do business with Russian defense firms. Turkey's purchase and future operation of the S-400 missile qualifies as such a transaction, but Trump has held back from using this tool as the United States continues to negotiate with Ankara to prevent Turkey from actually using the Russian missile system and to purchase the
American-made Patriot missile.
These negotiations have always been fanciful, but they have had deleterious effects on the relationship and allowed Syria to leach into broader issues that matter for U.S. interests vis-a-vis Russia. The uncertainty about CAATSA sanctions on Turkey has delayed foreign-military sales between the United States and Turkey for basic self-defense weapons and munitions. It may also complicate congressional approval for future Turkish F-16 aircraft upgrades. This may seem like a good way to punish Ankara, but it could backfire. To offset the loss of Turkey's participation in the F-35 program, which Erdogan chose to forfeit when he purchased Russia's S-400 missile, Ankara is now
considering the purchase of the Russian-made Su-35. It is not in America's interests for Ankara to deepen cooperation with Russia. So, counterintuitively, the best course of action to punish Turkey is to use the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which would then give the U.S. bureaucracy clarity on how to pursue basic foreign-military sales to keep Turkey's F-16 flying.
This approach would make less urgent Turkey's need for the Su-35. This approach buys time. And time allows Turkey to continue the development of its own indigenous jet. It also deprives Russia of a tool to further enmesh Turkey in a financing arrangement for Russian defense products.
The Syria debate in Washington has long been untethered from reality. The U.S. position in the Middle East is not dependent on Syria. The main irritant in the U.S.-Turkish relationship stemmed from the U.S. presence in Syria and how Washington fought the war against the Islamic State. With the U.S.-led war against ISIL over, it made sense to plan how to leave. Instead, the Trump administration pretended the boss did not want to leave, and then made plans to stay. This mess could have been avoided if there had been a serious debate about how to withdraw and choices made about how to follow presidential guidance. In the end, Ankara made that choice for the United States.
Faced with a chaotic withdrawal, the United States still has options. The policymaking elite in America should not make the mistake of pretending all is fine, or that a small base in eastern Syria actually matters for the formulation of American strategy in Syria. The top-line goal should be to impose costs on Russia for its victory and force defense resources to be spent in ways that are advantageous to the United States. This approach can also complicate Russian-Turkish ties and clarify elements of the U.S.-Turkish relationship, creating a pathway to impose costs on Ankara, but in a way that is in U.S. interests. If Washington finally gets real, it can do something positive. If it continues to lie to itself, nothing of value will come of this.
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:
"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."
