Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners



Quotes of the Day:

"There's a sense of desperation in Afghanistan because of the lack of funding and the fact that the U.S. only has a one-track military strategy. It doesn't have an economic and political game plan."
- Ahmed Rashid

“The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.”
- Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

“If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications; either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority.”
 - George F. Kennan




1. Opinion | It Shouldn’t Fall to Veterans to Clean Up Biden’s Mess
2. As the Taliban Tighten Their Grip, Fears of Retribution Grow
3. France and UK to propose Kabul safe zone at UN meeting, says Macron
4. The Final Retrograde from Afghanistan Has Officially Begun
5. Who Will Trust Us after Afghanistan? by Bing West
6. Kabul is only the start: US allies feel the draught as Biden turns his back
7. The deaths of 2 Marines in Kabul underscore the evolving roles of women in the military
8. Who Abandoned Bagram Air Base?
9. American-Born Disinformation is Harming U.S. Allies—Just Ask the Baltics.
10. The World Economy’s Supply Chain Problem Keeps Getting Worse
11.US military must prepare for POW concerns in the deepfake era
12. A Harvard professor predicted COVID disinformation on the web. Here’s what may be coming next
13. New research points to role of social media in stoking division in U.S.
14. How Biden Can Save His China Strategy After Afghanistan
15. U.S. Used a Special Hellfire Missile in Afghanistan Airstrike on Islamic State
16. Taliban: US airstrike hits suicide bomber targeting airport
17. All in or All Out? Biden Saw No Middle Ground in Afghanistan.




1.  Opinion | It Shouldn’t Fall to Veterans to Clean Up Biden’s Mess

Opinion | It Shouldn’t Fall to Veterans to Clean Up Biden’s Mess
The New York Times · by Elliot Ackerman · August 28, 2021
Guest Essay
It Shouldn’t Fall to Veterans to Clean Up Biden’s Mess
Aug. 28, 2021, 11:00 a.m. ET


By
Mr. Ackerman is an author and former Marine who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The time was set. At noon Thursday, Marines would swoop in and usher a group of 29 Afghans through Abbey Gate into Kabul Airport for evacuation. With minutes to spare, Ahmad — the leader of the group — was still looking for N., an Afghan man he’d never met. N. had tried, unsuccessfully, to enter through another gate earlier in the day, and he was now hoping to make it in with Ahmad’s group. The Marines would open the gate only once, but luckily they were running behind — potentially giving N. the extra minutes he’d need to find Ahmad in the heaving crowd outside it. I was on the phone with Ahmad. A colleague in another country was texting with N., and we were trying to connect them. Time was running out at the airport gates.
For the past two weeks, I’ve worked alongside an ad hoc group of veterans, journalists and activists with connections to Afghanistan who are trying to coordinate the evacuation of not just our Afghan friends but also strangers, like Ahmad and N., whose lives are under imminent threat. Days and nights full of creating elaborate text chains, building rosters of evacuees and sharing satellite imagery of routes to the airport.
As a Marine, I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and participated in Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. As a journalist, I covered the war in Syria. Never have I witnessed a greater, swifter collapse of competence than what I have seen with the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan.
Central to President Biden’s campaign was a promise that the candidate understood, deeply and personally, two essential things: empathy and service. Events in Afghanistan this week indicate this promise was, at worst, false and, at best, limited. Events in Afghanistan illustrate what happens when there is a breakdown in empathy. Events at the airport — desperation, death — indicate the extreme chaos that ensues when the commander in chief doesn’t actually understand the value of service.
On Thursday, the president gave a speech in response to that day’s suicide attack at the airport that killed 13 U.S. service members and more than 150 Afghans. After asking for a moment of silence and invoking his son Beau’s service in Iraq, Mr. Biden showed no contrition for his administration’s policies, which have sentenced tens of thousands of our Afghan allies to life under the yoke of the Taliban. This is an oppressive, barbaric regime that has shown no respect for the rule of law, no respect for women’s rights. There is no Taliban 2.0.
When the president gave a speech in response to Thursday’s suicide attack at Kabul Airport, he showed no contrition for his administration’s policies.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
But it’s not only Afghans for whom the Biden administration has shown a lack of empathy. It’s also America’s veterans. It shouldn’t fall to our service members to clean up the mess made by this catastrophic withdrawal. And yet it has. For years, veterans have been calling for the issuing of long-promised visas for Afghan allies to be sped up. The calls only grew louder after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal plan. In April, a chorus of veterans’ groups pleaded with the White House to begin a mass evacuation of Afghans. A bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the White House in June asking why the Pentagon had not been mobilized to protect Afghan allies, warning “the time is now.”
And yet Mr. Biden went ahead, over the pleas and against the advice of so many. The warnings came true. And because the administration provided no meaningful method for Afghans to leave, aside from a sclerotic special-visa application process, it has fallen to veterans and other civilians to try to save those who are desperately appealing for our help. Most of us, I believe, have done it out of a sense of duty and moral obligation, and as a last-ditch effort to uphold the promises we made to our Afghan friends. While there have been some success stories in this “digital Dunkirk,” as the former C.I.A. analyst Matt Zeller called it, there have been far more failures, near misses and desperate hopes dashed after hours and days of waiting in fear.
What is the value of service? How can the Biden administration claim to know, when it seems so willing to squander that value in pursuit of ill-laid plans? Apologists for the policies that brought us here claim that the catastrophic withdrawal was inevitable, that no degree of planning could have avoided this. That’s absurd. You need only look at a map to understand the inherent challenges in withdrawing from Afghanistan. Unlike Vietnam, which has hundreds of miles of coastline, Afghanistan is landlocked. The only way in or out is by air. So why were our U.S.-owned air bases shut down before an evacuation was complete? And that’s to say nothing of setting an arbitrary timeline of Sept. 11, 2021, for the complete troop withdrawal and then moving the timeline up to Aug. 31, 2021. If our back is up against a wall, it is a wall we built.
When the president spoke on Thursday night after the attack on Abbey Gate, he nodded at sacrifice. That’s fine, but it’s not what matters. What matters is to truly understand the value of service. If you do, you don’t send troops to die on a poorly planned and poorly executed mission. Failing to understand the value of service results in incompetence. And incompetence costs lives.
Which brings me back to Thursday, at Abbey Gate. The Marines were late because they were overwhelmed with other rescue attempts. Ahmad and N. were desperate to get in the gate. Shortly after 4 p.m. local time, a sergeant I’d been coordinating with appeared on the chain of text messages. He explained that all of his teams were tasked out on other missions. I asked if he could still rescue the Afghans we had waiting; he said he’d come himself. Immediately.
Then the chat went silent. For nearly an hour, there was no news of Ahmad, N., or the sergeant.
Finally I received a message from Ahmad: Hi
Are you in the airport? I asked.
Yes sir
A suicide bomber detonated himself at Abbey Gate 20 minutes later. Another hour passed. Then the sergeant texted me: He was OK. But N. hadn’t made it in, we soon learned. N. had survived the blast, but he was trapped on the other side of the gate.
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The New York Times · by Elliot Ackerman · August 28, 2021



2. As the Taliban Tighten Their Grip, Fears of Retribution Grow

This is what you do in a revolution, coup, hostile takeover, or whatever you want to call it: Seize intelligence information and communications so you can eliminate the opposition and control the population.


Excerpts:

When Taliban troops seized control of the Afghan capital two weeks ago, the invading units made a beeline for two critical targets: the headquarters of the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications.

Their aim — recounted by two Afghan officials who had been briefed separately on the raid — was to secure the files of Afghan intelligence officers and their informers, and to obtain the means of tracking the telephone numbers of Afghan citizens.

...

The Taliban’s first news conference after taking control of Kabul. Taliban officials promised amnesty to government forces and said there would be no settling of scores.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Yet there are growing reports of detentions, disappearances and even executions of officials at the hands of the Taliban, in what some current and former government officials describe as a covert and sometimes deadly pursuit of the Taliban’s enemies.
“It’s very much underground,” said one former legislator, who was in hiding elsewhere when the Taliban visited his home in the middle of the night.
“That is intimidation,” he said. “I feel threatened and my family is in shock.”
The Taliban swept into towns and districts, often without a shot fired, making diplomatic assurances to their opponents and the public. But the first commanders have often been replaced by more heavy-handed enforcers who conduct raids and abductions, officials of the former government said.

As the Taliban Tighten Their Grip, Fears of Retribution Grow
The New York Times · by Carlotta Gall · August 29, 2021
Taliban leaders have promised amnesty to Afghan officials and soldiers, but there are increasing reports of detentions, disappearances and even executions.

Taliban fighters outside the United States Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, last week. As the Americans withdraw their forces, many Afghans fear reprisal attacks from the Taliban.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

By
Aug. 29, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
ISTANBUL — When Taliban troops seized control of the Afghan capital two weeks ago, the invading units made a beeline for two critical targets: the headquarters of the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications.
Their aim — recounted by two Afghan officials who had been briefed separately on the raid — was to secure the files of Afghan intelligence officers and their informers, and to obtain the means of tracking the telephone numbers of Afghan citizens.
The speed with which Kabul fell on Aug. 15, when President Ashraf Ghani fled, was potentially disastrous for hundreds of thousands of Afghans who had been working to counter the Taliban threat, from prominent officials to midlevel government workers, who have since been forced into hiding.
Few officials found the time to shred documents, and thousands of top-secret files and payroll lists fell into the hands of the enemy, the two officials said.
A defaced poster of former President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, days after the Taliban swept into the city. Mr. Ghani fled on Aug. 15.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
As American troops complete their withdrawal by their Tuesday deadline, much of the nation is cringing in fear in anticipation of coming reprisals.
So far, the Taliban’s political leadership has presented a moderate face, promising amnesty to government security forces who lay down their arms, even writing letters of guarantee that they will not be pursued, although reserving the right to prosecute serious crimes. Spokesmen for the Taliban have also talked of forming an inclusive government.
A Taliban spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, said in a Twitter post in English that there was no settling of scores, nor was there a hit list with which the Taliban were conducting door-to-door searches, as has been rumored.
“General amnesty has been granted,” he wrote, adding that “we are focusing on future.”
The Taliban’s first news conference after taking control of Kabul. Taliban officials promised amnesty to government forces and said there would be no settling of scores.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Yet there are growing reports of detentions, disappearances and even executions of officials at the hands of the Taliban, in what some current and former government officials describe as a covert and sometimes deadly pursuit of the Taliban’s enemies.
“It’s very much underground,” said one former legislator, who was in hiding elsewhere when the Taliban visited his home in the middle of the night.
“That is intimidation,” he said. “I feel threatened and my family is in shock.”
The Taliban swept into towns and districts, often without a shot fired, making diplomatic assurances to their opponents and the public. But the first commanders have often been replaced by more heavy-handed enforcers who conduct raids and abductions, officials of the former government said.
The scale of the campaign is unclear, since it is being conducted covertly. Nor is it clear what level of the Taliban leadership authorized detentions or executions.
The people who seized the files at the National Security Directorate and the Ministry of Communications may not have even been Taliban: The men did not speak Afghan languages, the officials said, and may have been agents of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency working in tandem with Taliban forces. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency has long supported the Taliban in their violent opposition to the Kabul government.
The fear among Afghans is palpable. All but the youngest remember the Taliban’s authoritarian regime of the 1990s, with its draconian punishments, hangings and public executions.
Many people have gone into hiding, changed their locations and telephone numbers, and broken off communications with friends and colleagues.
“People do not trust the Taliban because of what they did previously,” said an Afghan who worked as a translator for the NATO mission and was among those evacuated.
Human rights organizations, activists and former government officials have also struggled to comprehend exactly what is happening across Afghanistan’s vast and mountainous terrain, but several government officials who remain in their posts said they were receiving increasingly frantic calls from relatives and acquaintances.
“They seem to be doing very menacing searches,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “It is very much police-state kind of behavior. The message is very clear.”
People in the northern province of Badakhshan have been pulled out of their homes in recent days and have not been seen since, one of the government officials said. There has been a pattern of pursuit of Afghan special operations forces personnel and commandos of the intelligence service, known as 00 units, as well as police and security chiefs across the country, he added.
Afghan special forces soldiers during a night raid in May. The Taliban have said there would be no retribution against government security personnel who lay down their arms.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Asked whether these actions and reports of killings indicated a Taliban policy or were ad hoc revenge-taking by individuals, he said, “It’s early to judge.”
But the official said that he had received information about an internal Taliban meeting at their headquarters in Quetta, Pakistan, where leaders discussed whether to grant amnesty to some highly trained Afghan operatives. The Taliban members had decided not to let them go since they could cause trouble for the Taliban in the future.
“That worries me if this turns into a policy,” he said.
That official, like all those interviewed on the subject, asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals by the Taliban against his relatives still inside Afghanistan.
The former security police chief in the southwestern province of Farah, Ghulam Sakhi Akbari, was fatally shot on the main Kabul-Kandahar highway on Friday, according to Facebook posts by activists. “Some activists have blamed the Taliban,” one wrote. “The Taliban have not said anything so far.”
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
How did the Taliban gain control? See how the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in a few months, and read about how their strategy enabled them to do so.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
What does their victory mean for terrorist groups? The United States invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to terrorism, and many worry that Al Qaeda and other radical groups will again find safe haven there.
At least a dozen former provincial officials of the Ghani government have been detained by the Taliban around the country, former government officials said. They named three district police chiefs and three security officials in the southern province of Kandahar, two provincial police chiefs, a provincial governor and two provincial department heads of the intelligence service, all of whom are known to have been detained.
It is not clear where the officials are being held or if any legal proceedings have been brought against them. In some cases, they have been reported missing by family members. In the case of the three district police chiefs in Kandahar, members of the public had demanded that the Taliban arrest the men, who have long been accused of human rights abuses, a resident said.
Taliban fighters in Kabul on the day the militants took control of the city.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
A group of political activists has raised concerns that some of their supporters are missing and feared abducted.
One activist, Majeed Karar, who is well known for his opposition to the Taliban, posted photographs of a district governor and a young Afghan poet whom he said had been abducted and killed in recent days. He said in a post on Twitter that he was receiving messages from friends about more killings.
The Taliban have not confirmed the detentions and, seemingly intent on avoiding international censure, have blamed some violence on other people claiming to be Taliban.
The day the Taliban captured three high-level commanders after a last pitched battle at Kandahar’s airport, townspeople began gathering in a frenzy at the stadium in the city, in anticipation of a public execution.
The spectacle, a hallmark of the Taliban regime in the 1990s, did not happen.
So far, there have not been mass reprisals countrywide, and the killings may prove to be cases of individual revenge, Ms. Gossman said.
Human Rights Watch established that 44 people were taken from their homes and executed in July in the town of Spin Boldak, the main border crossing to Pakistan from southern Afghanistan. Those killed were members of forces led by Abdul Raziq Achakzai, a C.I.A.-trained operative opposed to the Taliban who was widely accused of human rights abuses.
All 44 had received amnesty letters from the Taliban, Ms. Gossman said.
Amnesty International reported that nine men, mostly local police officers, were massacred by Taliban members in July in the central province of Ghazni. Six were shot to death and three were tortured before being killed, the rights group said.
A number of former government officials have complained that even after they cooperated with the Taliban in handing over their weapons and vehicles, the Taliban have continued to harass them.
A convoy of Afghan government security vehicles the day after the Taliban entered Kabul.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Bismillah Taban, the head of the Interior Ministry’s police criminal investigation unit under Mr. Ghani, said his assistant had handed over all of the equipment and weapons in his possession to the Taliban the day after they entered Kabul.
But he said the Taliban were still looking for him.
“The Taliban detained my former aide in Kabul, held him for five hours, tortured him to force him to reveal my hiding place,” he said from an undisclosed location. “I don’t believe their promise of general amnesty. They killed one of my colleagues after they took over the government. They will kill me, too, if they find me.”
The New York Times · by Carlotta Gall · August 29, 2021


3. France and UK to propose Kabul safe zone at UN meeting, says Macron

My thoughts:

"It seemed like a good idea at the time"

"This may not end well."

France and UK to propose Kabul safe zone at UN meeting, says Macron
The Guardian · by Patrick Wintour · August 29, 2021
France and Britain plan to table an emergency UN security council resolution on Monday calling for the Taliban to back a civilian-run safe zone at Kabul airport that would allow the continued air evacuation of those who want to leave the country, the French president has said.
“What we are trying to do is to be able to organise targeted humanitarian operations for evacuations that will not take place through the military airport in Kabul,” Emmanuel Macron told the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.
“It is about protecting these threatened Afghans and getting them out of the country in the coming days or weeks. We will see if this can be done through the capital’s civilian airport or through neighbouring countries”.
He said such a deal would be a prerequisite for constructing a future western relationship with the Taliban.
Journal du Dimanche cited Macron as saying the UK backed the resolution, although London has not spoken publicly on any such efforts. A Whitehall source played down the French president’s comments, saying the plans outlined in the interview were “premature”.
“We are not there yet,” the source said.
Macron said France still had several thousand people in Afghanistan whom it wished to protect. The Taliban have in recent days said they want to stop more Afghans from leaving the country.
Speaking before travelling to Iraq this weekend, he said the UN resolution “would provide a framework for the United Nations to act in an emergency, and it will above all make it possible to make everyone take on their responsibilities and for the international community to maintain pressure on the Taliban”.
“Our resolution proposal aims to define a safe zone in Kabul, under UN control, which would allow humanitarian operations to continue,” he said.
It is not yet clear if Russia or China will accept the resolution, or see it as an incursion into Afghan sovereignty.
Turkey had been negotiating with the Taliban and the US to take military responsibility for the airport, but abandoned the plan after the Taliban said they would not accept Turkish troops remaining on its soil.

Emmanuel Macron (centre) in Mosul, Iraq, on Sunday. Photograph: Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images
Macron made no attempt to hide that the evacuation operation was incomplete. “We still have on our lists several thousand Afghans who we want to protect, who are at risk because of their commitments - magistrates, artists, intellectuals - but also many other people who have been reported by relatives and who we are told are at risk,” he said.
The French president made a succession of pointed remarks towards the US, pointing out that Joe Biden had yet to accept many refugees from Afghanistan on to American soil but was instead sending them to processing centres in countries as far afield as Uganda and Albania.
France, he said, “had fought for the last few years to avoid too brutal a disengagement of the Americans or other allies in the region”, adding that the withdrawal from Afghanistan could have a negative impact on Iraq and Syria.
“The risk now, as we have seen in Afghanistan, is that the impression is given that the west has conditional allies that they are abandoning when their agenda changes. This is not our case. France does not abandon those who fought alongside it. For example, we continue to support the Syrian opposition - I have also received some of its components at the start of the summer – and the freedom fighters, especially the Kurdish peshmerga, who are fighting with us against Daesh [Islamic State]”.
He added that the US had shifted its “strategic agenda” to the Asia-Pacific region because American middle-class voters do “not understand why [Washington] sends soldiers for years to die at the end of the world”.
He concluded: “We must therefore play our part more in the face of the destabilisation of our neighbourhood.”
The Guardian · by Patrick Wintour · August 29, 2021



4. The Final Retrograde from Afghanistan Has Officially Begun

I worry about the last planes out being vulnerable to any shoulder fired missiles the Taliban or ISIS-K may have. The last forces leaving the airfield will be extremely vulnerable. I am sure we will have all necessary air assets in the air to suppress anything (I am sure to include AC-130 gunships) but it is going to be a very dicey retrograde.


The Final Retrograde from Afghanistan Has Officially Begun
The threat to U.S. personnel, aircraft in the final days at Kabul airport remains “very real” after a retaliatory U.S. drone strike took out two ISIS-K planners.
defenseone.com · by Tara Copp
The U.S. military has begun the process of withdrawing from Hamid Karzai International Airport but pledged to continue to evacuate people despite threats to the dwindling force and its outbound aircraft, the Pentagon said Saturday.
Late on Friday, the U.S. conducted a drone strike against an ISIS location in Nangahar province, Pentagon officials said, in retaliation for the group’s suicide bombing that killed 13 service members and as many as 170 Afghans just outside the airport’s Abbey Gate.
The Joint Staff deputy director for regional operations, Army Maj. Gen. William "Hank" Taylor, said on Saturday that the strike killed two “high-profile” members of ISIS-K, a facilitator and a planner.
Still, Taylor and Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said, that the threats against the remaining U.S. personnel on the ground in Kabul remain “very real.”
“We are monitoring them literally in real time,” Kirby said. “We're taking all the means necessary to make sure we remain focused on that threat stream.”
With limited flights and hours on the ground left before the Aug. 31 deadline for full withdrawal, the military has begun destroying some of its larger items that commanders on the ground have determined they don’t want to fly out, but don’t want to fall into enemy hands. This will make as much room as necessary for people and critical equipment on those last planes out.
“We have begun retrograding,” Kirby said, using the military term for the removal of equipment and forces as a military operation ends.
U.S. passport holders are still being allowed through the airport gates, but it has become much more difficult for SIV applicants—that is, Afghans who have helped U.S. forces and have applied for Special Immigrant Visas to the United States. Taliban fighters are going door to door, raiding the houses of Afghans who worked with the U.S. Many families who have not been able to get to the airport, through security, and onto an evacuation plane have gone into hiding.
Kirby said the military will still fly out SIV applicants and will continue to do so until the final plane departs.
“Nothing has changed about the timeline for us,” said Pentagon press secretary John Kirby. “That includes being able to continue to evacuate right up until the end.”
To date, U.S. and coalition aircraft have flown out more than 117,000 evacuees, most of them Afghan citizens.
defenseone.com · by Tara Copp



5. Who Will Trust Us after Afghanistan? by Bing West

Who Will Trust Us after Afghanistan?
By BING WEST

August 26, 2021 9:45 A
M
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(Omar Haidiri/AFP via Getty Images)
Our disaster in brief

F
ollowing 9/11, a bit of wreckage from the Twin Towers was buried at the American embassy in Kabul, with the inscription: “Never Again.” Now Again has come. On the 20th anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban flag will fly over the abandoned American embassy and al-Qaeda will be operating inside Afghanistan. Fifty years from now, Americans will stare in sad disbelief at the photo of an American Marine plucking a baby to safety over barbed wire at Kabul airport. What a shameful, wretched way to quit a war.

The root cause was extreme partisanship in Congress. By default, this bequeathed to the presidency the powers of a medieval king. The Afghanistan tragedy unfolded in four phases, culminating in the whimsy of one man consigning millions to misery.
Phase One. 2001–2007. After 9/11, America unleashed a swift aerial blitzkrieg that shattered the Taliban forces. Inside three months, al-Qaeda’s core unit was trapped inside the Tora Bora caves in the snowbound Speen Ghar mountains. A force of American Marines and multinational special forces commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis (later secretary of defense) was poised to cut off the mountain passes and systematically destroy al-Qaeda. Instead, General Tommy Franks, the overall commander, sent in the undisciplined troops of Afghan warlords, who allowed al-Qaeda to escape into Pakistan. Thus was lost the golden opportunity to win a fast, decisive war and leave.
Acting upon his Evangelical beliefs, President George W. Bush then made the fateful decision to change the mission from killing terrorists to creating a democratic nation comprising 40 million mostly illiterate tribesmen. Nation-building was a White House decision made without gaining true congressional commitment. Worse, there was no strategy specifying the time horizon, resources, and security measures. This off-handed smugness was expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney early in 2002 when he remarked, “The Taliban is out of business, permanently.”

On the assumption that there was no threat, a scant 5,000 Afghan soldiers were trained each year. But the fractured Taliban could not be tracked down and defeated in detail because their sponsor, Pakistan, was sheltering them. Pakistan was also providing the U.S.–NATO supply line into landlocked Afghanistan, thus limiting our leverage to object to the sanctuary extended to the Taliban.
In 2003, the Bush administration, concerned about the threat of Saddam’s presumed weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq. This sparked a bitter insurgency, provoked by Islamist terrorists, that required heavy U.S. military resources. Iraq stabilized in 2007, but by that time the Taliban had regrouped inside Pakistan and were attacking in eastern Afghanistan, where the dominant tribe was Pashtun, their own.
Phase Two. 2008–2013. For years, the Democratic leadership had been battering the Republicans about the Iraq War, claiming that it was unnecessary. By default, Afghanistan became the “right war” for the Democrats. Once elected, President Obama, who said that Afghanistan was the war we could not afford to lose, had no way out. With manifest reluctance, in 2010 he ordered a “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops, bringing the total to 100,000 U.S. soldiers plus 30,000 allied soldiers. The goal was to implement a counterinsurgency strategy, yet Obama pledged to begin withdrawing troops in 2011, an impossibly short time frame.
The strategy aimed to clear villages of the Taliban, then leave Afghan soldiers — askaris — to hold them and to build infrastructure and governance linked to the Kabul central government. In a 2011 book titled “The Wrong War,” I described why this strategy could not succeed. In Vietnam, I had served in a combined-action platoon of 15 Marines and 40 local Vietnamese. It had taken 385 days of constant patrolling to bring security to one village of 5,000. In Afghanistan, there were 7,000 Pashtun villages to be cleared by fewer than a thousand U.S. platoons, an insurmountable mismatch. Counterinsurgency would have required dedicated troops inserted for years. President Obama offered a political gesture, not a credible strategy.



Admiral James Stavridis was the supreme Allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during the surge period. He recently wrote, “We trained the wrong kind of army for Afghanistan. . . . A decade ago, we debated all this at senior levels, but kept coming back to a firmly held belief that we could succeed best by modeling what we knew and found comfortable: ducks like ducks, in the end.” According to the admiral, our top command knew they were creating “the wrong kind of army.” Yet they did so regardless.
My experience was different. In trips to Afghanistan over ten years, I embedded with dozens of U.S. platoons. When accompanying our grunts, the askaris did indeed fight. But ten years later, it remains a mystery to me why our generals refused to acknowledge what our grunts knew: namely, that the Afghan soldiers would not hold the villages once our troops left.

This wasn’t due to the structure of their army. The fault went deeper. The askaris lacked faith in the steadfastness of their own chain of command. Afghan president Hamid Karzai reigned erratically from 2004 through 2014, ranting against the American government while treating the Taliban with deference. His successor, Ashraf Ghani, a technocrat devoid of leadership skills, antagonized both his political partners and tribal chieftains. Neither man instituted promotion based upon merit or imbued confidence in the security forces. Familial and tribal patronage pervaded.
From the Kabul capital to province to district, from an Afghan general to a lieutenant, positions and rank depended upon paying bribes upward and extorting payments downward. We were caught on the horns of a dilemma caused by our political philosophy. Because we wanted to create a democracy, we chose not to impose slates of our preferred leaders. On the other hand, the askaris had no faith in the durability or tenacity of their own chain of command.
In contrast, the Taliban promoted upward from the subtribes in the different provinces. While decentralized, they were united in a blazing belief in their Islamist cause and encouraged by Pakistan. The Afghan army and district, provincial, and Kabul officials lacked a comparable spirit and vision of victory.

Phase Three. 2014–2020. From 2001 to 2013, one group of generals — many of them household names — held sway in the corridors of power, convinced they could succeed in counterinsurgency and nation-building. That effort, while laudable, failed.
But that did not mean that a Taliban victory was inevitable. Quite the opposite. A second group of generals came forward, beginning with General Joseph Dunford. The mission changed from counterinsurgency to supporting the Afghan army with intelligence, air assets, and trainers. President Obama lowered expectations about the end state, saying Afghanistan was “not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again.” U.S. troop strength dropped from 100,000 in 2011 to 16,000 in 2014. With the exception of Special Forces raids, we were not in ground combat, so there were few American casualties.
Battlefield tactics shifted to what the Afghan army could do: play defense and prevent the Taliban from consolidating. By 2018, U.S. troop strength was lower than 10,000. Nonetheless, General Scott Miller orchestrated an effective campaign to keep control of Afghanistan’s cities. Afghan soldiers, not Americans or allies, did the fighting and dying. The last U.S. combat death occurred in February of 2020.

Nevertheless, narcissistic President Trump, desperate to leave, promised the Taliban that America would depart by mid 2021. He cut the number of American troops in country to 2,500. With those few troops, General Miller nonetheless held the line. The U.S. military presence, albeit tiny, motivated the beleaguered Afghan soldiers. When the Taliban massed to hit the defenses of a city, the askaris defended their positions and the U.S. air pounced on targets. In addition, our presence provided a massive spy network and electronic listening post in central Asia, able to monitor Russia, China, Pakistan, and Iran. At a cost of no American lives and 5 percent of the defense budget, Afghanistan had reached a stalemate sustainable indefinitely at modest cost.
Phase Four. Bug-out in 2021. President Biden broke that stalemate in April of 2021, when he surprised our allies and delighted the Taliban by declaring that all U.S. troops would leave by 9/11, a singularly inappropriate date. As our military packed up, the miasma of abandonment settled into the Afghan psyche. In early July, our military sneaked away from Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, which triggered a cascading collapse. Once Afghan units across the country grasped that they were being abandoned, they dissolved. What followed was a chaotic evacuation from the Kabul airport, with the Taliban triumphantly entering the city.
Asked why he had pulled out entirely, President Biden said, “What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” That stunning fabrication was a denial of reality: Al-Qaeda are commingled with the Taliban in Kabul. As the world watched, America had to rely upon Taliban forbearance to flee. President Biden had handed America a crushing defeat without precedent.
115
















Afghanistan Evacuation
Evacuees wait to board a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III during an evacuation at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 23, 2021.
U.S. Marine Corps/Sergeant Isaiah Campbell/Handout via Reuters




President Biden has claimed that the ongoing evacuation occurred because the Afghan army ran away instead of fighting. In truth, the Afghan soldiers did fight, suffering 60,000 killed in the war. Their talisman was the American military. No matter how tough the conditions, somehow an American voice crackled over the radio, followed by thunder from the air. Those few Americans were the steel rods in the concrete. When that steel was pulled out, the concrete crumbled. The spirit of the Afghan army was broken.

During the month following the abandonment of Bagram Air Base, the Pentagon remained passive. In contrast, a month before the abrupt fall of Saigon in 1975, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger was concerned about the North Vietnamese advances. As a former grunt in Vietnam, I was his special assistant during that turbulent time. He in­formed State and the White House that he was ordering an air evacuation; 50,000 Vietnamese were rescued before Saigon fell. In the case of Kabul, the Pentagon took no such preemptive action.
Worse, selecting which Afghans can fly to safety has been left to State Department bureaucrats, although State has an abysmal ten-year record, with 18,000 applicants stuck in the queue. Each day approximately 7,000 undocumented immigrants walk into America; about 2,000 Afghans are flown out daily from Kabul. In the midst of an epic foreign-policy catastrophe, the priorities of the Biden administration remain driven by domestic politics and constipated bureaucratic processes.
W
hat comes after the botched evacuation finally ends?
(1) A course correction inside the Pentagon is sorely needed. Our military reputation has been gravely diminished. The 1 percent of American youths who volunteer to serve are heavily influenced by their families. About 70 percent of service members have a relative who served before them. The Afghanistan War spanned an entire generation. What they took away from this defeat will be communicated from father to son, from aunt to niece.
To avoid alienating this small warrior class, the secretary of defense and chairman of the Joint Chiefs must put aside their obsession with alleged racism and diversity in the ranks. Former secretary of defense Mattis said that lethality must be the lodestone of our military. Sooner or later in the next six months, we will be challenged. Instead of again waiting passively for instructions, the Pentagon should recommend swift, decisive action.
(2) President Biden’s image as a foreign-policy expert is indelibly tarnished. As vice president in 2011, he vigorously supported the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq. Three years later, U.S. troops were rushed back in to prevent Iraq from falling to the radical Islamists. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wrote at the time, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign-policy and national-security issue over the past four decades.”
President Biden bragged that under his leadership, America was “back.” Instead, while denying that our allies were upset with his performance, he has destroyed his credibility. Per­haps there will be changes in his foreign-policy team, but President Biden himself will not be trusted by our allies as a reliable steward.

(3) In his Farewell Address, Washington wrote, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
As Washington warned, due to extreme partisanship, the American presidency has accumulated the powers of a king or a despot. In matters of war, over the past several decades one party in Congress or the other has gone along with whatever the president decided. This tilts power decisively in favor of the White House. Congress has abdicated from providing either oversight or a broad base of public support. The White House as an institution has become regal and aloof — the opposite of the intention of the Founding Fathers.
Afghanistan, from start to finish, was a White House war, subject to the whims and political instincts of our president. The result was an erraticism that drove out strategic consistency and perseverance. A confident President Bush invaded Afghanistan, blithely expanded the mission, and steered a haphazard course from 2001 through 2007. Presidents Obama and Trump were overtly cynical, surging (2010–2013) and reducing (2014–2020) forces while always seeking a way out divorced from any strategic goal. President Biden (2021) was a solipsistic pessimist who ignored the calamitous consequences and quit because that had been his emotional instinct for a decade.
(4) Our Vietnam veterans were proud of their service. The same is true of our Afghanistan veterans. In both wars, they carried out their duty, correctly believing their cause was noble. After nation-building was designated a military mission, our troops both fought the Taliban enemy and improved life for millions of Afghans. With the Taliban now the victors, it hurts to lose the war, especially when the decision rested entirely with one man.
Who are we as a country? Who will fight for us the next time?
This article appears as “Who Will Trust Us the Next Time?” in the September 13, 2021, print edition of National Review.




6. Kabul is only the start: US allies feel the draught as Biden turns his back

Very interesting analysis.
Biden is said to want to use the 20th anniversary of the 11 September al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington to declare America’s “forever wars” over – for which he will claim credit. Setting the Afghan shambles aside, he is expected to say the era of invasion, occupation, nation-building and the “global war on terror” is at an end.
For US allies, all this points to a new era of enforced self-sufficiency and greater uncertainty
This revised approach to counter-terrorism will be less ambitious – and more self-serving. The main focus will be on direct threats to the US “homeland”, not to the rest of the world. Enhanced “over-the-horizon” capabilities will supposedly reduce the need for overseas deployments and permanent bases. The US will henceforth strike at threats from afar. Britain is likely to adopt a similar policy.
“The US approach should centre on gathering intelligence, training indigenous forces, and maintaining air power as well as special forces capabilities for the occasional strike when necessary,” foreign policy analysts Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon argued recently.
No one knows whether such a costly, hard to organise strategy will work in the long term. But the shift is already having tangible consequences. In Iraq, for example, US combat operations will cease in December. About 2,500 Americans will stay, to train and advise. In Syria, a small number of special forces will remain. Iraqis understandably worry about an IS comeback and an Afghan-style implosion.

Kabul is only the start: US allies feel the draught as Biden turns his back
Retreat from Afghanistan gives a clear signal of a US shift on counter-terrorism that leaves the rest of the world to fend for itself
The Guardian · by Simon Tisdall · August 29, 2021
It is, perhaps, dreadfully apt that an invasion which began 20 years ago as a counter-terrorism operation has ended in the horror of a mass casualty terrorist attack. The US-led attempt to destroy al-Qaida and rescue Afghanistan from the Taliban was undercut by the Iraq war, which spawned Islamic State. Now the circle is complete as an Afghan IS offshoot emerges as America’s new nemesis.
The Kabul airport atrocity shows just how difficult it is to break the cycle of violence, vengeance and victimisation. Joe Biden’s swift vow to hunt down the perpetrators and “make them pay” presumably means US combat forces will again be in action in Afghanistan soon. If the past is any guide, mistakes will be made, civilians will die, local communities will be antagonised. Result: more terrorists.
It is an obvious irony that US military chiefs in Kabul are collaborating with the Taliban, their sworn enemy, against the common IS foe as the evacuation ends. This suggests negotiators, on both sides, could have tried harder to reach a workable peace deal. It may augur well for future cooperation, for example on humanitarian aid. But the Taliban has many faces – and many cannot be trusted.
Last week’s events have raised yet more questions about Biden’s judgment and competence. He will be blamed personally. His predicament recalls the downfall of another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter. After the disastrous failure of Operation Eagle Claw to rescue US hostages in Tehran in April 1980, Carter was voted out of office the following November.
Biden faces Republican calls to resign. His approval ratings have plunged. But he defiantly insists that quitting Afghanistan is the right thing to do. Polls suggest most Americans agree, though they are critical of how it has been managed. Unlike in Carter’s time, the next presidential election is three years away. By then the agony and humiliations of recent days may be a distant memory.
The Kabul debacle also casts doubt on Biden’s new counter-terrorism strategy, which reportedly downgrades the threat posed by Islamist terrorism to the US. His national security team wants to shift global priorities and resources to meet different, 21st-century challenges to American hegemony, such as China, cyberwarfare and the climate crisis.
Biden is said to want to use the 20th anniversary of the 11 September al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington to declare America’s “forever wars” over – for which he will claim credit. Setting the Afghan shambles aside, he is expected to say the era of invasion, occupation, nation-building and the “global war on terror” is at an end.
For US allies, all this points to a new era of enforced self-sufficiency and greater uncertainty
This revised approach to counter-terrorism will be less ambitious – and more self-serving. The main focus will be on direct threats to the US “homeland”, not to the rest of the world. Enhanced “over-the-horizon” capabilities will supposedly reduce the need for overseas deployments and permanent bases. The US will henceforth strike at threats from afar. Britain is likely to adopt a similar policy.
“The US approach should centre on gathering intelligence, training indigenous forces, and maintaining air power as well as special forces capabilities for the occasional strike when necessary,” foreign policy analysts Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon argued recently.
No one knows whether such a costly, hard to organise strategy will work in the long term. But the shift is already having tangible consequences. In Iraq, for example, US combat operations will cease in December. About 2,500 Americans will stay, to train and advise. In Syria, a small number of special forces will remain. Iraqis understandably worry about an IS comeback and an Afghan-style implosion.

US combat operations will end in Iraq in December. Photograph: Ali Al-Saadi/AFP/Getty Images
Biden has already washed his hands of the conflict in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has waged an ineffectual, highly destructive war against Iranian-backed Houthi militants. Across the Gulf of Aden, in Somalia, Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops still stands. A recent spate of bombings by al-Shabaab terrorists provoked limited US airstrikes – a probable future model.
The same story of US disengagement and drawback is heard across the Middle East as the US “pivots” to Asia. Combat aircraft are being redeployed, carrier battlegroups may be reassigned to the Pacific theatre, and anti-missile batteries are being withdrawn from Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Most of these assets were pointed at Iran, deemed a prime sponsor of terrorism.
In the Sahel, west Africa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique, the US barely registers in the fight against Boko Haram and assorted IS and al-Qaida affiliates. The impressively named US Africa Command is headquartered in Stuttgart. President Muhammadu Buhari warns that Nigeria could suffer a similar fate to Afghanistan without a “comprehensive partnership” with the US. “Some sense the west is losing its will for the fight,” he said.
For US allies, all this points to a new era of enforced self-sufficiency and greater uncertainty. While Islamist-inspired attacks in the US have been rare since 9/11, in Europe many hundreds have died. Yet collective European counter-terrorism efforts often lack a military cutting edge. An exception was France’s ill-supported Operation Barkhane in Mali – until it was halted this year after suffering many casualties for little gain.
The chaos in Afghanistan has vividly dramatised the ongoing threat from international terrorism. With up to 10,000 foreign Islamist fighters in the country, according to the UN, fears grow it will again become a launchpad for global jihad. So the prospect of a less directly engaged, homeland-focused American counter-terrorism approach is alarming for partners dependent on US leadership and protection.
European Nato allies, sniping at Biden, are in denial. They don’t want to admit his Afghan withdrawal is just the start of something bigger. And as recent events painfully demonstrate, the UK is not remotely able to fend for itself.
The Guardian · by Simon Tisdall · August 29, 2021


7. The deaths of 2 Marines in Kabul underscore the evolving roles of women in the military
There is no turning back. Women will forever more be on the front lines serving and sacrificing for our country.

The deaths of 2 Marines in Kabul underscore the evolving roles of women in the military
BY  ALEX HORTON, TRAVIS M. ANDREWS• THE WASHINGTON POST • AUGUST 29, 2021
Stars and Stripes · by Alex Horton, Travis M. Andrews · August 29, 2021
Marine Corps Cpl. Nicole Gee, second from left, a maintenance technician with 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, awaits the launch of an MV-22B Osprey during an exercise aboard the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima on April 5, 2021. Gee was one of the 13 U.S. service members killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul on Thursday. (Mark Morrow/U..S. Marine Corps)

Clad in body armor with her hair pulled back in a tight bun, Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee cradled the barefoot Afghan infant in her arm as softly as she could through thick work gloves.
"I love my job," the 23-year-old wrote in an Instagram caption last week, after her unit's enormous task of processing thousands of Afghan and American evacuees through the Kabul airport gates after the capital fell.
Gee, of Roseville, Calif., was one of the 13 U.S. service members killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul on Thursday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives outside Abbey Gate, where U.S. troops were focusing their efforts. Most were Marines in their early 20s, and two were women: Gee and Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario, 25, of Lawrence, Mass.
The deaths of Gee and Rosario underscore the unique mission women in the military have played in two decades of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even as women were barred from officially serving in combat jobs until recent years, female service members were already on the front lines, exposed to the same danger as infantrymen and working in roles where risk did not discriminate according to gender.
In many cases, female service members volunteered for teams focused on gathering intelligence from women and searching them on patrol — both jobs difficult for male troops to accomplish because of Islamic cultural sensitivities. The roles, often voluntary in nature, were conduits for women to sidestep restrictions and work alongside grunts and Special Operations troops.
Those advances and histories converged Thursday. Gee and Rosario, a maintenance technician and a supply chief, respectively, were assigned duties to search incoming Afghan women and children, Marine Corps officials said, putting them at the epicenter of risk exposure that the suicide bomber exploited. Rosario had volunteered with her unit's female engagement team, said 1st Lt. Jack Coppola, a Marine Corps spokesman, and "was screening women and children at Abbey Gate when the attack took place."
Gee, who was promoted last month, was also involved in searching women and children, officials said.
Her father, Richard Herrera, told The Washington Post that he wasn't sure why his daughter, trained in overseeing equipment, was at risk. He "never expected her to be on the front lines in Afghanistan," he said.
The grueling task of searching evacuees was placed squarely on the shoulders of junior troops and young leaders, such as Gee and Rosario, and there is no substitute for placing hands directly on bodies, officials said, to ensure that no militants were slipping by with explosives. Troops on duty ordinarily report in shifts and rotate on a roster.
But the Marine Corps has far fewer women in its ranks relative to other services, and the female Marines on hand may have been working more shifts at the gate than male counterparts, said Kyleanne Hunter, a former Marine Corps officer who flew Cobra attack helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Any time you are in contact with a person, you're opening yourself up to risk of the unknown. It puts you in a greater proximity to danger," said Hunter, a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank.
All-female groups, known as lioness teams and later as female engagement teams or cultural support teams, were key to counterinsurgency campaigns that long ignored what could be learned from female civilians on the battlefield.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, women were added to infantry units to engage with women they encountered, but the efforts became more formalized, said Hunter, who served on a Pentagon advisory committee on women in the military.
Women flourished in those roles, despite pushback from lawmakers and Pentagon officials trying to keep them from combat duties, and in other duties that men long held.
"As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — with their blurry front lines — intensified, the discrepancy between what was technically allowed for women in war zones and what was actually happening became more apparent," wrote Kasey Cordell, in a 5280 magazine story about women in combat. "It was impossible to deny the fact that women, regardless of their assigned jobs, were very much involved in 'engaging an enemy on the ground.' "
Although bans on women serving directly in combat roles were not lifted until 2013, the services took years to implement their rules. The first female Marine Corps infantry officer earned her designation in 2017.
Female service members dotted the casualty list before then, often in noncombat roles.
Lt. Ashley White Stumpf joined one such all-female Army cultural support team in August 2011, when she was tasked with building and improving relations with Afghan civilians. She served alongside Special Operations forces, "encountering the same type of intense risks as their male counterparts," the Military Times reported.
The 24-year-old Ohio native was killed in an IED blast two months into her deployment. She was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star. A book about her and other women, "Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield," is being developed into a film produced by Reese Witherspoon.
Two years later, Army Capt. Jennifer Moreno, 25, was killed while serving on a Special Operations task force in Kandahar province. Although Moreno, a nurse by training, survived the initial blast, she stepped on a land mine while rushing to help a wounded soldier.
"None of us would have done what you did, running into hell to save your wounded brothers, knowing full well you probably wouldn't make it back," Capt. Amanda King, the commander of Moreno's cultural support team, wrote in her eulogy, according to Task and Purpose. The San Diego native was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star, the Combat Action Badge and a Purple Heart.
Before Thursday, the last female service member killed in combat appears to be Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, a Navy cryptologist who died in a 2019 Islamic State bombing in Manbij, Syria, along with another service member, a Defense Department civilian and a U.S. contractor working as an interpreter.
As more women filter into combat jobs previously closed to them, more will be wounded and killed, said Hunter, illustrating the need for Americans to better understand who gets remembered for valor, and who counts as veterans.
"Women have been part of this fight for a long time," she said.
Stars and Stripes · by Alex Horton, Travis M. Andrews · August 29, 2021



8. Who Abandoned Bagram Air Base?

There will be a lot of second guessing for a long time.

I would just say the reason the forces "slipped quietly out of Bagram at night" was that the planners and commanders were most likely trying to prevent what may soon happen in Kabul.

Excerpts:
The way U.S. forces quietly slipped out of Bagram was also demoralizing for the Afghan army and probably contributed to its collapse. The Associated Press spoke to soldiers wandering the base the next day. “They lost all the goodwill of 20 years,” one said, “by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.” The word must have spread: If the U.S. is abandoning its prized air base, then it really was bugging out altogether.
After the collapse of the Afghan government, Mr. Biden could have sent in enough U.S. troops to retake Bagram and provide for a safer evacuation. He declined that option in favor of getting to the exits as fast as possible, hoping to avoid a confrontation with the Taliban that could result in American casualties. On Thursday he got casualties anyway.
The wreck of Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal is damaging enough. But he compounds the harm to his credibility, and America’s, when he refuses to acknowledge mistakes and spins defeat as a victory for realism. Mr. Biden should take responsibility for his own bad decisions, instead of trying to hide behind the military brass.

Who Abandoned Bagram Air Base?
Biden says the military, but the military says he gave them little choice.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board

An Afghan policeman stands guard inside Bagram US air base after all US and NATO troops left on July 5.
Photo: wakil kohsar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The terrorist threat to U.S. troops, civilians and Afghans continues to loom over the frantic evacuation of Kabul airport. Thursday’s suicide bombing, which killed 13 Americans and nearly 200 Afghans, has been claimed by an Islamic State affiliate, which is plotting more.
Why are American troops in such a difficult-to-defend position? The evacuation is taking place at an urban airport with a civilian wing, and perimeter security is being provided, unbelievably, by the Taliban. Only about 40 miles away is Bagram airfield, the military base that the U.S. vacated in the dead of night in July, without even warning America’s Afghan allies.

President Biden on Thursday essentially blamed his generals for the Bagram pullout. “They concluded—the military—that Bagram was not much value added, that it was much wiser to focus on Kabul,” he said. “And so, I followed that recommendation.” What Mr. Biden neglected to mention is that the President sets the constraints under which the military draws up plans and evaluates options.
At a briefing last week, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that securing Bagram took “a significant level of military effort,” and “our task given to us at that time, our task was to protect the Embassy in order for the Embassy personnel to continue to function.” As a result, he added, “we had to collapse one or the other.”
When the decision was made, which was long before the Afghan government fell, the military thought using Kabul airport did not entail substantially higher risk. That option was judged, Gen. Milley said, “to be the better tactical solution in accordance with the mission set we were given and in accordance with getting the troops down to about 600, 700 number.”
On a call Friday with Members of Congress, a military briefer also elaborated on the White House line that the Pentagon made Mr. Biden do it. The briefer said the President’s order was to leave the country, and the military had to secure the Embassy.
That mission of withdrawal was Mr. Biden’s bad call, and his generals sought to make it work. Gen. Milley told Congress in June: “Bagram is not necessary, tactically or operationally, for what we’re going to try to do here with Afghanistan—consolidate on Kabul in support of their government.” Obviously the Afghans didn’t get the support they needed.
The way U.S. forces quietly slipped out of Bagram was also demoralizing for the Afghan army and probably contributed to its collapse. The Associated Press spoke to soldiers wandering the base the next day. “They lost all the goodwill of 20 years,” one said, “by leaving the way they did, in the night, without telling the Afghan soldiers who were outside patrolling the area.” The word must have spread: If the U.S. is abandoning its prized air base, then it really was bugging out altogether.
After the collapse of the Afghan government, Mr. Biden could have sent in enough U.S. troops to retake Bagram and provide for a safer evacuation. He declined that option in favor of getting to the exits as fast as possible, hoping to avoid a confrontation with the Taliban that could result in American casualties. On Thursday he got casualties anyway.
The wreck of Mr. Biden’s Afghan withdrawal is damaging enough. But he compounds the harm to his credibility, and America’s, when he refuses to acknowledge mistakes and spins defeat as a victory for realism. Mr. Biden should take responsibility for his own bad decisions, instead of trying to hide behind the military brass.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by The Editorial Board



9. American-Born Disinformation is Harming U.S. Allies—Just Ask the Baltics.

Damn QAnon and all the other conspiracy theorists.

Excerpts:
When it comes to our digital information environment, the United States also has unique regulatory jurisdiction over social media companies. Facebook is the most popular social media network (and the de facto internet) in several countries, including the Baltics. The company has also become increasingly secretive about its inner workings, and implemented a number of changes that collectively make it harder for independent researchers and monitoring organizations to understand the spread of dangerous misinformation on its platform. Requiring more data transparency would help the public better understand the extent of our disinformation problem, the main actors, and whether Facebook has done enough to address anti-vaccination conspiracies and other dangerous misinformation on its platform. At the very least, access to Facebook data would give us a clearer assessment of the threat of disinformation and online conspiracies. If the platform is really a neutral mirror reflecting the ills of society without causing them, people deserve to know.
These conspiracy networks are not just a bump in the road to the return to normal life. They are their own viral contagion, spreading beyond American borders to infect our allies. The United States didn’t create the pandemic (unless you believe certain conspiracies from Russia), but until it takes measures to contain the spread of viral disinformation, it will be accountable for prolonging it.


American-Born Disinformation is Harming U.S. Allies—Just Ask the Baltics.
QAnon is an unquestionably American phenomenon, and its international proliferation is embarrassing at best. At worst, QAnon, anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy groups are prolonging the global pandemic and fomenting anti-government violence against the United States and American allies.
The National Interest · by Eleanor Lopatto · August 24, 2021
There’s a saying that when the United States sneezes, the world catches a cold. Now some of the world’s most robust immune systems are struggling with a bad case of QAnon.
The three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—are some of the best-prepared on Earth to defend against the evolving threat of modern information campaigns. Their governments, businesses and civil societies honed their skills against Russian information and cyber warfare for nearly a decade before the United States uncovered evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
The coronavirus panedemic was a major stress test for the Baltics, forcing intelligence and strategic communications analysts to reconfigure their Russia-centric threat models in order to face a tsunami of misleading information coming not just across their Eastern border, but from every corner of the Earth. The Latvian Strategic Coordination Department coordinated crisis communications while also supporting the volunteer-run Kopā pret COVID-19 (“Together Against COVID-19”) initiative. In Estonia, the government’s strategic communications team called on an emergency reserve of crisis communication experts. At DebunkEU.org’s headquarters in Vilnius, Viktoras Daukšas reported that his staff worked fourteen- to eighteeen-hour days during the initial months of the pandemic in order to monitor and analyze a three-fold increase in digital mis- and disinformation.
They noticed an alarming new trend among the most popular pieces of disinformation. “Typically, videos in the Lithuanian language on Youtube might have maybe 100k [views] - if it’s a really popular one, 300k. But then we started to analyze and we found twelve videos in the Lithuanian language that were viewed more than three million times. Which is crazy,” added Daukšas. “And all of them are conspiracy theories—about 5G, about COVID, and about QAnon.”

“The summer and autumn of 2020 saw an explosion in the number of Lithuanian Twitter accounts containing the letter Q,” Re:Baltica reported last February. Conspiracy-minded individuals in the Baltics used QAnon-related hashtags like #WWG1WGA, #Q17, or #savethechildren to attract online audiences or to learn about the latest anti-lockdown protest techniques. References to "Plandemic," the most popular piece of coronavirus-related conspiracy media in the United States last year, appeared on protest signs across the Baltics, alongside anti-LGBTQ narratives, anti-5G slogans, and accusations that Bill Gates is injecting the world’s population with microchips via forced vaccinations.
The similarities between anti-COVID narratives in the United States and abroad is “a question of conspiracy theory templates,” according to Nerijus Maliukevičius, a professor researching information warfare and strategic communications at the University of Vilnius. QAnon hashtags served to connect bubbles of conspiratorial belief across borders and language barriers. “If something becomes a story in the States, it spills into all other conspiracy theory bubbles.”
As Americans learned from last January’s Capitol insurrection, QAnon and its adherents can inflict real violence. I spoke to Maliukevičius after an estimated 5,000 Lithuanians gathered outside the national parliament on August 10 to protest against new restrictions for unvaccinated individuals. According to local reporting, protesters erected improvised gallows with the inscription “For Lithuania’s Traitors” and compared COVID restrictions to Nazi Germany. Twenty-six people were arrested and eighteen police officers were reportedly injured after the protests turned violent. A week later, another 5,000 demonstrators flooded the Latvian capital of Riga after the government announced compulsory vaccinations for some professional groups, marking the country’s largest protests since 2009. When Maliukevičius saw that protesters in both Vilnius and Riga used the Star of David as a symbol of perceived discrimination, he realized these demonstrations were part of “the same dramatization that is played out by anti-vaxxers” in the United States and Europe.
Online conspiracy networks play a central role in organizing anti-lockdown protests in the United States and around the world. “A lot of the [protest] tactics actually come from abroad, and the content as well, for the domestic disinformation actors,” noted Nora Biteniece, a consultant for the Strategic Communications Coordination Department at the State Chancellery of Latvia. “They follow groups—foreign disinformation or COVID-skeptic groups—then they just translate the content and put it on their websites, on Facebook and so on.” For example, she saw protests against coronavirus restrictions in Latvia increase in size and sophistication after “World Freedom Rally” protests organized by coronavirus skeptics in Summer 2020.
The QAnon constellation of conspiracies threatens global public health by promoting both vaccine hesitancy and physical violence. A recent FBI assessment noted the connection between QAnon and domestic violent extremism, and acknowledged that “the current environment likely will continue to act as a catalyst for some to begin accepting the legitimacy of violent action.” Facebook banned QAnon in October 2020 after an unprecedented surge of conspiracy content, but a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue concluded that the ban “came too late.” An international network of conspiracy theorists continues to propagate anti-vaccination and anti-government narratives on the site in at least fifteen different languages.
Fueled by the pandemic, QAnon adherents and anti-vaxxers have become “a new type of International,” observed Maliukevičius, drawing a comparison between the old Soviet Communist International and the modern conspiracy movement. “What is fascinating to see is how QAnon and conspiracy networks movements create a global network or movement, and this can really be seen in Lithuania. It’s not so much ideological, but based on conspiracy, all things anti-systemic, a very complex picture you have here from extreme-right to extreme-left.”
QAnon is an unquestionably American phenomenon, and its international proliferation is embarrassing at best. At worst, QAnon, anti-vaxxers and other conspiracy groups are prolonging the global pandemic and fomenting anti-government violence against the United States and American allies. The problem will likely get worse without meaningful interventions, and after several years of neglect from platforms and policy-makers, QAnon and coronavirus conspiracies are deeply entrenched online.
What can we do to solve our QAnon problem? There is no easy solution, but we can take inspiration for best practices from the Baltics. The simplest place to start may be improving the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) communication practices, which have been criticized throughout the pandemic for being unclear, contradictory or withholding information the CDC used to decide public health guidelines. In an evolving crisis like the COVID pandemic, transparency about what officials do and do not know goes a long way towards shoring up trust in public institutions.
When it comes to vaccine hesitancy, outreach to local activists and media influencers plays a vital role in spreading information to hard-to-reach demographic groups. Because QAnon and anti-vaccine conspiracies frame COVID vaccines as part of an international government conspiracy, interrupting that framing via interpersonal encouragement and community outreach may be the most effective way to increase vaccination rates among those who are still hesitant.
We should also consider larger, structural changes that would increase our foundation of institutional trust. “You can’t solve disinformation tricks and acts just through communication, and debunking and things like that,” Biteniece observed about the domestic disinformation problem in Latvia. “In the long term, we need to improve the quality of our education, we need to improve the socioeconomic situation in the country.” Providing economic relief packages, freezing rent payments, and delivering other kinds of material assistance improves people’s quality of life, reduces fear and uncertainty, and undermines the effectiveness of conspiracy groups that rely on distrust in government to recruit new followers.
When it comes to our digital information environment, the United States also has unique regulatory jurisdiction over social media companies. Facebook is the most popular social media network (and the de facto internet) in several countries, including the Baltics. The company has also become increasingly secretive about its inner workings, and implemented a number of changes that collectively make it harder for independent researchers and monitoring organizations to understand the spread of dangerous misinformation on its platform. Requiring more data transparency would help the public better understand the extent of our disinformation problem, the main actors, and whether Facebook has done enough to address anti-vaccination conspiracies and other dangerous misinformation on its platform. At the very least, access to Facebook data would give us a clearer assessment of the threat of disinformation and online conspiracies. If the platform is really a neutral mirror reflecting the ills of society without causing them, people deserve to know.
These conspiracy networks are not just a bump in the road to the return to normal life. They are their own viral contagion, spreading beyond American borders to infect our allies. The United States didn’t create the pandemic (unless you believe certain conspiracies from Russia), but until it takes measures to contain the spread of viral disinformation, it will be accountable for prolonging it.
Eleanor Lopatto holds a Master's degree in Eurasian, Russian, & East European Studies from Georgetown University.
Image: Reuters
The National Interest · by Eleanor Lopatto · August 24, 2021





10. The World Economy’s Supply Chain Problem Keeps Getting Worse

Excerpts:

Manufacturers reeling from shortages of key components and higher raw material and energy costs are being forced into bidding wars to get space on vessels, pushing freight rates to records and prompting some exporters to raise prices or simply cancel shipments altogether. 
...
The cost of sending a container from Asia to Europe is about 10 times higher than in May 2020, while the cost from Shanghai to Los Angeles has grown more than sixfold, according to the Drewry World Container Index. The global supply chain has become so fragile that a single, small accident “could easily have its effects compounded,” HSBC Holdings Plc. said in a note.
...
As factories succumb to lock-downs, manufacturers are forced into a game of whac-a-mole, switching raw materials from one country to another. Some have resorted to air-freighting materials such as leather to factories to keep production lines rolling.




The World Economy’s Supply Chain Problem Keeps Getting Worse
August 25, 2021, 5:00 PM EDT
  •  Shipping shortages spark bidding wars by factory owners
  •  Rising costs push exporters to raise prices, stoking inflation


Supply Lines is a daily newsletter that tracks trade and supply chains disrupted by the pandemic. Sign up here.
A supply chain crunch that was meant to be temporary now looks like it will last well into next year as the surging delta variant upends factory production in Asia and disrupts shipping, posing more shocks to the world economy.
Manufacturers reeling from shortages of key components and higher raw material and energy costs are being forced into bidding wars to get space on vessels, pushing freight rates to records and prompting some exporters to raise prices or simply cancel shipments altogether. 

“We can’t get enough components, we can’t get containers, costs have been driven up tremendously,” said Christopher Tse, chief executive officer of Hong Kong-based Musical Electronics Ltd., which makes consumer products from Bluetooth speakers to Rubik’s Cubes. 
Tse said the cost of magnets used in the puzzle toy have risen by about 50% since March, increasing the production cost by about 7%. “I don’t know if we can make money from Rubik’s Cubes because prices keep changing.”

A container ship in Qingdao on Aug. 7. As factories succumb to lock-downs, manufacturers are forced to switch raw materials from one country to another.Photographer: Costfoto/Barcroft Media/Getty Images
China’s determination to stamp out Covid has meant even a small number of cases can cause major disruptions to trade. This month the government temporarily closed part of the world’s third-busiest container port at Ningbo for two weeks after a single dockworker was found to have the delta variant. Earlier this year, wharves in Shenzhen were idled after the discovery of a handful of coronavirus cases. 

“Port congestion and a shortage of container shipping capacity may last into the fourth quarter or even mid-2022,” said Hsieh Huey-chuan, president of Taiwan-based Evergreen Marine Corp., the world’s seventh-biggest container liner, at an investor briefing on Aug. 20. “If the pandemic cannot be effectively contained, port congestion may become a new normal.” 
The cost of sending a container from Asia to Europe is about 10 times higher than in May 2020, while the cost from Shanghai to Los Angeles has grown more than sixfold, according to the Drewry World Container Index. The global supply chain has become so fragile that a single, small accident “could easily have its effects compounded,” HSBC Holdings Plc. said in a note.
Ocean View
Spot rates for shipping containers from China to U.S., Europe hit new highs
Source: Drewry World Container Index
*Note: FEU refers to a 40-foot container
Higher freight rates and semiconductor prices could feed into inflation, said Chua Hak Bin, senior economist at Maybank Kim Eng Research Pte. in Singapore. In addition, producers including Taiwan’s Giant Manufacturing Co., the world’s biggest bicycle maker, say they will raise prices to reflect the increased costs. 

In the U.S., forecasters have lowered growth projections for this year and lifted inflation expectations into 2022, according to Bloomberg’s latest monthly survey of economists. Compared to a year earlier, the personal consumption expenditures price index is now expected to rise 4% in the third quarter and 4.1% in the fourth, double the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.
Hong Kong-based coffee-machine maker Eric Chan doesn’t see the crunch easing for months as he juggles a supply line that involves hundreds of components to meet booming demand for kitchen appliances. 
“We are storing up critical components for one year of usage because if we miss one component, we cannot manufacture the products,” said Chan, chief executive of Town Ray Holdings Ltd., which gets 90% of sales from household brand names in Europe.
The spread of the delta variant, especially in Southeast Asia, is making it difficult for many factories to operate at all. In Vietnam, the world’s second-largest producer of footwear and clothing, the government has ordered manufacturers to allow workers to sleep in their factories to try to keep exports moving. 

Even mighty Toyota Motor Corp. is affected. The automaker warned this month it will suspend output at 14 plants across Japan and slash production by 40% due to supply disruptions including chip shortages. 
On the other side of the planet, companies in the U.K. are grappling with record low levels of stock and retail selling prices are rising at the fastest pace since November 2017. 
Germany’s recovery is also under threat. A key measure of business confidence in Europe’s largest economy, released on Wednesday by the Munich-based Ifo institute. fell by more than economists had predicted with the drop blamed in part on shortages for metals, plastic products and semiconductors, among other goods. 
 
What Bloomberg Economics Says...
It is hard to see supply chain bottlenecks being resolved any time soon, with some major exporters including Indonesia and Vietnam still struggling to contain the delta outbreak. It could continue to drag on the global recovery by slowing production and pushing up costs, although not derailing it. 
Chang Shu, chief Asia economist
At the heart of the price pressures is the transportation bottleneck.

Big retailers tend to have long-term contracts with container lines, but Asian production relies on networks of tens of thousands of small and medium-sized producers who often arrange shipping through logistics firms and freight forwarders. They in turn have been struggling to secure space for clients as vessel owners sell to the highest bidders.
Some 60% to 70% of shipping deals on the Asia-America route are done through spot or short-term deals, according to Michael Wang, an analyst at President Capital Management Corp. He said auction-style pricing may continue until Chinese New Year in February 2022.
Buyers agree. In Germany, more than half of the 3,000 firms polled by the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce expected widespread supply-chain problems to persist into next year.
‘No Choice’
“Now container liners don’t sign long-term agreements, and most deals are done by spot prices,” said Jason Lo, CEO of Taiwanese gym equipment maker Johnson Health Tech Co. He said it was becoming impossible to estimate shipping costs and do financial planning, but “we have no choice.”

Colin Sung, general manager of Dongguan-based World-Beater International Logistics Co., said one client had more than 70 containers of goods sitting at a warehouse in Shenzhen because his American buyer didn’t want to pay the shipping cost. Sung said 60% to 70% of his clients have cut shipments due to rising costs.
Choke on the Water
Bottlenecks at key West Coast ports have lingered since November
Source: Marine Exchange of Southern California & Vessel Traffic Service L.A./Long Beach
For Asian factories outside China, the problem is even worse. Many Chinese companies are willing to pay above-market rates to load their cargo, said a spokesman at HMM Co., South Korea’s biggest container line. So when the ships call at ports outside China, they’re already almost full.
Chinese companies that spent decades shifting production of lower-value components to cheaper labor markets in South and Southeast Asia now face the headache of trying to get those parts to factories where they can be assembled into finished products. 
“We are talking about a lot of money just to move things around,” said Sunny Tan, executive vice president of Luen Thai International Group Ltd., which makes clothing and leather handbags for global brands. 

As factories succumb to lock-downs, manufacturers are forced into a game of whac-a-mole, switching raw materials from one country to another. Some have resorted to air-freighting materials such as leather to factories to keep production lines rolling.
Meanwhile, Luen Thai’s Tan, who is also Deputy Chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, is trying to figure out how he’ll fill festive display windows in time for Christmas. “I wish when shoppers see our product they give it a kiss when they realize how difficult it was just to get it to the shelf.”
— With assistance by Kyunghee Park, and Kevin Dharmawan


11. US military must prepare for POW concerns in the deepfake era

I wonder how this is being addressed in SERE training. Recall the psychological impact of the sounds we would hear in the RTL (resistance training laboratory), babies crying and young children calling for their daddy to come home and how hard it is on their mothers. Imagine the deep fakes drawn from social media with a POW's actual children and wife calling for him to come home in a deep fake video. I wonder if they are mining SERE students' social media accounts to create deep fakes to use in the RTL to "inoculate" them to be ready for this "technique."

And obviously the implications for this go well beyond our POWs.

Excerpts:
From a POW and captive recovery perspective, this technology creates two distinct concerns.
The first concern is the release of a POW deepfake to the public. Even though a violation of the Geneva Conventions, such a deepfake could be manipulated and utilized to create narratives of war crimes, atrocities, rejection of the U.S. war effort, pleadings to end the war, and other propaganda. The videos and audio could be distributed back to the American homefront on a broad scale to undermine the American war effort and the will to fight, stress families, influence politicians, and create cleavage in communities to weaken support for the war.
The second concern is that the captor could show deepfakes to POWs in order to manipulate them while in captivity. The captor could utilize deepfakes to indoctrinate, psychologically destabilize and manipulate the captive’s mental state. This effect becomes more likely in a protracted conflict where captivity might continue for several years. Even if each individual deepfake could be brushed off as likely fake, it is likely that over time, the isolation and pressure from the surrounding conditions could induce a POW to accept the deepfakes as real.

US military must prepare for POW concerns in the deepfake era
Defense News · by Jan Kallberg · August 23, 2021
In previous conflicts, authoritarian regimes have attempted to exploit their American prisoners of war for propaganda gain. These efforts often took the form of video and audio recordings as well as pictures of the POWs, despite such activities being in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions. The prospect of advanced digital capabilities such as deepfakes presents a significant new tool for potential adversaries in future conflicts. The American military must prepare for the prospect of these new technologies being used against their POWs in future conflicts.
Deepfake is the technique to manipulate video and audio to make it appear in a video that the person says or does something they never said or did. The technique utilizes preexisting audio and video of the target to create a video (potentially even a real-time, live video feed) where another person is controlling what is said by the deepfake subject, duplicating the targeted individual’s face, features, speech and vocal distinction. The end product is often not only plausible, but it can also be highly believable.
Several internet-famous deepfakes have surfaced on social media. The deepfakes of the Belgian visual artist Chris Ume gained international attention as he created compelling manipulated videos featuring what appeared to be Tom Cruise. The person is instead the actor Miles Fisher that Ume created to look and sound like Tom Cruise. Ume needed two months to create the Tom Cruise deepfakes, but he did not have access to Tom Cruise and couldn’t call him in to extract voice or features to speed up the deepfake creation. Today, a deepfake can be created in as little as five minutes. In a POW or captivity scenario, the captor’s access to the captive will render it very simple for the captor to create a deepfake of the captive.
From a POW and captive recovery perspective, this technology creates two distinct concerns.
The first concern is the release of a POW deepfake to the public. Even though a violation of the Geneva Conventions, such a deepfake could be manipulated and utilized to create narratives of war crimes, atrocities, rejection of the U.S. war effort, pleadings to end the war, and other propaganda. The videos and audio could be distributed back to the American homefront on a broad scale to undermine the American war effort and the will to fight, stress families, influence politicians, and create cleavage in communities to weaken support for the war.
The second concern is that the captor could show deepfakes to POWs in order to manipulate them while in captivity. The captor could utilize deepfakes to indoctrinate, psychologically destabilize and manipulate the captive’s mental state. This effect becomes more likely in a protracted conflict where captivity might continue for several years. Even if each individual deepfake could be brushed off as likely fake, it is likely that over time, the isolation and pressure from the surrounding conditions could induce a POW to accept the deepfakes as real.
In our view, the POW deepfake concerns need to be addressed in advance of potential conflicts where such tactics may be used. Planning and research initiatives should be commenced to address these increasingly likely possibilities. Preliminary efforts should include: (1) establishing ways to identify deepfakes shortly after their dissemination, (2) exploring the possibility of preparing a validated genuine video of all servicemembers as an aid to identifying deepfakes, with enough data that could be deposited before deployment (much like is currently done for ISOPREP), (3) preparing both the military and public at large in advance to the possibility of deepfakes, and (4) including deepfake information in POW training in order to prepare servicemembers for the possibility that deepfakes may be used against them in captivity.
Jan Kallberg is a research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point and an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy. Col. Stephen Hamilton is the chief of staff and technical director at the Army Cyber Institute at West Point and an associate professor at the United States Military Academy. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Army Cyber Institute at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy or the Defense Department.

12. A Harvard professor predicted COVID disinformation on the web. Here’s what may be coming next

I wish everyone reposting these tropes would realize what they are really contributing to.

Excerpts:
Those tropes have started to show up in recent protests in California, she said, where some people have gathered to rally against mask mandates, comparing it to Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.
At Donovan’s lab, based out of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a team of over 20 researchers dissect the major disinformation campaigns of the moment and reveal trends they see. Much of the work is manual, with the team poring over reams of content on YouTube, online forums, and social media.
After Trump said hydroxychloroquine could cure COVID-19 in March 2020, they traced back the false claim to an obscure Google document, showing the power of “cloaked science,” referring to disinformation that uses scientific jargon.
Now, Donovan and her team are watching the growth in “burn the mask” protests, where false beliefs that masks cause bacterial pneumonia are leading people to set them on fire and post videos online.
“The most pernicious forms of disinformation usually have a downstream effect where people do change their behaviors,” she said, “and some campaigns can lead to violence.”
A Harvard professor predicted COVID disinformation on the web. Here’s what may be coming next - The Boston Globe
The Boston Globe · by Pranshu Verma
Every day around 9 p.m., Joan Donovan bids her wife good night, heads into her home office — which she calls the “dungeon” — and binges white supremacist videos and conspiracy theories on YouTube.
Donovan’s nightly ritual, which often lasts until 2 a.m., is difficult but essential to her research at Harvard Kennedy School. At a time when false claims around COVID-19 and politics are running rampant, the former punk-rocker from Saugus has been able to predict what types of disinformation will travel from the darkest corners of the Internet to — in some cases — the highest levels of the US government.
She was one of the first researchers to predict medical disinformation would upend the fight against COVID. She also saw xenophobia associated with the pandemic on an alt-right YouTube show, weeks before then-President Trump called it the “China Virus.” And at 8:30 a.m. on Jan. 6, the day pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol, she warned on Twitter that “today we will witness the full break of the MAGA movement from representative politics.”
Now, she has a broader warning: If Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies don’t change their algorithms, any number of recent lies spreading online could take hold in the next few months and threaten the national discourse around the pandemic recovery, climate change, and racial inequality.
“Tech companies have built a system in which people spread misinformation so much further, so much faster, and in such higher velocities, that fighting it is like bringing a garden hose to a 30-story building that’s on fire,” Donovan said in an interview. “We need updated regulations that would ensure protection for the public interest.”
On a recent summer day, Donovan sat in her suburban Boston home office and opened up her YouTube playlist. There were videos questioning the coronavirus’s existence, clips of people disputing critical race theory — which argues that racism is embedded in laws and policies — in town halls, and footage of racist violence at street protests.
Donovan circled onto a clip from the controversial comedian Russell Brand delving into “The Great Reset,” a term far-right groups are using to claim billionaires and other leaders are using the pandemic, climate change, and private philanthropy to realign the world to benefit the rich.
The term — which originated in 2020 at a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland — had started popping up on her playlist. Clips of Brand buying into the concept far outpaced his other videos. A cross-reference of the term on 4chan, an anonymous messaging site known in part for conspiracy theories, showed it was starting to be used there as well.
“It always goes back to these very old antisemitic tropes about Jews controlling the world, or what they might call the ‘Deep State,’ or ‘New World Order,’” Donovan said. “And so ‘The Great Reset’ really clicked.”
Those tropes have started to show up in recent protests in California, she said, where some people have gathered to rally against mask mandates, comparing it to Nazis forcing Jews to wear yellow stars.
At Donovan’s lab, based out of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a team of over 20 researchers dissect the major disinformation campaigns of the moment and reveal trends they see. Much of the work is manual, with the team poring over reams of content on YouTube, online forums, and social media.
After Trump said hydroxychloroquine could cure COVID-19 in March 2020, they traced back the false claim to an obscure Google document, showing the power of “cloaked science,” referring to disinformation that uses scientific jargon.
Now, Donovan and her team are watching the growth in “burn the mask” protests, where false beliefs that masks cause bacterial pneumonia are leading people to set them on fire and post videos online.
“The most pernicious forms of disinformation usually have a downstream effect where people do change their behaviors,” she said, “and some campaigns can lead to violence.”
To slow the spread, Donovan has suggested some solutions. Social media companies should hire librarians to help curate content on news feeds, she said, rather than simply employ people to moderate it. “Moderation is a plan to remove what is harmful,” she wrote in Wired. “Curation actively finds what is helpful, contextual, and, most importantly, truthful.”
“You had to know about the subculture in order to decode what was going on,” Donovan said. “I can see that as something that was formative in my own biography.”Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Donovan’s immersion in this world has exacted a personal toll. She’s a frequent target of death threats, online insults, and harassment. To ensure her safety, Harvard has installed a panic button in her office on campus. “It does weigh on you,” she said. “If my wife asked me to stop, I’d stop.”
In a way, Donovan’s rise to academic prominence is no surprise.
Her interest in studying extremist groups started in the early 1990s, when she was enmeshed in the underground rock scene in Massachusetts as a teenager. The subculture was rife with neo-Nazis, racists, and skinheads, she said. To stay safe, she needed to master how people communicated to separate who was extremist and who wasn’t. (For example, skinheads who wore white laces in their Doc Martens were racist, she said, while those who wore red were not.)
“You had to know about the subculture in order to decode what was going on,” she said. “I can see that as something that was formative in my own biography.”
Her path to academia was not linear. Donovan — who has a love for Dodge Chargers and Stephen King novels, and who helped invent the beaver emoji — took nine years to graduate college. She started in 1997 at Northeastern University and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Concordia University, with a stint in a punk-rock band in between. She got her doctorate in 2015, focusing on the Occupy movement. Her early research focused on the worldview of white supremacists.
At Harvard, Donovan keeps a small teaching course load and manages her research lab, which has upward of $10 million in funding from philanthropic foundations and donors. Her work on how to “detect, document, and debunk” misinformation on the web has gotten her into the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of social media giants. (Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, recently gave the Harvard Kennedy School $5 million to support her lab’s work.)
Donovan has been spending more time recently with lawmakers, advising them on how to squash disinformation. In January 2020, she testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, urging politicians to curb the spread of “Deep Fake” videos, counterfeit propaganda campaigns, and other forms of online fraud.
Shortly after the 2020 election, she went before the House Select Committee on Intelligence to say that companies including Facebook and Twitter must do more to their algorithms and practices to promote more timely, local, and accurate journalism.
In December 2020, five lawmakers in Congress wrote to President-elect Biden asking him to name Donovan to the COVID task force. We “urge you to add a member to the Task Force who has a deep understanding of misinformation, including its causes, exacerbating factors, and ways to combat it,” they said. (He did not name her.)
There are some researchers who believe Donovan’s work is not attacking the true issue. Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School, published research with his coworkers on the 2020 election that said mass media outlets, such as Fox News, are more to blame than social media for the spread of disinformation. (In response to the criticism, Donovan said “misinformation-at-scale is a problem across all forms of media and it is not possible to disentangle social media from other channels.”)
Ultimately, Donovan believes the pandemic shows how sorely social media companies, journalists, citizens, and governments need to change the way they interact on the web.
Companies should focus less on debunking every medical myth and instead create protocols for deciding which disinformation campaigns are “reaching a tipping point” and should be addressed, she said. Local journalists should be vigilant in parsing through misinformation and not mistakenly report it as news. Politicians should require that social media platforms be more strongly regulated, like TV and radio stations.
“We should have an Internet that supports democracy,” she said.
Pranshu Verma can be reached at pranshu.verma@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @pranshuverma_.
The Boston Globe · by Pranshu Verma
13. New research points to role of social media in stoking division in U.S.
This is a blinding flash of the obvious.

New research points to role of social media in stoking division in U.S.
techpolicy.press · August 24, 2021
In his March 25th testimony to the House Energy & Commerce Committee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the divisiveness in U.S. politics by blaming political elites and the media environment, arguing “that technology can help bring people together.”
New research in a range of disciplines suggests today’s platforms are in fact part of the problem, and points to the need to study the information ecosystem from higher vantage to look for more connections and effects across the various groups of actors, media and platforms that influence the public sphere.
Social media facilitates polarization through “social, cognitive, and technological processes”
Writing in Trends in Cognitive Science, researchers and psychology and neural science at NYU and the University of Cambridge observe that reviewed empirical research to evaluate the relationship between social media and polarization, observing that while “social media is unlikely to be the main driver of polarization,” it is “often a key facilitator.” The researchers observe that the key factors that appear to shape the role of social media with regard to polarization are “partisan selection, message content, and platform design and algorithms.”
Walking through each, the researchers detail experimental results that correspond to these factors. For instance, they find that in the category of partisan selection, “cognitive biases in information seeking, belief updating, and sharing may all increase polarization,” and that while these biases emerge from the user they “may also interact with platform features to amplify the effect” such as triggering algorithms to increase exposure to similar content.
Partisan rhetoric on social media. Brady, W.J. et al. Source
With regard to platform design and algorithms, research points to the conclusion that different platforms contribute to division in different and unique ways. “Some platforms’ algorithms seem to amplify content that affirms one’s social identity and pre-existing beliefs,” say the authors, such as Facebook’s newsfeed.
Interventions on false claims could backfire, exacerbate spread on other platforms
One problem area where social media platforms have increased efforts to mitigate divisive and polarizing content is with regard to disinformation. But efforts to stop the spread of false and misleading content and ideas suggest the problem is tricky, and some interventions could produce undesired outcomes.
Writing in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review, researchers from NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) looked at “tweets from Former President Donald Trump, posted from November 1, 2020 through January 8, 2021,” a period in which he was sharing a high volume of false and misleading claims related to the outcome of the 2020 election, looking in particular at tweets “that were flagged by Twitter as containing election-related misinformation.”
The researchers then consider flags and blocking messages altogether, and find that “while blocking messages from engagement effectively limited their spread, messages that were flagged by the platform with a warning label spread further and longer than unlabeled tweets.”
Examples of “soft” (top) and “hard” (bottom) interventions on Twitter. Source
But the researchers did not simply look at the implications of such interventions on Twitter. Rather, they looked also to see how the messages spread on other platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Reddit. What they found points to the complexity of content moderation across multiple platforms:
Our findings underscore the networked nature of misinformation: posts or messages banned on one platform may grow on other mainstream platforms in the form of links, quotes, or screenshots. This study emphasizes the importance of researching content moderation at the ecosystem level, adding new evidence to a growing public and platform policy debate around implementing effective interventions to counteract misinformation.
This finding is expressed looking at the average trajectory of messages on one platform versus others. For instance, “messages that received either a soft or no intervention on Twitter had a similar average number of posts on public Facebook pages and groups,” while “messages that received a hard intervention on Twitter had a higher average number of posts, were posted to pages with a higher average number of page subscribers, and received a higher average total number of engagements.” In other words, blocking a message on Twitter may help it spread further on Facebook, for instance.
Blocking content on one platform does not stop it from spreading substantially on another. Source
The researchers point out that they have no causal evidence as to whether Twitter’s warning labels worked, or not. “Nonetheless, the findings underscore how intervening on one platform has limited impact when content can easily spread on others,” added paper co-author and NYU research scientist Megan A. Brown. “To more effectively counteract misinformation on social media, it’s important for both technologists and public officials to consider broader content moderation policies that can work across social platforms rather than singular platforms.”
New concerns about the relationship between gender and incivility towards female politicians on social media
Writing in the journal Social Media + Society, Boston University researchers look at Twitter and the role it plays in “the facilitation of political discourse” by measuring and analyzing the discourse related to the three top 2020 Democratic primary candidates: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Bernie Sanders, and then former Vice President Joe Biden. Concerned that “incivility has the potential to stifle democratic discourse and cause adverse effects within the political sphere,” the researchers collected more than 18 million tweets between August 1 and September 30, 2019.
Keywords employed in the collection of tweets. Source
Analyzing the set, the researchers found that 22.5% of a representative sample of the tweets contained language categorized as “uncivil”. While “the greatest proportion of uncivil tweets was directed to Joe Biden, the data indicates a statistically significant relationship between candidate gender and incivility,” and the researchers conclude that the “results show that the highest frequency of uncivil conversation surrounded Senator Elizabeth Warren, the only female candidate in [the] study.” Indeed, a text mining analysis found that ‘Murder’ was one of the most frequently associated terms that co-occurred with ‘Warren’,” according to the paper. Such a stark finding suggests there is still more work to be done on how to address uncivil dialogue and attacks toward political candidates and officials based on gender.
The role that social media plays in the divisive politics of the United States is a subject of interest not just to researchers but to regulators, politicians and civil society actors who wish to improve the nature of political conflict and achieve more just and equitable outcomes. A constant refrain from researchers studying these issues is the need for access to platform data.
“Research on social media’s impact on society has made tremendous strides in the last decade. But our work has often been hampered by a lack of platform transparency and access to the necessary data,” said NYU Professor Joshua A. Tucker, co-director of CSMaP and a co-author of the study on Twitter warning labels and election disinformation. “Increasing data access is critical to measuring the ecosystem-level impact of content moderation and producing rigorous research that can inform evidence-based public and platform policy.”
techpolicy.press · August 24, 2021
14. How Biden Can Save His China Strategy After Afghanistan


An ominous warning:
Just as we warned, the precipitous and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is complicating Biden’s Asia strategy rather than simplifying it. The administration’s strong first moves in Asia are now at risk of being overwhelmed by the fallout from Afghanistan. To recover, the administration must demonstrate not only that it can get Americans, U.S. allies, and vulnerable Afghans out of Kabul but also that it is doubling down on the U.S. commitment to the Indo-Pacific at the same time. Otherwise, the United States’ allies and adversaries will view the chaos in Afghanistan as the new normal rather than the exception.

How Biden Can Save His China Strategy After Afghanistan
Foreign Policy · by Michael J. Green, Gabriel Scheinmann · August 25, 2021
An expert's point of view on a current event.
Washington needs to give a visible sign of Indo-Pacific commitment.
By Michael J. Green, the senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a professor at Georgetown University, and Gabriel Scheinmann, the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society.
A man walks past U.S. and Taiwanese flags in Taipei on Aug. 10. Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images
In June, we argued that a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan would complicate the Biden administration’s pivot toward countering China in the Indo-Pacific rather than enabling it, as proponents were claiming. That is now manifestly obvious. Resources are being withdrawn from the Pacific to cover the withdrawal. The Japan-based aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, for example, is now on a sustained deployment in the Arabian Sea, leaving the U.S. Navy and its allies in the Western Pacific with none to replace it. Beijing has already warned Taiwan that the abandonment of Afghanistan proves Taipei cannot count on U.S. protection, prompting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to address the nation to urge greater efforts at self-defense. While not as critical in public as Washington’s European allies, senior national security officials in Tokyo and Canberra have quietly expressed to us their consternation not only at the lack of consultation on Afghanistan but also at the poor execution by what they had been led to believe was a U.S. national security dream team after the tumultuous years of the Trump administration.
Yet as chaotic and tragic as the Afghanistan withdrawal has been thus far, it should not change the logic of the Biden administration’s strategy on China. Domestic backing remains high: There is strong support among Americans for defending Asian allies against attack, which is unlikely to go down given the bipartisan backlash in the U.S. Congress against President Joe Biden for abandoning both Afghan and coalition allies in Afghanistan. Nor is there any evidence that Afghanistan has given U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific cause to give up on their own strategies of aligning more closely with Washington to counter Chinese hegemony, as the Stanford University lecturer Daniel Schneider writes.
In June, we argued that a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan would complicate the Biden administration’s pivot toward countering China in the Indo-Pacific rather than enabling it, as proponents were claiming. That is now manifestly obvious. Resources are being withdrawn from the Pacific to cover the withdrawal. The Japan-based aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, for example, is now on a sustained deployment in the Arabian Sea, leaving the U.S. Navy and its allies in the Western Pacific with none to replace it. Beijing has already warned Taiwan that the abandonment of Afghanistan proves Taipei cannot count on U.S. protection, prompting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to address the nation to urge greater efforts at self-defense. While not as critical in public as Washington’s European allies, senior national security officials in Tokyo and Canberra have quietly expressed to us their consternation not only at the lack of consultation on Afghanistan but also at the poor execution by what they had been led to believe was a U.S. national security dream team after the tumultuous years of the Trump administration.
Yet as chaotic and tragic as the Afghanistan withdrawal has been thus far, it should not change the logic of the Biden administration’s strategy on China. Domestic backing remains high: There is strong support among Americans for defending Asian allies against attack, which is unlikely to go down given the bipartisan backlash in the U.S. Congress against President Joe Biden for abandoning both Afghan and coalition allies in Afghanistan. Nor is there any evidence that Afghanistan has given U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific cause to give up on their own strategies of aligning more closely with Washington to counter Chinese hegemony, as the Stanford University lecturer Daniel Schneider writes.
Nevertheless, the debacle raises new questions for those in the region whom Biden needs to work with to succeed. The onus is now on the administration to provide more compelling answers on its Asia strategy than it has to date.
First, Biden must acknowledge the operational failures in Afghanistan. His refusal to admit any shortcomings has only compounded close allies’ concerns about basic operational competence. Calls by U.S. Sens. Mark Warner, Chris Coons, and others for a careful assessment of lessons learned should be echoed by Biden himself to reassure Asian allies that the United States will not repeat these mistakes in planning, consultation, and execution during the next major operation. Biden must first resolve the crisis of competence lest it become a crisis of confidence in the United States’ forward presence in Asia.
Second, the administration will need to refresh its counterterrorism strategy with allies like Australia to prepare for an expected increase in foreign fighters operating from Afghanistan—reportedly including hundreds of Islamic State and al Qaeda terrorists whom the Taliban released from prison last week—and jihadis elsewhere emboldened by the Taliban’s victory. The administration’s line that this counterterrorism strategy can be executed without eyes and ears on the ground in Afghanistan is risible to serious U.S. allies, who saw the surge in foreign fighters in Asia after the Obama administration’s withdrawal in Iraq and subsequent rise of the Islamic State. A bolder plan is needed, particularly with respect to the U.S.-India relationship, as the Taliban’s victory will likely increase the threat to India at a time when the United States and its allies need New Delhi’s help in maritime Asia. With the U.S.-Pakistan relationship fundamentally recast now that Washington is no longer dependent on Islamabad for access to Afghanistan, now is a good time for the Biden administration to step up its engagement with New Delhi on counterterrorism efforts.
The administration’s strong first moves in Asia are now at risk of being overwhelmed by the fallout from Afghanistan.
Third, the administration will need to demonstrate the power of U.S. deterrence in the Western Pacific with more visible exercises and deployments than originally planned, particularly after the absence of the Ronald Reagan for so long. Key U.S.-Japanese and U.S.-Australian defense ministers’ meetings are coming up this fall and must be locked in soon with ambitious agendas for military exercises, weapons development, and cooperation in new domains like cyber and space. Similarly, Biden must push hard to confirm that the next summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, also known as the Quad—will take place as expected in September. The administration should commit to fully fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, passed by Congress to boost the capabilities of the U.S. military’s Indo-Pacific Command.
Fourth, the administration needs to break out of its instinctive Atlanticism in responding to the Afghanistan crisis. Ten days after the fall of Kabul, Biden has yet to speak to a single Asian ally, despite having spoken with leaders of Western European NATO powers and Gulf countries to thank them for assistance in the evacuation. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has received no phone call—even though Australian forces took combat risks in Afghanistan every bit as great as the British and certainly greater than the Germans. The proposal for a G-7 meeting on Afghanistan will help the administration climb out of this hole, but only Japan would bring the Indo-Pacific perspective to the table. If the administration wants to prove it is serious about pivoting to the Indo-Pacific, then it’s high time for that to start showing in the response to critical events such as this.
Finally, the administration needs a big play in the region to demonstrate its strategic commitment. Vice President Kamala Harris was right to forge ahead with her visit to Vietnam and Singapore, but simply showing up to say that Southeast Asia is important and Washington remains committed is no longer enough. The biggest gap in Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy to date has been the absence of any economic statecraft after then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement in 2017. Since Biden’s election, all attempts to convince the new team to move forward on Indo-Pacific economic engagement have failed. Instead of joining the successor agreement to the TPP, launched by 11 countries without U.S. participation in 2018, the administration has advanced a much more modest proposal for a digital trade agreement that would address some of the cutting-edge technology competition issues vis-à-vis China. However, even that idea is now being slow-rolled. Allies in the region have quietly been told by the administration not to expect much economic statecraft out of Washington until after the U.S. midterm elections in November 2022. That is no longer an acceptable answer.
Just as we warned, the precipitous and complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is complicating Biden’s Asia strategy rather than simplifying it. The administration’s strong first moves in Asia are now at risk of being overwhelmed by the fallout from Afghanistan. To recover, the administration must demonstrate not only that it can get Americans, U.S. allies, and vulnerable Afghans out of Kabul but also that it is doubling down on the U.S. commitment to the Indo-Pacific at the same time. Otherwise, the United States’ allies and adversaries will view the chaos in Afghanistan as the new normal rather than the exception.
Michael J. Green is the senior vice president for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a professor at Georgetown University, and a former senior National Security Council official on Asia policy during the George W. Bush administration. Twitter: @JapanChair
Gabriel Scheinmann is the executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Society. Twitter: @GabeScheinmann
Lacking a serious vision for the region, the administration is aiming low.
Foreign Policy · by Michael J. Green, Gabriel Scheinmann · August 25, 2021
15. U.S. Used a Special Hellfire Missile in Afghanistan Airstrike on Islamic State

It remains easier to get permission to put a hellfire missile on the forehead of a terrorist than it does to get permission to conduct unconventional warfare.

But on a serious note I think the administration will continue to conduct CT operations to capture/kill high value targets contrary to what some pundits are assessing due to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yes it will be harder without operational bases in Afghanistan but I think our CT forces will still get the job done.



U.S. Used a Special Hellfire Missile in Afghanistan Airstrike on Islamic State
A secret weapon until recently, the missile employs blades instead of explosives, officials say, to limit damage

By Gordon Lubold and Warren P. Strobel
Aug. 28, 2021 6:47 pm ET
WASHINGTON—The Pentagon used a special Hellfire missile that packs no explosives to strike Islamic State militants in Afghanistan on Saturday in retaliation for a suicide bomb attack at the Kabul airport last week, according to two U.S. officials.
The airstrike, carried out by a Reaper drone flown from the Persian Gulf region, killed two militants associated with the Afghanistan offshoot of the Islamic State extremist group, and injured a third individual.
The Pentagon declined to release the identities of any of the individuals targeted. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Kabul airport attack that killed 13 American troops and nearly 200 Afghan civilians.
The missile used by the U.S. in the airstrike, called an R9X, is inert. Instead of exploding, the weapon ejects a halo of six large blades stowed inside the skin of the missile, which deploy at the last minute to shred the target of the strike, allowing military commanders to pinpoint their target and reduce the possibility for civilian casualties.

Pentagon spokesman John Kirby spoke to reporters about Afghanistan on Saturday.
PHOTO: SUSAN WALSH/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The use of the special Hellfire missile, which inside the military is referred to colloquially as “the flying Ginsu,” recalling the popular knives sold on TV infomercials in the 1970s, hadn’t been disclosed. The weapon also has been dubbed the “ninja bomb.”
At the strike site in Nangarhar, Rahamunullah, a neighbor said three people were killed and four others wounded, including a woman, contradicting the Pentagon’s assessment.
The strike appeared to cause limited damage to a house. Video from the scene viewed by The Wall Street Journal showed a small blast hole outside the home next to a fire-charred auto rickshaw. The walls were pockmarked with shrapnel, and the windows of the building had been blown out. Clothes, sandals and furniture were tossed around the rooms.
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The Pentagon declined to say whether there were multiple strikes, but characterized the operation as a single mission, leaving open the possibility that multiple strikes occurred, including one using the R9X missile.
The strike, in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, was in retaliation for the Kabul airport attack, and President Biden said Saturday more such strikes were likely. Pentagon officials wouldn’t specify how the militants targeted were connected to the airport attack, or whether they were involved in planning a future attack. Other officials said they were associated with both.

Mr. Biden said there was a likelihood of another attack from Islamic State in the coming hours as the U.S. military attempts to evacuate as many Americans and Afghans as possible.

The Pentagon has said it is planning to stick to the Aug. 31 deadline, when all U.S. personnel and military forces are to be withdrawn from inside the country.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the existence of the special missile in 2019. It carries an inert warhead and is designed to plunge through the tops of cars and buildings to reach its target, while causing minimal harm to nearby property and individuals.
The U.S. government had never publicly acknowledged the weapon’s existence. A number of officials have described the missile and its use to the Journal.
The weapon is known to have been used in February 2017 to kill an Egyptian national in Syria serving as al Qaeda’s No. 2 and in January 2019 in Yemen to kill a man accused by the U.S. of being behind the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in a Yemeni port.
U.S. Special Operations forces used it again last year in northwest Syria to kill the de facto leader of the local al Qaeda branch, the New York Times reported at the time.
—Dion Nissenbaum contributed to this article.


16. Taliban: US airstrike hits suicide bomber targeting airport

Excerpt:
There were few initial details about the incident, as well as a rocket that struck a neighborhood just northwest of the airport, killing a child. The two strikes initially appeared to be separate incidents, though information on both remained scarce.
The attack comes as the United States winds down a historic airlift that saw tens of thousands evacuated from Kabul’s international airport, the scene of much of the chaos that engulfed the Afghan capital since the Taliban took over two weeks ago. After an Islamic State affiliate’s suicide attack that killed over 180 people, the Taliban increased its security around the airfield as Britain ended its evacuation flights Saturday.
Taliban: US airstrike hits suicide bomber targeting airport
AP · by KATHY GANNON, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL · August 29, 2021
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban said that a U.S. airstrike targeted a suicide bomber in a vehicle Sunday who wanted to attack the Kabul international airport amid the American military’s evacuation there.
There were few initial details about the incident, as well as a rocket that struck a neighborhood just northwest of the airport, killing a child. The two strikes initially appeared to be separate incidents, though information on both remained scarce.
The attack comes as the United States winds down a historic airlift that saw tens of thousands evacuated from Kabul’s international airport, the scene of much of the chaos that engulfed the Afghan capital since the Taliban took over two weeks ago. After an Islamic State affiliate’s suicide attack that killed over 180 people, the Taliban increased its security around the airfield as Britain ended its evacuation flights Saturday.
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U.S. military cargo planes continued their runs into the airport Sunday, ahead of a Tuesday deadline earlier set by President Joe Biden to withdraw all troops from America’s longest war. However, Afghans remaining behind in the country worry about the Taliban reverting to their earlier oppressive rule — something fueled by the recent shooting death of a folk singer in the country by the insurgents.
Zabihullah Mujahid said in a message to journalists that the strike targeted the bomber as he drove a vehicle loaded with explosives. Mujahid offered few other details.
U.S. military officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
The rocket attack meanwhile struck Kabul’s Khuwja Bughra neighborhood, said Rashid, the Kabul police chief who goes by one name. Video obtained by The Associated Press in the aftermath of the attack showed smoke rising from building at the site around a kilometer (half a mile) from the airport.
No group immediately claimed the attack, however militants have fired rockets in the past.
Meanwhile, the family of a folk singer north of Kabul say the Taliban killed him.
The shooting of Fawad Andarabi came in the Andarabi Valley for which he was named, an area of Baghlan province some 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Kabul. The valley had seen upheaval since the Taliban takeover, with some districts in the area coming under the control of militia fighters opposed to the Taliban rule. The Taliban say they have since retaken those areas, though neighboring Panjshir in the Hindu Kush mountains remains the only one of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces not under its control.
The Taliban previously came out to Andarabi’s home and searched it, even drinking tea with the musician, his son Jawad Andarabi told the AP. But something changed Friday.
“He was innocent, a singer who only was entertaining people,” his son said. “They shot him in the head on the farm.”
His son said he wanted justice and that a local Taliban council promised to punish his father’s killer.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the AP that the insurgents would investigate the incident, but had no other details on the killing.
Andarabi played the ghichak, a bowed lute, and sang traditional songs about his birthplace, his people and Afghanistan as a whole. A video online showed him at one performance, sitting on a rug with the mountains of home surrounding him as he sang.
“There is no country in the world like my homeland, a proud nation,” he sang. “Our beautiful valley, our great-grandparents’ homeland.”
Karima Bennoune, the United Nations special rapporteur on cultural rights, wrote on Twitter that she had “grave concern” over Andarabi’s killing.
“We call on governments to demand the Taliban respect the #humanrights of #artists,” she wrote.
Agnes Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, similarly decried the killing.
“There is mounting evidence that the Taliban of 2021 is the same as the intolerant, violent, repressive Taliban of 2001,” she wrote on Twitter. “20 years later. Nothing has changed on that front.”
Meanwhile on Sunday, private banks across Afghanistan resumed their operations. However, they limited withdrawals to no more than the equivalent of $200 a day.
While some complained of still being unable to access their money, government employees say they haven’t been paid over the last four months. The Afghani traded around 90.5 to $1, continuing its depreciation as billions of dollars in the country’s reserves remain frozen overseas.
___
Akhgar reported from Istanbul, Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
AP · by KATHY GANNON, TAMEEM AKHGAR and JON GAMBRELL · August 29, 2021
17. All in or All Out? Biden Saw No Middle Ground in Afghanistan.
We will never know what would have happened if we had stayed or if we had evacuated civilians first (though in hindsight we certainly wish we did - but once we began evacuating them would Kabul have fallen as fast as it did because of the withdrawal? Would we still have had to evacuate the civilians in extremis as we are now? Again, we can never now). But now we have to deal with the situation as it is and not as we wish it would be.

Excerpt:

At this point, the die is cast. Mr. Biden made his choice. He wanted to be the president to end America’s longest war. Right or wrong, he has done so and on that, there is no middle ground.

All in or All Out? Biden Saw No Middle Ground in Afghanistan.
The New York Times · by Peter Baker · August 28, 2021
News Analysis
President Biden’s reductionist formula has prompted a debate over whether the mayhem in Kabul was inevitable or the result of a failure to consider other options.

A member of the U.S. Army in May aboard a helicopter over Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

By
Aug. 28, 2021, 12:12 p.m. ET
As the American military withdrawal from Afghanistan capping an ill-fated 20-year war turned uglier and deadlier in recent days, President Biden has stood by his decision but at the same time repeatedly singled out one person in particular to blame: his predecessor.
Because President Donald J. Trump struck an agreement with the Taliban last year to pull out, Mr. Biden has insisted that he had no choice but to abide by the deal he inherited or send tens of thousands of American troops back to Afghanistan to risk their lives in a “forever war.” It was, in other words, all in or all out.
But that reductionist formula has prompted a profound debate over whether the mayhem in Kabul, the capital, was in fact inevitable or the result of a failure to consider other options that might have ended in a different outcome. The unusual confluence of two presidents of rival parties sharing the same goal and same approach has led to second-guessing and finger-pointing that may play out for years to come in history books yet unwritten.
In framing the decision before him as either complete withdrawal or endless escalation, Mr. Biden has been telling the public that there was in fact no choice at all because he knew that Americans had long since grown disenchanted with the Afghanistan war and favored getting out. The fact that Mr. Trump was the one to leave behind a withdrawal agreement has enabled Mr. Biden to try to share responsibility.
“There was only the cold reality of either following through on the agreement to withdraw our forces or escalating the conflict and sending thousands more American troops back into combat in Afghanistan, lurching into the third decade of conflict,” Mr. Biden said as the Taliban seized Kabul this month.
Critics consider that either disingenuous or at the very least unimaginative, arguing that there were viable alternatives, even if not especially satisfying ones, that may not have ever led to outright victory but could have avoided the disaster now unfolding in Kabul and the provinces.
“The administration is presenting the choices in a way that is, at best, incomplete,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush who oversaw earlier stages of the Afghan war. “No one I knew was advocating the return of tens of thousands of Americans into ‘open combat’ with the Taliban.”
Instead, some, including the current military leadership of Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asserted that keeping a relatively modest force of 3,000 to 4,500 troops along with the extensive use of drones and close air support could have enabled Afghan security forces to continue holding off the Taliban without putting Americans at much risk.
“There was an alternative that could have prevented further erosion and likely enabled us to roll back some of the Taliban gains in recent years,” said Gen. David H. Petraeus, the retired commander of American forces in Afghanistan and former C.I.A. director who argued the mission was making progress while serving alongside Mr. Biden under President Barack Obama.
“With the Afghans doing the fighting on the front lines and the U.S. providing assistance from the air,” he added, “such a force posture would have been quite sustainable in terms of the expenditure of blood and treasure.”

But the White House rejected such a middle ground, contending that it amounted to more war. At her briefing on Friday, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said the only real choice was sending tens of thousands more Americans to “potentially lose their lives” or getting out.
“There are of course other options, but there are consequences to every option,” she said. “That is my point.” As for the critics, she said, “I think it’s easy to play back seat” driver.
Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut who supports Mr. Biden’s withdrawal, said those arguing to keep troops in Afghanistan were the ones who failed to win the war for two decades and perpetually pushed to stay even though “we have been losing for six to eight years.”
“To me, it’s the same game,” he said in an interview. “Everybody’s got a plan. But I’ve been working on this long enough to know everybody’s plans are” awful, he added, using an expletive. “The reality is inescapable.”
Mr. Biden was the third president in a row determined to finally end the war in Afghanistan, which has cost the lives of more than 2,400 American troops and as much as $2 trillion. In recent years, though, the conflict had evolved into an uneasy status quo with a far smaller American footprint. After drawdowns beginning under Mr. Obama, just a fraction of the troops there at the peak were left, yet military strategists said they had an outsize impact in keeping Afghan security forces in the fight without engaging in as much combat themselves.
Fewer than 100 American troops died in combat in Afghanistan over the past five years, roughly the equivalent of the number of Americans currently dying from Covid-19 every two hours. Until the devastating attack this week by ISIS-K at the Kabul airport killed 13 American service members, the military had suffered no combat deaths since the Trump agreement was signed.
Under the four-page deal signed in February 2020, Mr. Trump agreed to withdraw all American troops by May 1, 2021, lift sanctions and compel the release of 5,000 prisoners held by the Afghan government, which was cut out of the negotiations. The Taliban committed to not attacking American troops on the way out or letting terrorist groups use Afghanistan as a base to attack the United States.
While the Taliban agreed to talk with the Afghan government, nothing in the publicly released part of the deal prevented it from taking over the country by force as it ultimately did and reimposing its repressive regime of torture, murder and subjugation of women. It was such a one-sided bargain that even Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser H.R. McMaster called it a “surrender agreement.”
Following the deal, Mr. Trump reduced American forces in Afghanistan to 4,500 from 13,000. Eager to be the president to end the warhe signed a memo to the Pentagon instructing it to pull out all remaining forces by Jan. 15 before leaving office, but was talked out of it by advisers. Instead, he ordered the force drawn down to 2,500 troops in his final days, although about 3,500 actually remained.
For Mr. Biden, inheriting such a small force in Afghanistan meant that commanders were already left with too few troops to respond to a renewed Taliban offensive against American forces, which he deemed certain to come if he jettisoned Mr. Trump’s agreement, requiring him to send thousands more troops back in, officials said.
While he has suggested he had little choice because of the Trump agreement, Mr. Biden in fact was already determined to pull out of Afghanistan regardless and acknowledged in a recent interview with ABC News that “I would have tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops” even if his predecessor had not negotiated a deal with the Taliban.
His views were shaped by his experience as vice president in 2009 arguing against the temporary troop surge that Mr. Obama ordered to Afghanistan. Mr. Biden emerged from that episode soured on the military and the war, convinced that the generals had rolled Mr. Obama by making it politically impossible not to go along with more troops.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
How did the Taliban gain control? See how the Taliban retook power in Afghanistan in a few months, and read about how their strategy enabled them to do so.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
What does their victory mean for terrorist groups? The United States invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago in response to terrorism, and many worry that Al Qaeda and other radical groups will again find safe haven there.
Democrats who once worked with Mr. Biden said they assumed that his mind therefore was already made up on Afghanistan when he took office in January and that his current advisers, knowing that, did not push back hard. But aides to the president insisted that while he did have strong views, he engaged in a methodical policy process to test his own assumptions and explore alternatives, repeatedly insisting there be “no stone left unturned.”
Mr. Biden assigned Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, to run an interagency examination of Afghanistan policy that resulted in 10 meetings of department deputies, three cabinet-level meetings and four meetings in the Situation Room that included the president.
The Biden team considered other options, including keeping a small presence of troops for counterterrorism operations or to support Afghan security forces but reasoned that was just “magical thinking” and would take more troops than was sustainable. They discussed whether to renegotiate the Trump agreement to extract more concessions but the Taliban made clear it would not return to the bargaining table and considered the Trump deal binding.
Mr. Biden’s advisers also considered extending the withdrawal deadline until the winter, after the traditional fighting season was over, to make the transition less dangerous for the Afghan government. The Afghanistan Study Group, a bipartisan congressionally chartered panel that was led by Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., a retired Joint Chiefs chairman and that included Ms. O’Sullivan, in February recommended extending the May 1 deadline and seeking better conditions before pulling out.
But Mr. Biden was warned by security specialists that the longer it took to withdraw after a decision was announced, the more dangerous it would become, aides said, so he extended it only until Aug. 31.
Particularly influential on Mr. Biden, aides said, were a series of intelligence assessments he requested about Afghanistan’s neighbors and near neighbors, which found that Russia and China wanted the United States to remain bogged down in Afghanistan.
At the end of the day, then, the officials said every option eventually led to one of the two ultimate alternatives — get out altogether, as Mr. Trump had agreed to do, or prepare for a prolonged and more dangerous shooting war with many more troops. While not everyone in the room preferred Mr. Biden’s path, officials maintained that everyone was heard.
“Biden basically faced the same issue that Trump faced,” said Vali Nasr, who was a senior adviser to Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, “and his answer was the same — we’re not going to go back in, we have to get out.”
Republican criticism now, he added, was brazenly hypocritical. “They’re the ones who released all these Taliban commanders, they’re the ones who signed this deal,” he said.
Mark T. Esper, a defense secretary under Mr. Trump, agreed that the deal was flawed and in fact argued against drawing down further in the final months of the last administration before being fired in November. In recent days, he said, “there were more options available to President Biden” than simply continuing Mr. Trump’s withdrawal.
“He could have tried to go back to the table with the Taliban and renegotiate,” Mr. Esper said on CNN. “He could have demanded, as I argued, that they agree to the conditions they established or they agreed to in the agreement and that we use military power to compel them to do that.”
At this point, the die is cast. Mr. Biden made his choice. He wanted to be the president to end America’s longest war. Right or wrong, he has done so and on that, there is no middle ground.
The New York Times · by Peter Baker · August 28, 2021

V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Personal Email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
Web Site: www.fdd.org
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Subscribe to FDD’s new podcastForeign Podicy
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."

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