Quotes of the Day:
"Can we really ensure stability or only manage chaos?”
- Anonymous
"I think at the heart of it, Afghanistan was an IW mission that was led by conventionally minded Army leaders, who never understood the problem set they faced, and they just tried to power through it, and move on to the next thing."
- A former senior US military officer
“All history proves that there is no cheap and easy way to defeat guerrilla movements”
- Henry Kissinger, 1962
1. REMARKS ON THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 2758 25 October 2021 (China)
2. China celebrates 50 years of being in the UN -- and it's determined to keep Taiwan out
3. The U.N. Should Open Its Door to Democratic Taiwan
4. In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems
5. The Ignorance of Political Islam Continues to Doom Western Policy in Afghanistan
6. 'There could be still hundreds of Americans' in Afghanistan, former U.S. envoy says
7. Navy Approaching 'Weak' Rating in New U.S. Military Strength Survey
8. Afghanistan facing desperate food crisis, UN warns
9. Facebook’s Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making
10. Taiwan Must Be Included in Joe Biden's China Strategy by John Bolton
11. FDD | Turkey Lands on Anti-Money Laundering Watchlist — Again
12. Russia Challenges Biden Again With Broad Cybersurveillance Operation
13. FDD | Iran’s Nuclear Extortion Continues
14. 362. POW Concerns in a Digital Era – Manipulation of Reality as a Threat
15. No unusual N.Korean military activities after Seoul's rocket launch
16. Reconsidering U.S. Decision-Making Within NATO After the Fall of Kabul
17. Do the Reading, Do the Math: Lessons for the Military for an Uncertain Strategic Future
18. Commander Optimistic About ‘Armed Overwatch’ Procurement Prospects
19. America’s Green Berets prepare for near-peer war
1. REMARKS ON THE 50th ANNIVERSARY OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 2758 25 October 2021 (China)
Sent: Sunday, October 24, 2021 11:02:15 PM
Subject: UN Secretary-General's remarks on the 50th anniversary of GA resolution 2758
THE SECRETARY-GENERAL
---
REMARKS ON THE 50th ANNIVERSARY
OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 2758
25 October 2021
I am pleased to join you as we mark 50 years since the General Assembly adopted resolution 2758 deciding to “restore all its rights to the People’s Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China in the United Nations.”
In the decades since, China has become an increasingly important contributor to the work of the Organization and a major pillar of international cooperation.
I thank China for its role in shaping and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals, as evidenced by its strong commitment and significant progress to eradicate poverty in all forms and dimensions, one of the world's leading challenges.
China’s achievements provide valuable lessons in poverty alleviation that are being shared with other countries through South-South Cooperation.
Of course, major challenges remain – in China and around the globe.
Our world faces a torrent of tests. Rising inequalities. The climate crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic. Geopolitical tensions. Multiplication of conflicts. Human rights under threat.
We need to come together to bridge great divides and solve our challenges through enhanced international cooperation.
This includes strengthening the multilateral system to contribute to effective governance of global public goods.
That is the motivation of my report to the General Assembly, Our Common Agenda – which contains 90 specific proposals to take on the challenges of today and strengthen multilateralism for tomorrow.
Our Common Agenda builds on the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the Paris Climate Agreement.
Excellencies,
The climate crisis is a code-red for humanity.
I commend President Xi Jinping for announcing at the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly that China will end financing of coal-fired power plants abroad and direct support to green and low carbon energy.
We must do everything possible to keep the 1.5-degree goal of the Paris Agreement alive.
I appeal for China’s presentation of an ambitious Nationally Determined Contribution in the run-up to COP-26 in Glasgow.
The UN also fully supports the Chinese presidency of the COP-15 Biodiversity Conference and welcomes its leadership in putting forward the Kunming Declaration.
Ambition on biodiversity and climate are mutually reinforcing.
Both in Glasgow and Kunming, we must do our part to make peace with nature and safeguard our planet for future generations.
Additionally, the announcement of the Global Development Initiative brings forward new potential in its deep alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.
The United Nations stands ready to support its implementation and provide technical assistance to ensure compliance with recognized international norms and standards.
China has been a steady partner in ensuring that the United Nations can carry out its activities, as the second‑largest contributor to the regular and peacekeeping budgets.
We count on China to play an essential role in global health by stepping up efforts to make COVID-19 vaccines a global public good, including contributions to the COVAX facility, a necessary step towards stopping the pandemic for everyone, everywhere.
China was also the host of the conference that emerged with our most comprehensive global action plan for gender equality, the Beijing Declaration.
Securing women’s equality and full representation must be central to peace and development.
Excellencies,
The world must come together to strengthen multilateralism and address global challenges in solidarity.
At heart, that is what membership in the United Nations is all about – and what we celebrate and reaffirm today:
The commitment of all Member States, including China – a strong supporter of multilateralism – to fulfil the UN Charter and contribute to the work of the Organization and achievement of our common agenda for peace and security, sustainable development, and human rights.
The United Nations will remain a firm partner of the people and Government of China towards building a fairer and more sustainable future.
As we look back on 50 years of China and the UN, let us look forward and work to ensure that China and the world make progress in our shared efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and leave no one behind.
I thank you and once again extend my congratulations on today’s milestone.
2. China celebrates 50 years of being in the UN -- and it's determined to keep Taiwan out
China celebrates 50 years of being in the UN -- and it's determined to keep Taiwan out
CNN · by Analysis by Jessie Yeung, CNN
A version of this story appeared in CNN's Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country's rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.
Hong Kong (CNN)Fifty years ago today, representatives from around the world convened at the United Nations headquarters in New York for a history-shifting vote.
By the end of the day, the Republic of China (ROC), a government that fled to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war in 1949, was out of the global organization. Instead, the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Communist government that took power in the mainland, was recognized as the "only legitimate representative of China" and admitted into the UN as a permanent member of the veto-wielding Security Council.
It was a major blow for the Nationalist government, which had been one of the founding members of the UN and contributed to the Allied victory in World War II. As the delegation from Taipei walked out of the general assembly hall that night, its foreign minister warned bitterly that the decision would threaten peace everywhere. "This is dangerous nonsense," he said.
After the Communist victory and founding of the PRC in 1949, both the Nationalist and Communist governments claimed to be the sole representatives of the entire Chinese territory, forcing other countries and international organizations to choose one or the other.
Initially, many countries stuck to their alliances with the ROC and shunned the PRC. But as time went on, more and more governments switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing -- leaving Taiwan with only 15 diplomatic allies today.
Read More
The UN, too, was forced to choose -- and the fateful vote in 1971 ultimately reflected the shift in which "China" its members had decided to recognize.
Dual representation in the UN had been previously raised as a potential solution -- but it was shot down by both Beijing and Taipei. "There is no room for patriots and traitors to live together," Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the defeated Nationalists, famously said in 1961.
In the decades since the vote, the resolution has helped shape China's rise as a world power and granted it broad voting power in "participating in the UN bureaucracy and shaping the language of UN resolutions," said Maggie Lewis, an expert in contemporary Chinese law at Seton Hall University.
And under increasing pressure from Beijing, Taiwan has steadily become ever more diplomatically isolated, excluded from major agencies like the World Health Organization.
Beijing, meanwhile, continues to view Taiwan as an inseparable part of its territory -- even though the two sides have been governed separately for over seven decades and the Chinese Communist Party has never controlled the democratic island of around 24 million people.
Despite such pressures, Taiwan has continued to maintain relations with a number of key Western partners, especially the United States, which provides Taiwan with defensive weapons and has sent top officials to visit the island.
In a statement Saturday, the US State Department said US and Taiwanese officials had met for a "discussion focused on supporting Taiwan's ability to participate meaningfully at the UN."
"US participants reiterated the US commitment to Taiwan's meaningful participation at the World Health Organization and UN framework convention on climate change and discussed ways to highlight Taiwan's ability to contribute to efforts on a wide range of issues," it added.
Unsurprisingly, the statement was met with indignation in China, which considers such suggestions a dangerous signal to advocates of Taiwan's formal independence.
Chinese state media quickly blasted the Biden administration as "the most incapable and degenerate in the country's history," adding that Taiwan had "fabricated history and betrayed morality." The push for Taiwan's participation in the UN was a "cheap shot" and "shameless manipulation," it said.
Though only sovereign states can be full UN members, Taipei has accused Beijing of "intentionally misinterpreting" the 1971 resolution to keep Taiwan out, suggesting that Taipei no longer contests the UN China seat. Many on the island simply want to participate separately under the name Taiwan.
The 1971 resolution "merely decided upon the question of credentials -- that is, the question of who represents the UN member state China, without implying a position on the scope of its territory, let alone endorsing the PRC's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan," said Liang-yu Wang, Deputy Representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in the US, the island's de facto embassy, on Thursday.
"But all the years, China has made the leap from a matter of accreditation, to a political statement, even a legal claim," she added. "Therefore, nowadays the resolution is often wrongly cited to exclude Taiwan's participation in the meetings and activities in the UN system."
Even "superficial participation" has been blocked -- and meaningful participation will be even harder, said Chinese law expert Lewis. In the eyes of Beijing, even the most marginal inclusion for Taiwan into the UN could undermine its claim of sovereignty -- a bottom line it has vowed to defend at all cost.
CNN · by Analysis by Jessie Yeung, CNN
3. The U.N. Should Open Its Door to Democratic Taiwan
I wonder how a General Assembly vote would go. It would be a real indicator on how the international community is lining up and how much influence the PRC wields.
The U.N. Should Open Its Door to Democratic Taiwan
Expelled 50 years ago to make room for the Beijing government, today it deserves full recognition.
WSJ · by Gary Schmitt and Michael Mazza
In 1970 Beijing’s supporters in the U.N. faced an uphill battle. Only a year later the proposal passed in a landslide. What changed? In July of that year, President Richard Nixon revealed that national security adviser Henry Kissinger had visited Beijing, that Nixon himself would do so before May 1972, and that the latter meeting would “seek the normalization of relations between the two countries.”
In 1971 there was a reasonable case for the Beijing government’s inclusion in the U.N. It had all the qualifications of statehood, and the 850 million people living on the mainland had no representation. It also seemed increasingly untenable to exclude a nuclear power.
There was no such case, however, for excluding Taiwan. At the time, it had diplomatic relations with 54 countries, including the U.S., Japan, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, West Germany, Israel and South Africa. Its mutual defense treaty with the U.S. would remain in force for the rest of the decade. Taiwan, a founding member of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, remained a member of those organizations until losing its seats to China in 1980. A true reckoning would have recognized the existence of two states, each with a right to U.N. membership—a solution not unlike those later reached to admit both North and South Korea and both East and West Germany.
Instead, the U.N. has only compounded its 1971 error in recent decades. In the early 2000s, to explain why he had blocked a Taiwanese diplomat from speaking to the U.N. Correspondents Association, Secretary-General Kofi Annan invented a U.N. “one-China policy.” His successor, Ban Ki-moon, went even further, invoking Resolution 2758 and claiming that “the United Nations considers Taiwan for all purposes to be an integral part of the People’s Republic of China.”
But Resolution 2758 says nothing of the sort—it doesn’t even refer to Taiwan. The U.N. charter doesn’t give the U.N. the power to make territorial decisions, nor does international law recognize a U.N. vote as a legitimate means of drawing sovereign boundaries.
So what explains the U.N.’s legal and moral malfeasance in its treatment of democratic Taiwan—preventing it, for example, from even participating as an observer in World Health Organization meetings? The obvious answer is the U.N.’s deference to China. Beijing’s diplomats throw temper tantrums, mobilize partners to advance China’s interests, and have been especially successful at putting Chinese officials in positions of authority in various U.N. bodies such as the International Telecommunications Union.
The U.S. and its diplomatic allies have failed repeatedly to push back against China’s bullying. To mark Resolution 2758’s 50th anniversary, the U.S. should make clear to Beijing that absent far greater Chinese flexibility on Taiwan’s engagement in the U.N., Washington will launch a campaign to secure Taiwan’s full membership.
Such a campaign would feature American diplomats publicly making the case for Taiwan’s inclusion, introducing annual resolutions at the General Assembly, and coaxing recalcitrant U.N. members to support a seat for Taiwan. Faced with a fight over full membership for Taiwan, U.S. allies and partners might increase their own pressure on China to accept at least partial participation.
As the U.S. establishes the legal rationale for Taiwan’s participation—that it has all the attributes of a sovereign state under international law—Washington may have to rethink its own policy. When the U.S. formally recognized China, Washington acknowledged “the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China,” and it has consistently stated that the resolution of the dispute must be peaceful. But a peaceful resolution is nowhere in sight as Beijing continues to increase military, economic and diplomatic pressure. And the people and government of Taiwan are no longer interested in unification with China.
A fight over Taiwan’s membership in the U.N. might at a minimum lead the U.N. to reverse its dubious reading of Resolution 2758 and in turn open the door for Taiwan’s greater participation in international organizations. But it could also move the U.S. and its allies to take a more principled position toward an island democracy that is increasingly important to the global order that the U.N. was intended to promote.
Mr. Schmitt is a senior fellow and Mr. Mazza a nonresident fellow in foreign and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
WSJ · by Gary Schmitt and Michael Mazza
4. In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems
Excerpts:
The internal documents, obtained by a consortium of news organizations that included The New York Times, are part of a larger cache of material called The Facebook Papers. They were collected by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who became a whistle-blower and recently testified before a Senate subcommittee about the company and its social media platforms. References to India were scattered among documents filed by Ms. Haugen to the Securities and Exchange Commission in a complaint earlier this month.
The documents include reports on how bots and fake accounts tied to the country’s ruling party and opposition figures were wreaking havoc on national elections. They also detail how a plan championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to focus on “meaningful social interactions,” or exchanges between friends and family, was leading to more misinformation in India, particularly during the pandemic.
Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts, according to its documents. Eighty-seven percent of the company’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13 percent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users, according to one document describing Facebook’s allocation of resources.
In India, Facebook Grapples With an Amplified Version of Its Problems
Published Oct. 23, 2021
Updated Oct. 25, 2021, 4:25 a.m. ET
The Facebook Papers
Internal documents show a struggle with misinformation, hate speech and celebrations of violence in the country, the company’s biggest market.
Oct. 23, 2021Updated 4:04 p.m. ET
On Feb. 4, 2019, a Facebook researcher created a new user account to see what it was like to experience the social media site as a person living in Kerala, India.
For the next three weeks, the account operated by a simple rule: Follow all the recommendations generated by Facebook’s algorithms to join groups, watch videos and explore new pages on the site.
The result was an inundation of hate speech, misinformation and celebrations of violence, which were documented in an internal Facebook report published later that month.
“Following this test user’s News Feed, I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past three weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” the Facebook researcher wrote.
From the Document: An Indian Test User’s Descent Into a Sea of Polarizing, Nationalistic Messages
“The test user’s News Feed has become a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore.”
The report was one of dozens of studies and memos written by Facebook employees grappling with the effects of the platform on India. They provide stark evidence of one of the most serious criticisms levied by human rights activists and politicians against the world-spanning company: It moves into a country without fully understanding its potential impact on local culture and politics, and fails to deploy the resources to act on issues once they occur.
With 340 million people using Facebook’s various social media platforms, India is the company’s largest market. And Facebook’s problems on the subcontinent present an amplified version of the issues it has faced throughout the world, made worse by a lack of resources and a lack of expertise in India’s 22 officially recognized languages.
The internal documents, obtained by a consortium of news organizations that included The New York Times, are part of a larger cache of material called The Facebook Papers. They were collected by Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who became a whistle-blower and recently testified before a Senate subcommittee about the company and its social media platforms. References to India were scattered among documents filed by Ms. Haugen to the Securities and Exchange Commission in a complaint earlier this month.
The documents include reports on how bots and fake accounts tied to the country’s ruling party and opposition figures were wreaking havoc on national elections. They also detail how a plan championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to focus on “meaningful social interactions,” or exchanges between friends and family, was leading to more misinformation in India, particularly during the pandemic.
Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts, according to its documents. Eighty-seven percent of the company’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13 percent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users, according to one document describing Facebook’s allocation of resources.
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said the figures were incomplete and don’t include the company’s third-party fact-checking partners, most of whom are outside the United States.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, left, and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, at a town hall event at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., in 2015.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times
That lopsided focus on the United States has had consequences in a number of countries besides India. Company documents showed that Facebook installed measures to demote misinformation during the November election in Myanmar, including disinformation shared by the Myanmar military junta.
The company rolled back those measures after the election, despite research that showed they lowered the number of views of inflammatory posts by 25.1 percent and photo posts containing misinformation by 48.5 percent. Three months later, the military carried out a violent coup in the country. Facebook said that after the coup, it implemented a special policy to remove praise and support of violence in the country, and later banned the Myanmar military from Facebook and Instagram.
In Sri Lanka, people were able to automatically add hundreds of thousands of users to Facebook groups, exposing them to violence-inducing and hateful content. In Ethiopia, a nationalist youth militia group successfully coordinated calls for violence on Facebook and posted other inflammatory content.
Facebook has invested significantly in technology to find hate speech in various languages, including Hindi and Bengali, two of the most widely used languages, Mr. Stone said. He added that Facebook reduced the amount of hate speech that people see globally by half this year.
“Hate speech against marginalized groups, including Muslims, is on the rise in India and globally,” Mr. Stone said. “So we are improving enforcement and are committed to updating our policies as hate speech evolves online.”
In India, “there is definitely a question about resourcing” for Facebook, but the answer is not “just throwing more money at the problem,” said Katie Harbath, who spent 10 years at Facebook as a director of public policy, and worked directly on securing India’s national elections. Facebook, she said, needs to find a solution that can be applied to countries around the world.
Voters waiting to cast ballots in West Bengal’s state legislative assembly elections in Kolkata in April.
Facebook employees have run various tests and conducted field studies in India for several years. That work increased ahead of India’s 2019 national elections; in late January of that year, a handful of Facebook employees traveled to the country to meet with colleagues and speak to dozens of local Facebook users.
According to a memo written after the trip, one of the key requests from users in India was that Facebook “take action on types of misinfo that are connected to real-world harm, specifically politics and religious group tension.”
Ten days after the researcher opened the fake account to study misinformation, a suicide bombing in the disputed border region of Kashmir set off a round of violence and a spike in accusations, misinformation and conspiracies between Indian and Pakistani nationals.
After the attack, anti-Pakistan content began to circulate in the Facebook-recommended groups that the researcher had joined. Many of the groups, she noted, had tens of thousands of users. A different report by Facebook, published in December 2019, found Indian Facebook users tended to join large groups, with the country’s median group size at 140,000 members.
Graphic posts, including a meme showing the beheading of a Pakistani national and dead bodies wrapped in white sheets on the ground, circulated in the groups she joined.
After the researcher shared her case study with co-workers, her colleagues commented on the posted report that they were concerned about misinformation about the upcoming elections in India.
From the Document: An Indian Test User’s Descent Into a Sea of Polarizing, Nationalistic Messages
“These groups become perfect distribution channels when they want to promote bad content within short period of time.”
“The admins of these groups tended to take a lax position/hands-off attitude towards ensuring that the content shared in the group was on a particular topic of focus, and allowed users to freely post whatever they found interesting/wanted to share.”
Two months later, after India’s national elections had begun, Facebook put in place a series of steps to stem the flow of misinformation and hate speech in the country, according to an internal document called Indian Election Case Study.
The case study painted an optimistic picture of Facebook’s efforts, including adding more fact-checking partners — the third-party network of outlets with which Facebook works to outsource fact-checking — and increasing the amount of misinformation it removed. It also noted how Facebook had created a “political white list to limit P.R. risk,” essentially a list of politicians who received a special exemption from fact-checking.
The study did not note the immense problem the company faced with bots in India, nor issues like voter suppression. During the election, Facebook saw a spike in bots — or fake accounts — linked to various political groups, as well as efforts to spread misinformation that could have affected people’s understanding of the voting process.
In a separate report produced after the elections, Facebook found that over 40 percent of top views, or impressions, in the Indian state of West Bengal were “fake/inauthentic.” One inauthentic account had amassed more than 30 million impressions.
A report published in March 2021 showed that many of the problems cited during the 2019 elections persisted.
In the internal document, called Adversarial Harmful Networks: India Case Study, Facebook researchers wrote that there were groups and pages “replete with inflammatory and misleading anti-Muslim content” on Facebook.
The report said there were a number of dehumanizing posts comparing Muslims to “pigs” and “dogs,” and misinformation claiming that the Quran, the holy book of Islam, calls for men to rape their female family members.
Much of the material circulated around Facebook groups promoting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an Indian right-wing and nationalist paramilitary group. The groups took issue with an expanding Muslim minority population in West Bengal and near the Pakistani border, and published posts on Facebook calling for the ouster of Muslim populations from India and promoting a Muslim population control law.
Facebook knew that such harmful posts proliferated on its platform, the report indicated, and it needed to improve its “classifiers,” which are automated systems that can detect and remove posts containing violent and inciting language. Facebook also hesitated to designate R.S.S. as a dangerous organization because of “political sensitivities” that could affect the social network’s operation in the country.
Of India’s 22 officially recognized languages, Facebook said it has trained its A.I. systems on five. (It said it had human reviewers for some others.) But in Hindi and Bengali, it still did not have enough data to adequately police the content, and much of the content targeting Muslims “is never flagged or actioned,” the Facebook report said.
Five months ago, Facebook was still struggling to efficiently remove hate speech against Muslims. Another company report detailed efforts by Bajrang Dal, an extremist group linked with the Hindu nationalist political party Bharatiya Janata Party, to publish posts containing anti-Muslim narratives on the platform.
Supporters of Prime Minister Modi’s Bhartiya Janata Party celebrating its lead in the 2019 election in New Delhi.Credit...Saumya Khandelwal for The New York Times
Facebook is considering designating the group as a dangerous organization because it is “inciting religious violence” on the platform, the document showed. But it has not yet done so.
“Join the group and help to run the group; increase the number of members of the group, friends,” said one post seeking recruits on Facebook to spread Bajrang Dal’s messages. “Fight for truth and justice until the unjust are destroyed.”
Ryan Mac, Cecilia Kang and Mike Isaac contributed reporting.
5. The Ignorance of Political Islam Continues to Doom Western Policy in Afghanistan
Conclusion:
Afghanistan has been lost at tremendous cost. There are, however, innumerable ongoing campaigns against Takfiri militants across the globe, and this defeat is an abject lesson on the importance of equipping combatant commanders and nation-builders with the appropriate instruments to fashion stable and peaceful societies. Political authorities must convince western taxpayers that the essential value of investing in Islam is not a betrayal of secular values.
The Ignorance of Political Islam Continues to Doom Western Policy in Afghanistan
The current controversy over whether to recognize and constructively engage the odious Taliban regime or isolate it continues to be guided by a general ignorance by secular Western elites of the important role of religious legitimacy in political Islam. Secular and progressive policymakers fail to recognize that political Islam is not doctrinally monolithic nor is it static and that the Taliban's hardline variant of Islamic governance is ephemeral and will not survive in Kabul. Unlike the Taliban of the 1990s, which exchanged legitimacy for peace, the contemporary regime will come under pressure to modernize, which opens up significant policy opportunities for aid donors.
The catastrophically abrupt collapse of the Western-backed government in Kabul confirmed a complete lack of Western understanding of the dynamics of how to create political legitimacy in a traditional Muslim state. Secular state efficiency was never going to be sufficient because in Islamic societies, religious and political legitimacy are indistinguishable. The military campaign and provision of services, however effectively executed, should have been accompanied by a third campaign of ideas. NATO’s failure to address the issue of political Islam in Afghanistan doomed its efforts to failure and continues to haunt western policy.
The secular development strategy in Afghanistan was largely the result of domestic constraints in European countries, whose electoral constituencies were facing controversial political and cultural disputes over the impact of Muslim immigration. More egregiously, Western states, and I know the cases in the US in particular, rejected proposals for the promotion or setting-up of religious institutes in Afghanistan, favorable to NATO, primarily for the engagement of religious public diplomacy. One can certainly anticipate the controversy of such an effort. At worst, it could have been seen as blasphemous or disingenuously manipulative. In academic writing, I had proposed the harnessing of Barelvi Islam for the NATO effort but did not venture into the realm of policy because I was assured the Western effort in Afghanistan was on an even keel. My confidence was utterly unfounded, and I am now writing this post-mortem two decades too late.
I have never been to Afghanistan. However, I did conduct foreign policy research in Pakistan for over ten years, starting in 1999, and came in close contact with senior military, political, diplomatic, intelligence and police leaders from three of the four provinces and Kashmir, complemented by activities at Fort Leavenworth and Coronado Island, and written extensively on the topic of Pakistan-Afghan relations. My quick litmus test of whether an aid worker, contractor, civil servant, soldier, or diplomat had an inkling of the measures of regime legitimacy in Afghanistan was whether they could identify the particular “fiqh," or Islamic legal tradition, of the Afghans, and in my experience, the vast majority, secular to the bone, could not.
The most articulate and persistent extreme threat to establishing a democratic Islamic regime, like the prospective one in Kabul, are Takfiri militants, or those that believe that Muslim regimes revert to pre or non-Islamic society are illegitimate. We need to say militant because ninety-nine percent of Takfiris have a non-violent philosophic and political strategy. Like the Mujahideen before them, the Afghan Taliban are under the influence of the orthodox Hanbali fiqh (legal tradition) emanating from the Gulf States, and this is because of the heavy funding support channeled through Pakistani evangelical movements like the Ahl-i-Hadith, as well as private individuals, and political parties like Jamiat-i-Islamia. The latter party is based on a nineteenth-century South Asian Deobandi reform movement, which sought to use Arab Islamic orthodoxy to arrest the decline of Islam vis-à-vis the rise of political Hindusim in the sub-continent. Deobandism crudely dovetails with the goals of militant Islamic scholars supporting or in Afghanistan, seeking to justify resistance, but without the extra baggage of rebuilding the Mughal Empire. The orthodox Hanbali tradition of the isolated Arabian Peninsula is streamlined, and Salafist (literarily fundamentalist) fits nicely with an illiterate or recently literate rural population, unburdened by years of accumulated Islamic scholarship and poetry that is typical of Afghanistan. The permissiveness in Afghan social culture, Pakhtunwali, of decentralized violence associated with an emphasis on tribal justice and honor, is compatible with the Hanbali fiqh’s simplified and occasionally strict legal code.
The influences on Sunni Islam experienced by the Afghan Pashtun in Afghanistan have elements of Persian mysticism, Turkish Sufism, but is primarily dominated by the Hanafi Fiqh, or legal tradition of South Asian Islam, and its main ritual tradition, that of Barelvi Sufism, with its emphasis on saintly worship. Barelvi Islam is far less prone to militancy than other traditions, but it has associated groups that have nevertheless engaged in acts of sectarian terror against Shiites and non-Muslims. The Hanafi fiqh could be described as South Asia's equilibrium Islamic spiritual culture, optimized to survive in a highly competitive yet interdependent religious market, characterized by the close mutual proximity of the attractive alternatives of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Christianity, and their variants. Muslim and Hindu Sindhis, also Barelvis, and Kashmiris in Pakistan, for example, share the same shrines and poets, without contradiction. Sunni Afghans are mostly Hanafi and have been so since approximately the 1920s, which matters because of the prominent role of Islam in family law, and the political enterprise of Islam to create paradise on earth through just social laws. The popularity of Islamic law does not primarily sideline or compete with Western commercial and contract law, though litigation is very time-consuming in the latter, but rather against feudal law, which is seen as favoring privileged and landed elites, and therefore a constant issue for Islamic scholars promoting justice.
The Taliban’s composite Hanbali fiqh cum Deobandi philosophy is, consequently, very vulnerable and ultimately doomed to decline for four reasons. First, these traditions are alien to those segments of Afghanistan's population that are not seeking to justify armed mobilization, particularly the urban population, merchants, and prosperous farmers. Second, the inevitability of increasing literacy and access to the internet will expose the cultural poverty of the Hanbali Fiqh when confronted with other South Asian religions. Ninety percent of Afghanistan's historical and current commerce is through Pakistan with India, so it cannot avoid exposure, and further infrastructural developments with Central Asia and Iran will further highlight these contradictions. Third, the growth of Hanbali movements among urban groups throughout South Asia has been stagnant for decades. Fourth, the Hanbali fiqh’s strictures against the worship of saints as intercessors run counter to local Afghan traditions. The Taliban face a never-ending problem of having to barricade their warriors’ cemeteries from grandmothers who sneak in praying for the health, fortune and fertility of their children.
This vulnerability was exploited by the British Raj, with the result of a remarkable loyalty by the Muslim British India Army, despite a century of religious enticements by Russian, German, and especially Turkish and Arab authorities. The British achieved this by providing heavy subsidies to established local shrines. Nor is Sufism toothless: when Afghan leader Amanullah Khan (1919-1929) unsuccessfully attacked the British in 1919, in 1929, the latter exploited a retaliatory revolt by the mystic leader of the Afghan Naqshbandiya, Bacha Saqqao, a Sufi faith within the broader Barelvi tradition. In the resulting chaos, the British then permitted a rebel Afghan general to raise an army in the sanctuary of the British controlled Pashtun areas and to descend into Kabul and overthrow the government there. The first revolt against the contemporary Afghan regime, credibly thought to have been encouraged by support from Pakistan’s Frontier Force in 1973, was led by the mystic leader Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani of the Hizb-i Tawheed, who had secured considerable influence within the Afghan military. The Qadiriyyas and Chistis are other similar mystical movements with broad appeal in mainstream Afghan society.
The British East India Company and the subsequent British Raj inherited a system of incentives and punishments from the Mughal Empire and benefitted from the cooperation of other landed elites already patronizing the pirs and shrines. The district employees in the British-Indian Civil Service were typically fluent in the local language and were often members of families employed for two or three generations. It was these instruments of policy that kept Punjabi garrisons loyal to the British Raj and facilitated the creation of Pakistan, despite Hindu and Muslim opposition. A more contemporary example, Pakistan exercised its ideological influence initially through Jamiat-i-Islamia, a Leninist-structured Pakistani religious party, which had extensive independent contacts with Islamist groups throughout South Asia. Pakistan shifted its patronage to the more pliable Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, particularly for recruiting militants through refugee camp madrassahs.
Afghanistan has been lost at tremendous cost. There are, however, innumerable ongoing campaigns against Takfiri militants across the globe, and this defeat is an abject lesson on the importance of equipping combatant commanders and nation-builders with the appropriate instruments to fashion stable and peaceful societies. Political authorities must convince western taxpayers that the essential value of investing in Islam is not a betrayal of secular values.
Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is an associate professor of international relations at Concordia University (Montreal), former army engineer officer, and has written extensively on Pakistan, where he conducted field research for over ten years.
6. 'There could be still hundreds of Americans' in Afghanistan, former U.S. envoy says
Excerpts:
“I was asked by the former president to negotiate our withdrawal from Afghanistan and get commitments from the Taliban. ... That has been achieved. We are out. Our longest war is over,” said Khalilzad, who was tapped in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump to negotiate the withdrawal.
Still, even while defending the deal to withdraw, Khalilzad remained skeptical of the Taliban. Regarding the fate of women in Afghanistan, the former ambassador said the U.S. should keep pressure on the Taliban, including by freezing assets, until assurances are given, like reopening schools for girls.
Khalilzad also said the Taliban told him they don't know the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda. Asked if he believed that, Khalilzad said, "I didn't."
"There is a lack of trust between us and them,” he said.
'There could be still hundreds of Americans' in Afghanistan, former U.S. envoy says
Zalmay Khalilzad, the former lead negotiator of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan, spoke publicly for the first time since his resignation.
Special Representative for Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad speaks during a May 20 House Oversight subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill. | Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
10/24/2021 09:06 AM EDT
The former chief negotiator of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan says there could still be hundreds of Americans in the country.
“Truth of the matter is, we don’t know … but my judgment is there could be still hundreds of Americans there,” Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS' “Face the Nation, his first since resigning Monday.
The precise number, however, appears to be unclear. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said there are "under 200 and likely closer to 100" Americans in Afghanistan in Aug. 30 remarks, but CNN reported just two days ago that close to 200 Americans are still seeking to leave the country.
Khalilzad wrote in his Oct. 18 resignation letter that he decided to step down because "we are entering a new phase in our Afghanistan policy." He reiterated that reasoning to CBS News.
“I was asked by the former president to negotiate our withdrawal from Afghanistan and get commitments from the Taliban. ... That has been achieved. We are out. Our longest war is over,” said Khalilzad, who was tapped in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump to negotiate the withdrawal.
Still, even while defending the deal to withdraw, Khalilzad remained skeptical of the Taliban. Regarding the fate of women in Afghanistan, the former ambassador said the U.S. should keep pressure on the Taliban, including by freezing assets, until assurances are given, like reopening schools for girls.
Khalilzad also said the Taliban told him they don't know the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qaeda. Asked if he believed that, Khalilzad said, "I didn't."
"There is a lack of trust between us and them,” he said.
7. Navy Approaching 'Weak' Rating in New U.S. Military Strength Survey
Excerpts:
The Heritage Foundation’s 2022 Index of Military Strength rated the Pentagon overall as “only marginally able” to operate in key regions – such as Europe, the Middle East and Asia – based on existing alliances like NATO, political stability, the forward presence of American forces and the state of key infrastructure, like ports and highways in foreign nations and domestic shipbuilding and repair.
“Marginal” in the index’s ranking is the middle grade on its five-step scale, according to Dakota Wood, Heritage’s editor for the project and a retired Marine. Explaining “marginal” as a grade, he said in terms of capacity it comes down to being “not big enough or equipment [being] too old.”
...
In accepting the Marine Corps’ premise that it is a “one-war plus force,” the index said it requires 30 battalions, but has 24 now, so the rating is “marginal.” If that number drops to 21 as planned, the Marine Corps capacity grade would be “weak.” Wood, at the conference on the index’s release, said that would leave the service “dramatically too small” to meet the demands of a force that could handle one major global conflict.
This is the danger facing the Marine Corps in continuing to sacrifice end-strength to buy robotics, unmanned systems and long-range strike missiles to modernize its warfighting capabilities for the future, he added.
“The hope is the small unit can do big things,” Wood said.
The report stated one reason why the Corps’ grade on capability of its equipment rose was the retirement of its M1A2 Abrams tanks. While “aggressively pursuing a host of new capabilities” from the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle to the Assault Amphibious Vehicle and the F-35B Lightning II Strike Fighter, small units will still be using Humvees, cargo trucks “and various items of support equipment procured” decades earlier.
Navy Approaching 'Weak' Rating in New U.S. Military Strength Survey - USNI News
Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) transits the South China Sea with Independence-variant littoral combat ship USS Tulsa (LCS-16) on Sept. 7, 2021. US Navy Photo
The Navy’s ability to defend the nation’s vital security interests is “marginal,” – with the caveat that its score is trending to “weak” in capability and readiness – while the Marine Corps’ ability is graded as “strong,” according to a think tank’s latest survey of United States military power.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2022 Index of Military Strength rated the Pentagon overall as “only marginally able” to operate in key regions – such as Europe, the Middle East and Asia – based on existing alliances like NATO, political stability, the forward presence of American forces and the state of key infrastructure, like ports and highways in foreign nations and domestic shipbuilding and repair.
“Marginal” in the index’s ranking is the middle grade on its five-step scale, according to Dakota Wood, Heritage’s editor for the project and a retired Marine. Explaining “marginal” as a grade, he said in terms of capacity it comes down to being “not big enough or equipment [being] too old.”
As the authors noted since 2015, using open sources, “the index should be seen as a report card for how well or poorly conditions, countries, and the U.S. military have evolved during the assessed year” in having a military force capable of fighting two major regional wars almost simultaneously. The 2022 report added the recently established U.S. Space Force.
“Our nuclear enterprise is our good news story” in the report, Wood said. The report rated the nuclear enterprise as “strong.”
Looking at the Navy, author Brent Sadler found the “battle force fleet of 297 ships and intensified operational tempo combine to reveal a Navy that is much too small relative to its task.” The report also noted the fleet is continuing to age, requiring more maintenance and time off station.
Wood, in his comments on the index when it was released on Wednesday, said “more than half [the ships in the fleet} are over 20 years old.” They include “some of our premier” warships – “fast-attack submarines, ballistic missile submarines and cruisers.”
Using the benchmark Heritage established two years ago, the optimal fleet size would be 400 ships, consisting of 13 carrier strike groups and the same number of carrier air wings. The air wings would have 624 strike fighter aircraft.
In addition, the fleet would include 15 expeditionary strike groups.
Sadler added in the Navy report that since unmanned platforms “have not matured as a practical asset” yet, an assessment of them is not included. The same holds true with the Navy’s growing increases in “research, modeling, wargaming and intellectual exercises” on new classes of warships, which are not scored in the report card.
But on shipbuilding and maintenance, the index uses a troubling statistic that the numbers in the skilled labor force – welders and pipefitters – are shrinking and their wages dropping relative to inflation at a time when more workers would be needed to grow the fleet.
“Of particular concern is the increased production of nuclear-powered warships, most notably nuclear-powered submarines that would be vital in any conflict with China,” Sadler said. Building those assets becomes more questionable with the loss of skilled workers.
At the public shipyards, the workforce has grown by 16 percent since 2013. But “as demand increases for nuclear-powered warships to pace the threat from China and Russia into the foreseeable future, it remains to be seen whether the public shipyards will be able to sustain the recruitment of skilled labor in the numbers needed.”
On personnel issues, Sadler wrote: “the Navy’s response to the pandemic has been a success overall” in continuing to operate under these conditions and vaccinating active-duty personnel.
Wood, in writing the Marine Corps section, stated, it has “made substantial strides in the past few years in regaining its material readiness and stabilizing key modernization programs, and, over the past two years, in profoundly changing its battle orientation, conceptual underpinnings, organizational design, and acquisition of the tools that it believes it will [be] needed to win in combat.”
The danger comes, in the report’s estimation, of the Marine Corps “becoming too small relative to the task of enabling the projection of naval power into the most challenging combat environments.”
However, “the pacing threat for the Corps is China, which is developing new tools and operational concepts that will likely require the distribution of Marine Corps forces across a large contested littoral battlespace” that likely will require “larger end-strength and more tactical units,” Wood said.
In accepting the Marine Corps’ premise that it is a “one-war plus force,” the index said it requires 30 battalions, but has 24 now, so the rating is “marginal.” If that number drops to 21 as planned, the Marine Corps capacity grade would be “weak.” Wood, at the conference on the index’s release, said that would leave the service “dramatically too small” to meet the demands of a force that could handle one major global conflict.
This is the danger facing the Marine Corps in continuing to sacrifice end-strength to buy robotics, unmanned systems and long-range strike missiles to modernize its warfighting capabilities for the future, he added.
“The hope is the small unit can do big things,” Wood said.
The report stated one reason why the Corps’ grade on capability of its equipment rose was the retirement of its M1A2 Abrams tanks. While “aggressively pursuing a host of new capabilities” from the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle to the Assault Amphibious Vehicle and the F-35B Lightning II Strike Fighter, small units will still be using Humvees, cargo trucks “and various items of support equipment procured” decades earlier.
Related
8. Afghanistan facing desperate food crisis, UN warns
Afghanistan could become a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. What will the international community do about it? What will Russia, China, and Pakistan do about it?
Afghanistan facing desperate food crisis, UN warns
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Image source, EPA
Image caption, A woman in Kandahar who was internally displaced. The UN warns that half the population faces food shortages
Millions of Afghans will face starvation this winter unless urgent action is taken, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) has warned.
More than half the population - about 22.8 million people - face acute food insecurity, while 3.2 million children under five could suffer acute malnutrition, the WFP said.
"Afghanistan is now among the world's worst humanitarian crises, if not the worst," said David Beasley, the executive director of the WFP.
"We are on a countdown to catastrophe."
Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in August after the US pulled out the last of its remaining troops and the militants swept across the country retaking ground.
The takeover weakened an already fragile economy that was heavily dependent on foreign aid. Western powers suspended aid and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments.
A nation is considered aid-dependent when 10% or more of its gross domestic product comes from foreign aid; in Afghanistan's case, about 40% of GDP was international aid, according to the World Bank.
Media caption, Residents of Afghanistan’s third-largest city, Herat, explain how life has changed
Many Afghans are now selling their possessions to buy food. The new Taliban administration has been blocked from accessing overseas assets, as nations assess how to deal with the hardline group, meaning wages to civil servants and other workers have been withheld.
"It has been more than five months that I have received my wages," a teacher in Herat told the BBC. "Life is tough. I am selling whatever we have at home. We are selling our animals, cutting our trees to sell the wood."
"People are impoverished here," said a man in Kandahar. "Yesterday I saw a woman who was going through the rubbish bins at the local hotel, collecting the leftover food. I asked her why she was doing so and she said she didn't have any other solution, she was trying to find food for her children."
The WFP warned that the looming winter threatened to further isolate Afghans dependent on humanitarian assistance to survive. And for the first time in Afghanistan, urban residents are suffering from food insecurity at similar rates to rural communities, the organisation said.
"It is urgent that we act efficiently and effectively to speed up and scale up our delivery in Afghanistan before winter cuts off a large part of the country, with millions of people - including farmers, women, young children and the elderly - going hungry in the freezing winter," said QU Dongyu, the director of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.
In September, the WFP warned that only five percent of Afghan families had enough to eat every day. Basic ingredients like cooking oil and wheat had skyrocketed in price. In October, the organisation warned that one million children were at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition without immediate life-saving treatment.
In September, more than $1bn (£720m) was pledged by the international community at a conference in Geneva to support Afghans with about a third earmarked for the WFP.
But according to the WFP on Monday, the UN humanitarian assistance programme remains only a third funded. The organisation said it may require as much as $220m (£159.6m) per month to meet the task, calling the current financial commitments a "drop in the ocean".
The food crisis in Afghanistan has been compounded by water shortages and a severe drought - the country's second in four years.
9. Facebook’s Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making
Facebook’s Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making
In hot debates, employees and management spar over allegations content rules aren’t enforced for Breitbart and other right-wing publishers for fear of public blowback. Other internal documents show management expresses wariness of appearing biased.
WSJ · by Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz
In June 2020, when America was rocked by protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, a Facebook employee posted a message on the company’s racial-justice chat board: “Get Breitbart out of News Tab.”
News Tab is a feature that aggregates and promotes articles from various publishers, chosen by Facebook. The employee’s message included screenshots of headlines on Breitbart’s website, such as “Minneapolis Mayhem: Riots in Masks,” “Massive Looting, Buildings in Flames, Bonfires!” and “BLM Protesters Pummel Police Cars on 101.”
The employee said they were “emblematic of a concerted effort at Breitbart and similarly hyperpartisan sources (none of which belong in News Tab) to paint Black Americans and Black-led movements in a very negative way,” according to written conversations on Facebook’s office communication system reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Many other employees chimed in to agree.
In the same chat, a company researcher said any steps aimed at removing Breitbart—a right-wing publisher popular with supporters of former President Donald Trump —could face roadblocks internally because of the potential political blowback. “At best, it would be a very difficult policy discussion,” the researcher said.
Facebook chose to keep Breitbart on News Tab. A spokeswoman for the tech giant said the company makes a judgment based on the specific content published on Facebook, not the entire Breitbart site, and that the Facebook material met its requirements, including the need to abide by its rules against misinformation and hate speech.
Many Republicans, from Mr. Trump down, say Facebook discriminates against conservatives. The documents reviewed by the Journal didn’t render a verdict on whether bias influences its decisions overall. They do show that employees and their bosses have hotly debated whether and how to restrain right-wing publishers, with more-senior employees often providing a check on agitation from the rank and file. The documents viewed by the Journal, which don’t capture all of the employee messaging, didn’t mention equivalent debates over left-wing publications.
Other documents also reveal that Facebook’s management team has been so intently focused on avoiding charges of bias that it regularly places political considerations at the center of its decision making.
Facebook employees, as seen in a large quantity of internal message-board conversations, have agitated consistently for the company to act against far-right sites. In many cases, they have framed their arguments around Facebook’s enforcement of its own rules, alleging that Facebook is giving the right-wing publishers a pass to avoid PR blowback. As one employee put it in an internal communication: “We’re scared of political backlash if we enforce our policies without exemptions.”
A protest against police brutality and racism in June 2020 in Minneapolis.
PHOTO: KEREM YUCEL/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Facebook employees focused special attention on Breitbart, the documents show, criticizing Facebook for showcasing the site’s content in News Tab and for helping it to sell ads. They also alleged Facebook gave special treatment to Breitbart and other conservative publishers, helping them skirt penalties for circulating misinformation or hate speech.
Right-wing sites are consistently among the best-performing publishers on the platform in terms of engagement, according to data from research firm NewsWhip. That is one reason Facebook also is criticized by people on the left, who say Facebook’s algorithms reward far-right content.
Facebook says it enforces its rules equally and doesn’t consider politics in its decision making.
“We make changes to reduce problematic or low-quality content to improve people’s experiences on the platform, not because of a page’s political point of view,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “When it comes to changes that will impact public pages like publishers, of course we analyze the effect of the proposed change before we make it.”
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Facebook is one of the most important outlets for publishers, with more than a third of Americans saying they regularly get their news from the platform, according to Pew Research Center.
Some internal documents show employee antipathy toward conservative media. In 2018, an engineer who had claimed on a message board that Facebook was intolerant of conservatives, left the company. When he took his critique to Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, some Facebook employees criticized him for going on a network “so infamous and biased it can’t even call itself a news channel,” records from the message boards show. Various employees called Mr. Carlson a “white nationalist” and “partisan hack” who “looks as though he’s a Golden Retriever who has been consistently cheated out of a cache of treats.”
“Any dog comparison is a compliment as far as I’m concerned,” Mr. Carlson said in an interview.
Fox News declined to comment. Fox Corp. and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.
In many of the documents reviewed by the Journal, employees discussed whether Facebook was enforcing its rules evenly across the political spectrum. They said the company was allowing conservative sites to skirt the company’s fact-checking rules, publish untrustworthy and offensive content and harm the tech giant’s relationship with advertisers, according to records from internal Facebook message boards.
‘Special exceptions’
In a farewell memo to colleagues in late 2020, a staffer in Facebook’s integrity team, which seeks to mitigate harmful behavior on the platform, said Breitbart was undermining the company’s efforts to fight hate speech.
“We make special exceptions to our written policies for them, and we even explicitly endorse them by including them as trusted partners in our core products,” the staffer said of Breitbart.
Ranking Trust
A study by Facebook researchers found that Breitbart was the least trusted news source, and also ranked as low quality, among several dozen it looked at across the U.S. and Great Britain.
from the files
TRUST RATINGS FROM USER SURVEY
Publisher quality rating
Audience size
Breitbart is ranked
least trusted of
all publishers
FACEBOOK INTERNAL TRUST RATING
Note: Red outline original to document.
Source: August 2019 internal Facebook trust study
Breitbart was included in News Tab, which was launched in 2019. The product contains a main tier with curated news from publishers including The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post, which are paid for their content. Breitbart is part of a second tier of news designed to deliver news tailored to a user’s interest, and isn’t paid.
Facebook said it requires sites included on News Tab to focus on quality news reporting and bars those that repeatedly share what it deems misinformation or violate its public list of community standards.
Asked about the inclusion of Breitbart, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview at the time of the launch that the aim was for News Tab to have a diversity of perspectives.
As the May 25 killing of Mr. Floyd inflamed political tensions across the country in 2020, one staffer wrote in the racial-justice chat that he understood “factual progressive and conservative leaning news organizations” both needed to be represented, but that could be done without including Breitbart.
A senior researcher wrote in the chat that it would be a problem for Facebook to remove Breitbart from News Tab for the way it framed news events, such as the protests after Mr. Floyd’s death, because “news framing is not a standard by which we approach journalistic integrity.”
He said if the company removed publishers whose trust and quality scores were going down, Breitbart might be caught in that net. But he questioned whether the company would do that for all publishers whose scores had fallen. “I can also tell you that we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago: would we take the same approach for them too?” he wrote.
He said that Breitbart had been hurt by algorithm changes that favored all content considered trustworthy, which were defensible within Facebook, he wrote, because they applied to all publishers and could be tied to some clear goal of improving user experience.
An August 2019 study by Facebook researchers found that Breitbart was the least trusted news source of the several dozen it looked at across the U.S. and Great Britain, according to a chart from the study reviewed by the Journal. The study, which also ranked news sources based on quality, also classified Breitbart as “low-quality.”
A Breitbart spokeswoman said the company’s content was far more accurate and more popular with Facebook’s own users than the mainstream news media competitors that Facebook pays for content.
Demonstrators in support of Donald Trump and Breitbart in March 2017 in Huntington Beach, Calif.
PHOTO: EUGENE GARCIA/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK
Facebook’s relationship with Breitbart has also come under fire from advertisers and the employees who work on ad sales. In 2018, one employee working on the Facebook Audience Network, a group of third-party publishers for whom Facebook sells advertising, argued that Facebook should drop Breitbart from the network.
“My argument is that allowing Breitbart to monetize through us is, in fact, a political statement,” the person wrote in an internal memo. “It’s an acceptance of extreme, hateful and often false news used to propagate fear, racism and bigotry.”
Many advertisers sought to ensure their ads didn’t appear on Breitbart by taking advantage of a Facebook Audience Network feature that allowed them to block specific websites, the employee wrote, but the tactic wasn’t proving effective.
“Breitbart tries to work around every control that we put in place, so we have to block at the platform level,” the employee quoted an unnamed advertiser as saying, conveying the client’s dissatisfaction.
A director of product management responded. “On a personal level, all you say resonates with me,” the director wrote. “That being said, and most importantly, we have to rely on our principles and policies when making decisions.”
The Breitbart spokeswoman said it was false that it worked around controls.
Breitbart remained in Facebook Audience Network until the spring of 2020, when all mobile web publishers were removed.
Targeting ‘hyperposters’
Facebook took steps to damp the spread of what it deemed misinformation in users’ feeds after the 2016 election. That included a tool called “Sparing Sharing,” which targeted “hyperposters,” or accounts that post very frequently. It reduced the reach of their posts, since data had shown these users disproportionately shared false and incendiary information.
Another tool, called “Informed Engagement,” reduced the reach of posts that people were more likely to share if they hadn’t read them.
The two tweaks successfully shifted the news stories users were likely to see toward a more mainstream, less volatile mix.
In 2019, Facebook data scientists studied the impact of the two tools on dozens of publishers based on their ideologies, according to the documents reviewed by the Journal.
The study, dubbed a “political ideology analysis,” suggested the company had been suppressing the traffic of major far-right publishers, even though that wasn’t its intent, according to the documents. “Very conservative” sites, it found, would benefit the most if the tools were removed, with Breitbart’s traffic increasing an estimated 20%, Washington Times’ 18%, Western Journal’s 16% and Epoch Times’ by 11%, according to the documents.
Political Test
When Facebook analyzed its ‘Sparing Sharing’ and ‘Informed Engagement’ tools, which were designed to reduce what it deemed misinformation, it found the two had a greater impact on far-right publishers.
Political ideology (as classified by Facebook)
Very liberal
Liberal
Moderate
Conservative
Very conservative
Circles sized by publisher audience size
LIKELY INCREASE IN AUDIENCE WITHOUT TOOLS IN PLACE ⟶
Note: Audience size is based on Facebook internal metric VPV, or Viewport Views, which measures how many times content is seen by users.
Source: Internal document titled, ‘Sparing Sharing + Informed Engagement Removal Political Ideology Analysis’
The study was designed to prepare Facebook for any fallout that might come from stopping the two initiatives, including accusations of bias, according to the documents and people familiar with the matter. “We could face significant backlash for having ‘experimented’ with distribution at the expense of conservative publishers,” one of the researchers wrote in an internal memo.
The company stopped the Informed Engagement program but kept Sparing Sharing.
Mr. Kaplan ordered more studies analyzing how enforcement efforts were implemented for different ideologies as Facebook increasingly faced the charge that it was suppressing conservative voices, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
“It is not news to us that Facebook has effectively suppressed our content,” the Breitbart spokeswoman said. “Still, we’ve been crushing our establishment news competitors in engagement for years, so imagine what would happen if Facebook treated Breitbart equally with other top news publishers.”
List of examples
In 2020, a Facebook engineer gathered up a list of examples he said were evidence that Facebook routinely declines to enforce its own content moderation rules for big far-right publishers like Breitbart, Charlie Kirk, PragerU and Diamond and Silk, according to the documents.
The controversy had escalated in July 2020, when Mr. Trump tweeted a Breitbart video claiming “you don’t need a mask” against Covid-19 and there was a cure for it that included the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. The video, which featured a live news conference, was seen millions of times before Breitbart and social-media platforms including Facebook took it down.
According to Facebook’s fact-checking rules, pages can be punished if they acquire too many “strikes”—meaning they published content deemed false by third-party fact-checkers. It requires two strikes within 90 days to be deemed a “repeat offender,” which can result in a user being suspended from posting content. More strikes can lead to reductions in distribution and advertising revenue.
In a town hall, Mr. Zuckerberg said Breitbart wasn’t punished for the video because that was its only infraction in a 90-day period, according to internal chats describing the meeting.
According to the engineer’s list of examples, the content producers were “managed partners,” part of a program in which Facebook assigns internal handlers to prominent users. A side benefit for these users, the engineer alleged, was that their liaison at Facebook helped them avoid punishment over fact-checking strikes, according to the documents.
A strike would be escalated for review by senior Facebook executives, including the policy and public-relations teams, who would consider whether to overturn the punishment.
A Facebook spokesman said such inquiries come from entities on both sides of the political spectrum, as well as mainstream news organizations.
In an internal memo, the engineer said he based his assessment in part on a queue of three dozen escalations that he had stumbled onto, the vast majority of which were on behalf of conservative content producers. A summary of the engineer’s findings was posted to an internal message board.
Social-media influencers Lynnette ‘Diamond’ Hardaway, center, and Rochelle ‘Silk’ Richardson, right, spoke with Mr. Trump at a rally in March 2020.
PHOTO: AL DRAGO/BLOOMBERG NEWS
In one case he cited regarding pro-Trump influencers Diamond and Silk, third-party fact-checkers rated as “false” a post on their page that said, “How the hell is allocating 25 million dollars in order to give a raised [sic] to house members, that don’t give a damn about Americans, going to help stimulate America’s economy?” When fact-checkers had rated that post “false,” a Facebook staffer involved in the partner program argued there should be no punishment, noting the publisher “has not hesitated going public about their concerns around alleged [anti-]conservative bias on Facebook.”
Diamond and Silk were able to lobby the third-party fact checker to change the rating down to “Partly False” and, with the help of the managed partner escalation process, all its strikes were removed, according to the posted summary and escalation documents.
A Facebook spokesman said that the employee who flagged Diamond and Silk’s willingness to complain about bias was just gathering information to pass up to decision makers, not arguing what to do about the incident.
The chat conversations the Journal reviewed show that inside the company, Facebook employees demanded that higher-ups explain the allegations.
“We are apparently providing hate-speech-policy-consulting and consequence-mitigation services to select partners,” wrote one. “Leadership is scared of being accused of bias,” wrote another.
Facebook executives dropped into the chat to explain fact-checking policies and how the managed partner program worked but didn’t address the questions about bias, according to the chat records.
—Design by Andrew Levinson. A color filter has been used on photos.
the facebook files
A series offering an unparalleled look inside the social-media giant’s failings—and its unwillingness or inability to address them.
Appeared in the October 25, 2021, print edition as 'Inside Facebook, Debates Over Politics Rage.'
10. Taiwan Must Be Included in Joe Biden's China Strategy by John Bolton
Conclusion:
This is far from a complete list even of China’s politico-military threats, let alone the economic and social menace it embodies. In the immediate future, different potential partners will agree in different respects about the nature of Beijing’s dangers. Accordingly, Washington needs a “variable geometry” to involve its potential allies until perceptions of the struggle ahead are better defined and more widely shared. Taiwan is far safer nested within this process than standing apart from it. That is how Washington’s strategic thinking should proceed.
Taiwan Must Be Included in Joe Biden's China Strategy
Last week, the White House yet again corrected President Joe Biden for misstating his own Taiwan policy. The day after saying America had a “commitment” to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack, thereby reversing the long-standing (and badly misguided) “strategic ambiguity” approach, his aides hurriedly said the policy had not changed. “Ironic” doesn’t come close to describing Biden’s misstep. In a 2001 Washington Post op-ed, Biden lambasted George W. Bush for exactly the same thing. Entitled “Not So Deft On Taiwan,” the op-ed ended with “Words matter.”
Indeed. Even Kissengerian words like “strategic ambiguity” can outlive their utility. Taiwan’s central vulnerability today is that it stands isolated by decades of Chinese pressure and propaganda. The conceptual answer is to enmesh Taiwan as a key element of the overall U.S. and allied response to the full array of China’s threats, diplomatically, militarily, and economically. Focusing primarily on bolstering Taiwan’s military power underlines its isolation rather than reducing it. China’s recent improvements to military bases in Fujian province show the cross-Strait arms race is a central fixture of their relations, not a decisive answer for either.
Treating Taiwan separately obscures its significance in America’s policy debates, and fails to generate the domestic political support required to successfully deter China. In fact, given Biden’s priority on reaching agreements with Beijing on climate-change issues, China’s palpable threat to Taiwan is likely being downplayed, not to mention broader dangers. Thus, for example, when Biden met in August with Israeli Prime Minister Bennett, Israeli officials were surprised China received only passing mention.
China poses an extraordinarily wide range of threats. Understanding that Taiwan is part of that spectrum doesn’t diminish its importance, but instead ensures it is not treated as a “one-off” issue susceptible to being traded away. We didn’t trade off NATO allies to the Soviet Union one-by-one, and while we are far distant from an Indo-Pacific NATO, looking at the big picture helps us with Taiwan. Paraphrasing Eisenhower, enlarging a problem can help solve it.
Beijing’s offensive posture on its periphery is clear and growing, as its neighbors see plainly. Taiwan is hardly the alpha and omega of China’s hegemonic aspirations. Deterring Beijing from attacking Taiwan thus fits readily into a strategy both offensive and defensive all along China’s landmass. Beijing needs to hear that Washington holds it accountable for North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile programs, not as simply one more concerned state in the failed Six-Party Talks.
President Biden should strongly reaffirm that the Senkaku Islands lie within Washington’s defense commitments to Tokyo, as Obama and Trump did. In the South China Sea, tightening politico-military relations with the littoral states; explicitly rejecting China’s territorial claims and finally resolving the other nations’ competing claims (including Taiwan’s); expanding freedom-of-navigation operations and the number of navies participating; and continued growth in military cooperation with others on China’s periphery like India and Vietnam, including greater cooperation in cyber-security with “neutral” states, are all of a strategic piece.
Image: Chinese Internet.
At the apex of the pyramid are nuclear weapons, the ultimate means for China to prevent others from adequately engaging in collective defense with Taiwan. STRATCOM Commander Charles Richard has described China’s increases in nuclear weapons delivery capabilities as “breathtaking”, no understatement. Enhanced ballistic-missile inventories, reflected by substantial new missile-silo construction, plus Beijing’s progress in hypersonic cruise-missile technology, all indicate it must be a participant in any future strategic weapons negotiations. Bilateral talks between Russia and America reflect merely a bygone era of nuclear threats, not the one growing before our eyes now. China’s complaint that its nuclear inventory is too small to participate would simply give it a license to build up to Russian and American levels, and only then participate. This is unacceptable. Beijing’s nuclear importance should also be plain to Russia, but apparently not yet. Notwithstanding its current closeness to Beijing, Moscow must understand that Greater China’s territory may well include Far Eastern Russia and more by 2100. All those natural resources and tiny population may be too tempting to resist.
This is far from a complete list even of China’s politico-military threats, let alone the economic and social menace it embodies. In the immediate future, different potential partners will agree in different respects about the nature of Beijing’s dangers. Accordingly, Washington needs a “variable geometry” to involve its potential allies until perceptions of the struggle ahead are better defined and more widely shared. Taiwan is far safer nested within this process than standing apart from it. That is how Washington’s strategic thinking should proceed.
11. FDD | Turkey Lands on Anti-Money Laundering Watchlist — Again
Conclusion:
Washington should continue to designate Turkey-based and Turkey-linked illicit financial actors and encourage its allies to do so as well. U.S. authorities should also intensify their ongoing efforts to extradite from Austria the Turkish money laundering suspect Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, who could help expose an extensive and interconnected web of Iranian, Turkish, and Venezuelan illicit financial dealings. Congress and the administration should pressure the Erdogan government to fully implement FATF’s recommendations, which are necessary to protect the integrity of the international financial system. If Turkey does not implement the FATF recommendations in the near future, the watchdog would have ample reason to move Turkey from the grey list to the black list.
FDD | Turkey Lands on Anti-Money Laundering Watchlist — Again
Aykan Erdemir
Turkey Program Senior Director
Toby Dershowitz
Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Strategy
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · October 22, 2021
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Paris-based global money laundering and terror financing watchdog, added Turkey to its “grey list” on Thursday, placing Ankara alongside 22 other jurisdictions, including Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen, under increased monitoring. This designation shows yet again that NATO member Turkey continues to offer a permissive jurisdiction for terror finance, sanctions evasion, and money laundering under the 19-year rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party. FATF President Marcus Pleyer summed up Turkey’s situation by saying that “serious issues remain” in the country’s financial operations aimed at combatting money laundering and terrorist financing.
The 39-member FATF was founded in 1989 to defend the integrity of the international financial system. Turkey has been a member since 1991. FATF first put Turkey on its grey list in 2011. In 2012, Turkey came close to being blacklisted, as FATF warned Ankara that the watchdog “will initiate discussions on Turkey’s membership” if “adequate counter terrorist financing legislation has not been enacted by October 2012.” FATF’s “black list,” which currently includes only two countries, Iran and North Korea, designates high-risk jurisdictions against which the watchdog “calls on all members and urges all jurisdictions to apply enhanced due diligence” and “counter-measures to protect the international financial system.”
Grey listing is a step that precedes a jurisdiction’s inclusion on the black list. FATF removed Turkey from its grey list in 2014 after Ankara made various amendments to Turkey’s legal and regulatory framework. Ankara’s systematic shortcomings in implementation, however, continued to draw criticism from Turkey’s Western allies.
In December 2019, FATF warned that unless Ankara improves its “serious shortcomings,” Turkey risked being added to the grey list once again. In Turkey’s mutual evaluation report, an in-depth peer review that includes analysis and recommendations by members states, FATF highlighted the “need to improve measures for freezing assets linked to terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Being put on the grey list “can scare away investors and creditors, hurting exports, output and consumption. It also can make global banks wary of doing business with a country,” as the Associated Press reported yesterday. Former U.S. Treasury Department officials told The Wall Street Journal that FATF’s designation of Turkey will “likely spur an exodus of money out of the country as banks and other foreign investors are forced to reassess their exposures.”
Turkey can scarcely afford another blow to its ailing economy. The lira has fallen to an all-time low, having depreciated by 23 percent so far this year, while inflation is at 20 percent. As of last year, the Erdogan government’s financial mismanagement had already prompted the biggest outflows from Turkey’s debt and equity markets in more than a decade and has also dried up foreign direct investment from Ankara’s traditional economic partners in the West. Right before FATF’s decision, the London-based chief economist of a global investment bank tweeted that Turkey has become “an irrelevance to global emerging market investors,” since the country now comprises only “0.2% of the Global Emerging Market MSCI equity index.” MSCI, the world’s largest index provider, warned last year that it was considering ejecting Turkey from its emerging market index and reclassifying the country as a “frontier” or “standalone” market.
FATF listed eight “deficiencies” that need action by Ankara. Among other things, the watchdog says Turkey must apply sanctions “in particular for unregistered money transfer services and exchange offices and in relation to the requirements of adequate, accurate and up-to-date beneficial ownership information.” FATF also says Turkey must undertake “more complex money laundering investigations and prosecutions” and “pursu[e] outgoing requests and domestic designations related to UN-designated groups.”
Pleyer said, “Turkey has made some progress across all areas of concern. However, serious issues remain,” especially in “supervision in particularly high-risk sectors, such as banks, gold and precious stones dealers, and real estate agents.” He added that Ankara “needs to show it is effectively tackling complex money laundering cases and show it is pursuing terrorist financing prosecutions in line with its risks and prioritizing cases of UN-designated terrorist organizations, such as ISIL and al-Qaeda.”
However, rather than prosecuting jihadist financiers, the Turkish government is turning a blind eye to their activities, as U.S. Treasury Department designations continue to show. Likewise, evidence from federal court cases exposes not just the negligence but also the complicity of the Erdogan government in illicit financial activities, including sanctions evasion.
Since 2019, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has issued seven sets of designations targeting Turkey-based or Turkey-linked jihadist individuals and entities. These sanctions, which OFAC issued in April, September, and November of 2019 and in January, May, August, and September of 2021, demonstrate Washington’s heightened vigilance against jihadist networks operating within the borders of an increasingly adversarial NATO member state. In addition to al-Qaeda, these sanctions targeted illicit financial networks linked to the Islamic State, Hamas, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Egyptian group Harakat Sawa’d Misr. These links show the extent to which Turkey has become what NPR in 2014 referred to as the “jihadi highway.”
The Erdogan government has also been a key facilitator of Iran’s and Venezuela’s sanctions evasion schemes. In 2018, a Manhattan federal court sentenced Mehmet Hakan Atilla, the Turkish public lender Halkbank’s deputy general manager, to 32 months in prison for participating in a multibillion-dollar scheme to violate U.S. economic sanctions against Iran. Halkbank itself now faces a federal indictment on charges of fraud, money laundering, and other offenses related to its participation in that scheme. In 2019, Treasury designated an Istanbul-based company for facilitating payments made as part of a “corruption network for the sale of [Venezuelan] gold in Turkey,” linked to a key facilitator of the Nicolás Maduro regime’s sanctions-evasion and bribery schemes.
Two other federal cases point to Ankara’s terror finance problem. In October 2020, a judge in the Eastern District of New York ruled that plaintiffs could move forward with a landmark case against Turkey’s Kuveyt Turk Bank for aiding and abetting the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Additionally, 876 victims of Iran-sponsored terrorism are pursuing civil action against Halkbank in a Southern District of New York court for helping Tehran avoid the financial consequences of its support for terrorist attacks.
Erdogan has a troubling history of covering up cases against sanctions busters and rewarding sanctions evaders with cushy appointments, including one who went on to serve as an ambassador and another as CEO of the Istanbul stock exchange. Furthermore, since 2008, the Erdogan government has declared seven wealth amnesties, which allowed individuals and entities to repatriate previously undisclosed offshore assets and to declare their domestics assets without facing any legal scrutiny or tax penalties. During the run-up to the last wealth amnesty, in June 2020, Transparency International Turkey Chair Oya Ozarslan warned that Turkey’s policy can “create a risk of introducing black money … into the system” by facilitating money laundering and terror finance.
Besides offering a permissive jurisdiction for illicit finance, the Erdogan government also helps other permissive jurisdictions avoid FATF scrutiny. In 2018, Turkey joined China and Saudi Arabia in trying to block a U.S.-led effort to place Pakistan on the grey list. Ankara remained opposed to the measure even after Beijing and Riyadh withdrew their objections. Last year, Erdogan announced that he opposes adding Pakistan to FATF’s black list.
The Erdogan government was dealt additional blows this week. The European Commission said Turkey has made no progress in the fight against corruption and failed to “establish anti-corruption bodies in line with Turkey’s international obligations.” The commission also recommended that Ankara improve the “legal framework regulating the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing,” in line with the “recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force and those of the Venice Commission on the law on preventing financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
Despite this flurry of criticism, the Erdogan government shows no signs of recognizing Turkey’s serious and growing illicit finance problem. Turkey’s Ministry of Treasury and Finance responded to FATF by saying that the watchdog’s action was “undeserved.” Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu slammed FATF’s decision by accusing Europe of “financing and empowering terrorism.” He went as far as to claim that the grey list decision was retaliation for Ankara’s measures to stop LGBT individuals from “corrupt[ing] our country’s morals,” and for Turkey’s actions against Washington’s Syrian Kurdish-led partners in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. Soylu added, “We consider this decision to be a political decision. You are involved in all kinds of perversions. We are not like that; we are a Muslim nation.”
Washington should continue to designate Turkey-based and Turkey-linked illicit financial actors and encourage its allies to do so as well. U.S. authorities should also intensify their ongoing efforts to extradite from Austria the Turkish money laundering suspect Sezgin Baran Korkmaz, who could help expose an extensive and interconnected web of Iranian, Turkish, and Venezuelan illicit financial dealings. Congress and the administration should pressure the Erdogan government to fully implement FATF’s recommendations, which are necessary to protect the integrity of the international financial system. If Turkey does not implement the FATF recommendations in the near future, the watchdog would have ample reason to move Turkey from the grey list to the black list.
Aykan Erdemir is senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Toby Dershowitz is senior vice president for government relations and strategy. They both contribute to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from the authors, the Turkey Program, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Aykan and Toby on Twitter @aykan_erdemir and @tobydersh. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Aykan Erdemir Turkey Program Senior Director · October 22, 2021
12. Russia Challenges Biden Again With Broad Cybersurveillance Operation
Excerpts:
“What the Russians are looking for is systemic access,” said Christopher Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired by President Donald J. Trump last year for declaring that the 2020 election had been run honestly and with no significant fraud. “They don’t want to try to pop into accounts one by one.”
Federal officials say that they are aggressively using new authorities from Mr. Biden to protect the country from cyberthreats, particularly noting a broad new international effort to disrupt ransomware gangs, many of which are based in Russia. With a new and far larger team of senior officials overseeing the government’s cyberoperations, Mr. Biden has been trying to mandate security changes that should make attacks like the most recent one much harder to pull off.
In response to SolarWinds, the White House announced a series of deadlines for government agencies, and all contractors dealing with the federal government, to carry out a new round of security practices that would make them harder targets for Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean hackers. Those included basic steps like a second method of authenticating who is entering an account, akin to how banks or credit card companies send a code to a cellphone or other device to ensure that a stolen password is not being used.
But adherence to new standards, while improved, remains spotty. Companies often resist government mandates or say that no single set of regulations can capture the challenge of locking down different kinds of computer networks. An effort by the administration to require companies to report breaches of their systems to the government within 24 hours, or be subject to fines, has run into intense opposition from corporate lobbyists.
Russia Challenges Biden Again With Broad Cybersurveillance Operation
The new campaign came only months after President Biden imposed sanctions on Moscow in response to a series of spy operations it had conducted around the world.
Microsoft said it recently notified more than 600 organizations that they had been the target of about 23,000 attempts to enter their systems.
By
Oct. 25, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ET
SEA ISLAND, Ga. — Russia’s premier intelligence agency has launched another campaign to pierce thousands of U.S. government, corporate and think-tank computer networks, Microsoft officials and cybersecurity experts warned on Sunday, only months after President Biden imposed sanctions on Moscow in response to a series of sophisticated spy operations it had conducted around the world.
The new effort is “very large, and it is ongoing,” Tom Burt, one of Microsoft’s top security officers, said in an interview. Government officials confirmed that the operation, apparently aimed at acquiring data stored in the cloud, seemed to come out of the S.V.R., the Russian intelligence agency that was the first to enter the Democratic National Committee’s networks during the 2016 election.
While Microsoft insisted that the percentage of successful breaches was small, it did not provide enough information to accurately measure the severity of the theft.
“I was clear with President Putin that we could have gone further, but I chose not to do so,” Mr. Biden said at time, after calling the Russian leader. “Now is the time to de-escalate.”
American officials insist that the type of attack Microsoft reported falls into the category of the kind of spying major powers regularly conduct against one another. Still, the operation suggests that even while the two governments say they are meeting regularly to combat ransomware and other maladies of the internet age, the undermining of networks continues apace in an arms race that has sped up as countries sought Covid-19 vaccine data and a range of industrial and government secrets.
“Spies are going to spy,” John Hultquist, the vice president for intelligence analysis at Mandiant, the company that first detected the SolarWinds attack, said on Sunday at the Cipher Brief Threat Conference in Sea Island, where many cyberexperts and intelligence officials met. “But what we’ve learned from this is that the S.V.R., which is very good, isn’t slowing down.”
It is not clear how successful the latest campaign has been. Microsoft said it recently notified more than 600 organizations that they had been the target of about 23,000 attempts to enter their systems. By comparison, the company said it had detected only 20,500 targeted attacks from “all nation-state actors” over the past three years. Microsoft said a small percentage of the latest attempts succeeded but did not provide details or indicate how many of the organizations were compromised.
American officials confirmed that the operation, which they consider routine spying, was underway. But they insisted that if it was successful, it was Microsoft and similar providers of cloud services who bore much of the blame.
A senior administration official called the latest attacks “unsophisticated, run-of-the mill operations that could have been prevented if the cloud service providers had implemented baseline cybersecurity practices.”
“We can do a lot of things,” the official said, “but the responsibility to implement simple cybersecurity practices to lock their — and by extension, our — digital doors rests with the private sector.”
Government officials have been pushing to put more data in the cloud because it is far easier to protect information there. (Amazon runs the C.I.A.’s cloud contract; during the Trump administration, Microsoft won a huge contract to move the Pentagon to the cloud, though the program was recently scrapped by the Biden administration amid a long legal dispute about how it was awarded.)
But the most recent attack by the Russians, experts said, was a reminder that moving to the cloud is no solution — especially if those who administer the cloud operations use insufficient security.
Microsoft said the attack was focused on its “resellers,” firms that customize the use of the cloud for companies or academic institutions. The Russian hackers apparently calculated that if they could infiltrate the resellers, those firms would have high-level access to the data they wanted — whether it was government emails, defense technologies or vaccine research.
The Russian intelligence agency was “attempting to replicate the approach it has used in past attacks by targeting organizations integral to the global information technology supply chain,” Mr. Burt said.
That supply chain is the chief target of the Russian government hackers — and, increasingly, Chinese hackers who are trying to replicate Russia’s most successful techniques.
In the SolarWinds case late last year, targeting the supply chain meant that Russian hackers subtly changed the computer code of network-management software used by companies and government agencies, surreptitiously inserting the corrupted code just as it was being shipped out to 18,000 users.
Once those users updated to a new version of the software — much as tens of millions of people update an iPhone every few weeks — the Russians suddenly had access to their entire network.
In the latest attack, the S.V.R., known as a stealthy operator in the cyberworld, used techniques more akin to brute force. As described by Microsoft, the incursion primarily involved deploying a huge database of stolen passwords in automated attacks intended to get Russian government hackers into Microsoft’s cloud services. It is a messier, less efficient operation — and it would work only if some of the resellers of Microsoft’s cloud services had not imposed some of the cybersecurity practices that the company required of them last year.
Microsoft said in a blog post scheduled to be made public on Monday that it would do more to enforce contractual obligations by its resellers to put security measures in place.
“What the Russians are looking for is systemic access,” said Christopher Krebs, who ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security until he was fired by President Donald J. Trump last year for declaring that the 2020 election had been run honestly and with no significant fraud. “They don’t want to try to pop into accounts one by one.”
Federal officials say that they are aggressively using new authorities from Mr. Biden to protect the country from cyberthreats, particularly noting a broad new international effort to disrupt ransomware gangs, many of which are based in Russia. With a new and far larger team of senior officials overseeing the government’s cyberoperations, Mr. Biden has been trying to mandate security changes that should make attacks like the most recent one much harder to pull off.
In response to SolarWinds, the White House announced a series of deadlines for government agencies, and all contractors dealing with the federal government, to carry out a new round of security practices that would make them harder targets for Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean hackers. Those included basic steps like a second method of authenticating who is entering an account, akin to how banks or credit card companies send a code to a cellphone or other device to ensure that a stolen password is not being used.
But adherence to new standards, while improved, remains spotty. Companies often resist government mandates or say that no single set of regulations can capture the challenge of locking down different kinds of computer networks. An effort by the administration to require companies to report breaches of their systems to the government within 24 hours, or be subject to fines, has run into intense opposition from corporate lobbyists.
13. FDD | Iran’s Nuclear Extortion Continues
Conclusion:
At the very least, Washington should work with international partners to censure Tehran at the next quarterly IAEA Board of Governors meeting. Tehran has thrice managed to avoid censure this year. The Biden administration should also support the efforts of its European partners, who in 2020 triggered the JCPOA’s dispute resolution mechanism within the Joint Commission — the body created by the accord to resolve issues pertaining to implementation — to address Iran’s mounting deal violations. And finally, should Tehran not relent, Washington and its international partners should “snap back” UN Security Council resolutions and penalties on Iran, a process that would occur once the IAEA Board forwarded Iran’s nuclear file back to the Security Council. This would ramp up the multilateral pressure on the Islamic Republic and fortify the Biden administration’s claims of a closing “window” and a diminishing “runway” for diplomacy.
Currently, the Biden administration continues to hope that its offer of talks will be sufficient to bring Iran back to the negotiating table. But Tehran’s growing confidence in its nuclear escalation — particularly its growing stockpiles of 20 percent and 60 percent enriched uranium — indicate that this may not happen soon or even in the manner the administration desires.
FDD | Iran’s Nuclear Extortion Continues
fdd.org · by Behnam Ben Taleblu Senior Fellow · October 22, 2021
Mohammad Eslami, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI), recently proclaimed that the Islamic Republic is ahead of schedule on a parliamentary mandate to enrich 120 kg of uranium to 20 percent purity by the end of 2021. Eslami’s comment builds on months of atomic advances, all of which serve as proof of Tehran’s continuing commitment to a policy of nuclear escalation and coercion.
Uranium enriched to 20 percent and above is qualified as highly enriched uranium (HEU), which Iran is prohibited from producing and stockpiling pursuant to the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). HEU at higher purities is used in nuclear weapons. States that can enrich up to 20 percent have mastered the lion’s share of the technical work to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons, should they decide to develop them.
At present, it is unclear if the 120 kg of 20 percent enriched uranium is all in the gaseous form known as uranium hexafluoride (UF6), which is suitable for enrichment via centrifuge. The 120 kg figure could be a rough composite of Iran’s 33 kg of 20 percent enriched uranium that remains in different chemical forms and the 84.3 kg of 20 percent enriched uranium that the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said was in UF6 form as of August 2021.
According to experts, it is also possible that Iran is using a different technical measurement, hexafluoride mass, rather than uranium mass and is choosing to tout this repackaged higher figure for political purposes. It may also be possible, but less likely, that Iran’s rate of production at its declared enrichment facilities, the underground Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant and the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz, has increased.
While this question is unlikely to be resolved until the IAEA’s next quarterly report, Eslami’s announcement conveys Iran’s intent to benefit from its nuclear expansion by increasing pressure on Washington to make more concessions. Earlier this year, an unnamed Iranian official explicitly stated that Iran would not cease enrichment to 20 percent purity until the removal of U.S. sanctions. “I expect Mr. Eslami to implement the system’s strategy well,” said Fereydoun Abbasi, one of Eslami’s predecessors at the AEOI, in an interview last month.
Iran’s parliament, which mandated this escalation, did so in response to the killing of Iran’s top military-nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, in late 2020. Since then, Tehran has used more alleged sabotage as a reason to press for further advances, such as enrichment of uranium to 60 percent purity, a threat the regime has been making for about a decade but did not act on until this April.
Despite the change in style between Rouhani and Raisi, as well as the changes in Iranian government personnel, Tehran has remained consistent in its nuclear policy since Washington left the JCPOA in 2018. While the likely overall aim of this policy is to force America to re-enter a fast-expiring nuclear accord and win sanctions relief, the more the program presses ahead unimpeded, the less restraint Iran may feel down the line. This policy appears to have gone through three different phases, representing the varying levels of risks the regime is willing to run — which are informed first and foremost by Tehran’s understanding of America’s stomach for escalation.
The first phase, starting in mid-2018, is when Iran sought to show “strategic patience.” Tehran was openly hoping that Washington’s unilateral sanctions policy would backfire and fail. Spurred by a desire to respond to the surprising efficacy of U.S. sanctions, Tehran commenced phase two in mid-2019 — gradual and overt violations of the JCPOA while escalating regional and maritime tensions through aggressive military and proxy militia actions. The third and final phase, which began in 2020 and continues until today, features significant nuclear escalation. These moves — such as the production of uranium metal and the knowledge Iran is gaining from making 60 percent enriched uranium — can no longer be considered reversible. By directly impeding IAEA access to monitoring equipment and data, Tehran has also aimed to be more provocative.
The third phase therefore offers the Islamic Republic a chance to develop new nuclear facts on the ground while taking its strategic competition with Washington to a new level. This is why if the Biden administration is serious about preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, it must advance a strategy of its own to hold the regime accountable for its nuclear advances.
Currently, the Biden administration has not even used counterproliferation authorities to sanction Eslami, the man overseeing this escalation, while the United Nations, United Kingdom, and European Union already have. Eslami has a worrisome past that includes leading organizations supportive of Tehran’s nuclear weapons drive as well as serving in key positions in firms that produce drones and ballistic missiles for the Islamic Republic.
At the very least, Washington should work with international partners to censure Tehran at the next quarterly IAEA Board of Governors meeting. Tehran has thrice managed to avoid censure this year. The Biden administration should also support the efforts of its European partners, who in 2020 triggered the JCPOA’s dispute resolution mechanism within the Joint Commission — the body created by the accord to resolve issues pertaining to implementation — to address Iran’s mounting deal violations. And finally, should Tehran not relent, Washington and its international partners should “snap back” UN Security Council resolutions and penalties on Iran, a process that would occur once the IAEA Board forwarded Iran’s nuclear file back to the Security Council. This would ramp up the multilateral pressure on the Islamic Republic and fortify the Biden administration’s claims of a closing “window” and a diminishing “runway” for diplomacy.
Currently, the Biden administration continues to hope that its offer of talks will be sufficient to bring Iran back to the negotiating table. But Tehran’s growing confidence in its nuclear escalation — particularly its growing stockpiles of 20 percent and 60 percent enriched uranium — indicate that this may not happen soon or even in the manner the administration desires.
Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Iran Program and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). For more analysis from Behnam, the Iran Program, and CMPP, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD and the Iran Program on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_Iran and FDD_CMPP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Behnam Ben Taleblu Senior Fellow · October 22, 2021
14. 362. POW Concerns in a Digital Era – Manipulation of Reality as a Threat
I am glad to see this discussed. It should be no surprise. I wonder how SERE has taken this on. How do we inoculate high risk personnel from this threat?
362. POW Concerns in a Digital Era – Manipulation of Reality as a Threat
[Editor’s Note: Today’s post — co-authored by returning guest blogger and proclaimed Mad Scientist Dr. Jan Kallberg, LTC Todd Arnold, and COL Stephen Hamilton, all from the U.S. Army Cyber Institute at West Point, New York — addresses how we have been socially conditioned to “trust the pixel” in the digital age, creating a vulnerability for adversaries to exploit in future conflicts by manipulating our Soldiers and Leaders, the Home Front, and captured comrades-in-arms via deepfake technology. Read on to see how our adversaries could use deepfakes to negatively influence the American will to fight, and learn what we can do now to build resiliency to these increasingly likely possibilities!]
As technology evolves, it introduces new methods to deliver and consume information. Unfortunately, technology is often dual-use – the technology that is used for positive civilian purposes can be simultaneously used with nefarious intent or military gain. Dual-use technology is not novel or unique to the current information age; mass printing and trains created social mobility and consolidated democracy in America, but conversely was the foundation for the early Soviet totalitarian propaganda machine in the 1920s. Similarly, the radio, which gave all Americans political insights and strengthened the bond between the electorate and the elected, was the same technology used by multiple totalitarian governments as the engine for their propaganda machine to suppress the opposition, consolidate control, and retain their grip on power (e.g., 1930’s Germany and Italy). With current technological advances and capabilities, the information society can be informed as events happen in real-time, but the same wide information dissemination can manipulate, disinform, and negatively influence entire populations in unanticipated ways and at unprecedented speed.
Our potential adversaries seek to influence our country’s direction, while advancing their agenda, by distorting American society’s perception of reality and how we relate to our own values. The Russian perception management strategy, adopted from the Soviet Union and duplicated by China and North Korea, aims to make the average citizen feel less loyal to the United States through questioning, and thereby undermining, the legitimacy, authority, trust, and confidence in U.S. elected officials. The perception under attack is our belief in our society, our mission, and democracy itself. In a traditional peace time media landscape, Russian and Chinese perception management would struggle to have an audience. However, with great power competition, social media and online content proliferation, and the potential for U.S. Prisoners of War (POWs) being taken in future combat operations, an opportunity unfolds for our adversaries.
POWs are an audience that, due to the physical circumstances and the nature of captivity, cannot shelter themselves from a captor that does not obey international humanitarian law. In previous armed conflicts, authoritarian regimes attempted to exploit American POWs for propaganda gain. These efforts often took the form of video and audio recordings, forced statements, and pictures of the POWs, despite such activities clearly violating the Geneva Conventions. The prospect of advanced digital capabilities, such as deepfakes, presents potential adversaries with a new powerful tool for manipulation and influence in future conflicts. The American military must begin preparing for the prospect of these new technologies being used against its POWs.
In the last decade, images and video have replaced the written word as the standard bearer for facts, entertainment, notions, and emotions. The ubiquity of digital media, tablets, smart phones, and wearables that we watch and interact with has also created a reliance on the available images, footage, and media. The old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” is more relevant than ever. The younger generation trusts images and available online footage, while they consume information rapidly, with little or no time to analyze the validity of the information. The inherent trust of visual information elevates the credibility of plausible information, making it an ideal medium for launching active disinformation campaigns (e.g., recent Russian and Chinese activities). So, rather than society becoming more resilient to disinformation campaigns, it is likely that we are gradually building up a vulnerability by trusting the pixel instead of our traditional sources of information.
What are deepfakes? A deepfake is the manipulation of digital video and audio files to make it appear in a video that the person says or does something they never said or did, primarily by face-swapping. The technology can be used to manipulate television news, public statements, audio or film footage; virtually any digital medium. The technique utilizes pre-existing 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 and is becoming increasingly difficult to detect. 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, whom Mr. Ume altered to look and sound like Tom Cruise. The process required two months to create the deepfakes, but Mr. Ume neither had access to Tom Cruise nor could he call Mr. Cruise to extract voice features to speed up the deepfake creation. Today, a plausible deepfake can be created in as little as five minutes. In a POW or captivity scenario, the captor’s access to the captive makes gaining adequate features to render a deepfake trivial.
From a POW and captive recovery perspective, this technology creates two distinct concerns. The initial concern is the release of a POW deepfake to the public. Even though the creation and release would be considered 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 deepfakes could be rapidly distributed across the American home front on a national scale to undermine the American war effort, the will to fight, stress service members’ families, use tailored messages to politicians by POW constituents, create cleavage in communities, and weaken support for the war.
The systematic attack on the will to fight could seriously impact the support for continued U.S. operations. To expand on this concern and visualize its utilization, we give two examples using deepfakes which demonstrate negatively influencing the American will to fight:
First, a deepfake video is produced where U.S. POWs claim they will be executed for the war crimes ordered by General Jones — and the only way to save them is for General Jones to publicly accept responsibility for their war crimes. The deepfake video, distributed widely among U.S. allies, would exacerbate anti-US sentiment in the Third World. The video is shared and becomes viral among social media users, many driven by an anti-US sentiment. Additionally, the adversary may still hold the advantage of having POWs for as long as possible by using deepfake technology to continue generating new content even though the POWs have already been executed or perished in captivity.
Second, a POW is interviewed by the captor’s interrogation team about mundane daily events of no significance; the sound and images are captured during the 30 minute session without the POW’s knowledge or consent. The POW is resisting collaboration and acts according to the U.S. Army Code of Conduct. However, technology could portray the POW as a willing collaborator. Constructing a narrative based on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that is plausible would reinforce the idea that the video is genuine. The 30 minutes of audio and images are well beyond what the captor would need to create a few minutes of deepfake video that is a plea from the POW to spare their life and end hostilities. The POW in the deepfake video could falsely detail collateral damage, the deaths of innocent civilians, the absence of a U.S. cause for hostilities, or how the futile American policy will fail.
The second concern is that the captors could manipulate POWs by showing them deepfakes while in captivity. This scenario is neither implausible nor unprecedented; during both the Vietnam and Korean conflicts, the Communists dedicated hours of daily indoctrination to sway captured U.S. Soldiers’ and Airmen’s opinions and beliefs. The old-school Soviet propaganda machine was focused on making a lie plausible while undermining the sense of reality and truth that prevailed until that point. For the propagandist, achieving plausibility is easier than fully convincing a target. The length of captivity could be several years, which works in the captors’ favor, since POWs have no other information or sources other than those the captor provides. For the Communists during the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea, the captives were a propaganda asset that, if turned against the United States, would support their cause.
Modern technology gives a variety of effective tools to confuse the captive and undermine their will to resist. The captor could utilize deepfakes to indoctrinate, psychologically destabilize, and manipulate the captive’s mental state. The potential effects become more likely in a protracted conflict where captivity may continue for several years. When combined with intentionally harsh conditions, even the most ardent resistance could crumble. Despite the fact that a POW might dismiss each individual deepfake as implausible, it is possible that over time, the isolation and pressure from the surrounding conditions would lead a POW to cave into its manipulation.
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 initiated to address these increasingly likely possibilities. Preliminary efforts should include: 1) Identifying ways to identify deepfakes shortly after their dissemination; 2) Exploring the possibility of preparing a validated genuine video of all service members as an aid to identifying deepfakes, with enough data captured and archived prior to 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) Incorporating deepfake awareness in POW resistance training to prepare the service member for the possibility that deepfakes may be used against them while in captivity.
We find it essential to migrate from a shared notion of what captivity means based on experiences in WWII and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Today, the tools captors can use for their propaganda and manipulation are widely different. Modern-day propaganda can now reach every networked digital device, and our potential adversaries are ready to use that reach to influence our will to fight. Based on the history of abuse demonstrated by our adversaries, our concern is that utilizing the manipulated POWs’ voices and images could be a part of these psychological operations.
About the Authors: Jan Kallberg is a research scientist at the Army Cyber Institute. Todd Arnold is the Lead for the Cyber Operations Research Element (CORE) at the Army Cyber Institute and an Assistant Professor in EECS at the U.S. Military Academy. Stephen Hamilton is the Chief of Staff and Technical Director at the Army Cyber Institute and an Associate Professor in EECS at the U.S. Military Academy. The authors would like to thank Mark Visger for his valuable feedback.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, Army Cyber Institute, the U.S. Military Academy, Army Futures Command (AFC), or U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
15. No unusual N.Korean military activities after Seoul's rocket launch
No unusual N.Korean military activities after Seoul's rocket launch - Bhaskar Live English News
Seoul, Oct 25 | South Korean military officials said on Monday that they have not detected any unusual North Korean military activities amid concerns Pyongyang could stage another show of force in response to Seoul’s recent space rocket launch.
“The intelligence authorities of South Korea and the United States have been closely cooperating and keeping close tabs on the (North Korean military) movements,” Yonhap News Agency quoted Col. Kim Jun-rak, the spokesperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying at a press briefing.
“But there have been no unusual movements,” he added.
On October 21, South Korea fired off its first homegrown space launch vehicle, the KSLV-II, from the Naro Space Centre in the country’s southern coastal village of Goheung.
The launch came as Pyongyang has called on Seoul and Washington to drop “double standards” in reference to the allies’ characterisation of its missile activities as “provocations” while rationalising their own as deterrence.
As the North is banned from using ballistic missile technology under UN Security Council sanctions, long-range rocket launches under what it calls a “space development” initiative have long been a subject of international criticism.
16. Reconsidering U.S. Decision-Making Within NATO After the Fall of Kabul
Excerpts:
The challenge of how to incorporate allied views into U.S. policymaking could require a reassessment of basic assumptions and bureaucratic processes. Bearing in mind that the starting point of a U.S. policymaking process is typically an assessment of U.S. interests, it might seem ill-advised to adjust U.S. goals and decisions because of the concerns of allies and partners. Policymakers have an understandable belief that U.S. preferences should never be placed second, even to those of close allies. However, it is notable that allies seem to routinely take account of U.S. policy in developing their own Afghanistan policy. Furthermore, from a decision process perspective, while allied views may be important for all stakeholders in U.S. policy processes — including the State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security Council — they are unlikely to be at the center of anyone’s concerns given other equities at stake. As a result, a U.S. interagency policy process that develops decisions by aggregating and elevating decision-making within these stakeholder departments and agencies often tends to deprioritize allied views relative to other factors. Another issue is that bringing allies into U.S. decision-making would likely require informing them of pre-decisional options. High profile decision-making on Afghanistan, among other issues, has frequently been disrupted by media leaks. Even with actions to minimize the risk of allies leaking U.S. information, sharing pre-decisional details with allies, even close allies, could pose an unacceptable risk of leaks that limit U.S. freedom of action.
Even if these bureaucratic challenges could be addressed, ideas of U.S. leadership remain to some degree at odds with greater consideration of allies’ preferences. Leadership is a recurring theme in discussions about U.S. foreign policy, of which Afghanistan is a telling example. The day after Obama announced his policy on Afghanistan in 2009, he gave a foreign policy speech at West Point where he explained his “bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage.” What exactly U.S. leadership means may not be well-defined, but at a minimum it appears to involve the United States influencing and setting the agenda for shared decisions.
Biden, and other future American policymakers, should not assume that U.S. leadership will increase allied burden-sharing or unity. Instead, they face a tradeoff between policies that are more narrowly based on U.S. interests and policies that more closely fit allied preferences but increase the costs and sacrifice borne by the United States. Allies may continue to support U.S.-preferred policies, but they could become increasingly dissatisfied. Prioritizing allied preferences would help to preserve alliance unity and maybe even strengthen burden-sharing.
Reconsidering U.S. Decision-Making Within NATO After the Fall of Kabul - War on the Rocks
With NATO, the United States often tries to have it all: U.S. leadership of the alliance and increased allied burden-sharing. Indeed, in addressing the Munich Security Conference in February 2021, President Joe Biden emphasized to allies that that the “U.S. is back” and is determined “to earn back our position of trusted leadership,” while welcoming “Europe’s growing investment in the military capabilities that enable our shared defense.”
But the recent experience in Afghanistan shows how the form that U.S. leadership takes can frustrate allies. Even as U.S. officials consulted with allied officials about Afghanistan, available accounts and Biden’s own explanations suggest that the U.S. decision was based on an assessment of U.S. interests and priorities and was not a shared decision that sought to balance allied concerns. Allies seem to have preferred a more conditions-based troop withdrawal but, once the U.S. decision to withdraw was made, allies had little choice but to end the NATO mission since they could not carry on without U.S. participation. Allies were uncharacteristically public in their criticism of the United States — the U.K. defense secretary characterized U.S. policy as a mistake, while the head of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union Party called the dilemma in Afghanistan the greatest challenge to the alliance since 1945.
Accounts of U.S. decision-making on Afghanistan since 2001 show that reports of decision-making under Biden follow the pattern of past processes: The United States tended to inform allies of U.S. decisions — which, in turn, effectively set alliance policy for the mission — rather than incorporating allied views into the U.S. decision process. As a result, allies effectively became obliged to support a NATO policy that often did not reflect their preferences and concerns. Allies’ frustration could lead them to reduce their contributions to NATO efforts in the future.
As shown in Afghanistan, the United States faces a tradeoff between incorporating allied views into U.S. decisions and compromising allies’ support for U.S. policy. If the United States is serious about strengthening alliances and burden-sharing, this may require finding ways to better incorporate allied concerns into U.S. decision-making.
How America Makes Decisions
The history of the alliance points to a range of ways in which U.S. officials have engaged with allies with differing viewpoints. For example, in the face of French opposition to a European army, the Eisenhower administration adjusted its proposed approach for the defense of Europe. By contrast, historian Timothy Andrews Sayle writes “Kennedy and his administration viewed NATO as a tool of American policy rather than a forum for reaching common cause with allies.” Following the Cold War, while European allies belatedly supported U.S. policy in the Balkans, the United States pursued the invasion of Iraq despite French and German opposition.
In Afghanistan, the United States took a leadership role and guided the overall approach to the mission from the beginning. The day after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack, NATO invoked Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty, which calls on members to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. The allies sought to offer support to the United States through the alliance. However, in the initial phase of the mission, the United States dismissed alliance-wide support and engaged only select allies. Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld explained, “the mission determines the coalition, and the coalition must not determine the mission.” As the United States ramped up to conduct combat operations in Iraq, it sought greater assistance from allies. Rumsfeld observed that he “sought to increase the NATO alliance’s involvement in Afghanistan to lessen the burden on our troops.”
By 2006, the Taliban recovered its strength and U.S. and allied efforts to strengthen Afghan state institutions made slow progress. Robert Gates, who took over as secretary of defense in 2006, sought to convince European countries to provide more combat forces and engage in combat operations to fight the resurgent Taliban. Meanwhile, European allies favored a peacekeeping approach and economic development. Gates describes how the U.S. accommodated European concerns by agreeing to support a “comprehensive approach” that included both combat operations and civilian support for regional development and economic reconstruction. However, Rumsfeld and Gates also criticized the State Department for failing to staff civilian vacancies, which undercut the civilian component of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. So Gates’s reported accommodation to NATO was perhaps not much of a compromise since the United States was already seeking to adopt a more comprehensive approach.
In 2009, the Obama administration engaged in a high-profile debate about whether to increase U.S. forces, which also neglected allied preferences. In August 2009, the U.S. commander on the ground, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, provided his assessment of why additional troops were needed to his U.S. superiors and other U.S. military officials, including Adm. James Stavridis, the dual-hatted commander of NATO military operations and European Command. However, Stavridis was told not to provide a copy to the NATO secretary Ggeneral. Why? Because Thomas Donilon, the deputy national security adviser, had directed that “there be no discussion of the assessment at NATO until the White House was comfortable with it.” The NATO secretary general did receive one of the five hard copies of the troop-to-task analysis that was distributed in October, a few weeks after McChrystal’s original assessment had been leaked to the Washington Post.
Based on the record of the White House debate — some 150 pages in Bob Woodward’s book, as well as accounts in Gates and President Barack Obama’s memoirs — Obama and other senior leaders seemed to focus on NATO views mostly to judge what level of troops allies might contribute rather than to take into account allies’ preferred strategies. Woodward’s account of discussion at a National Security Council principals’ meeting is revealing. In response to an argument from Jim Jones, the national security adviser, that allies should be consulted, Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, reportedly countered “when did NATO ever lead if we don’t lead?” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her lead on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, resolved the debate by noting that the “U.S. should have a rollout plan to explain the president’s eventual decision to everyone — first NATO and the allies, of course, and Congress and the public.” Clinton and Holbrook’s thinking is notable: The allies were to be made aware of the decision, not to be participants in it.
Later, following the troop surge and Obama’s 2014 announcement of the end of the combat mission in Afghanistan, NATO seemed a step behind the U.S. decision of whether all forces would depart. Obama had set a 2016 deadline for the departure of all forces except an embassy-based presence, and U.S. observers urged him to reconsider the decision to leave, noting continued challenges in Afghanistan. On Oct. 15, 2015, after what White House officials described as an “extensive, lengthy review,” Obama announced that the United States would maintain its troop presence. Only a month before this announcement, a U.S. general assigned to Resolute Support noted “it still remains the plan” for the United States to draw down to a Kabul-based embassy presence. A week before the U.S. announcement, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg observed, “We haven’t made any final decisions on the duration of the Resolute Support Mission,” and Stoltenberg responded to Obama’s October announcement only by welcoming the U.S. announcement, indicating the that the alliance still needed to formulate a consensus response to the U.S. decision.
Despite friction with the Trump administration and fatigue from the long war, European countries also increased their forces alongside America’s troop increase beginning in 2017, offering what the International Crisis Group characterized as “a symbolically significant expression of support.” Following U.S. direct negotiations with the Taliban in October 2018, U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad engaged with allies as he repeatedly traveled to Brussels leading up to the announcement in February 2020 of a U.S.-Taliban agreement. Notably, however, the agreement did not include NATO as a signatory, even as it obligated the United States to achieve the withdrawal of NATO forces. While NATO had previously expressed general support for the peace process, it issued a statement about the agreement welcoming “significant first steps in pursuit of a peaceful settlement to the conflict.” NATO announced “conditions-based adjustments, including a reduction to our military presence,” but it did not frame any reduction as deriving from the agreement.
Accounts of the decision process within the Biden administration highlight an invigorated interagency process and report that Biden made the decision to withdraw U.S. forces over the objections of the Pentagon and Congress. While allies did not publicly broadcast their views at the time, subsequent accounts have indicated their opposition. Nevertheless, U.S. officials seem to have been more concerned about the eventual victory of the Taliban and impact on Afghan citizens than allied objections.
After the decision was made, according to Secretary General Stoltenberg’s later accounts, there was U.S. consultation, but no effort to develop an alternative for continuing the mission without U.S. troops:
I think it reflects the reality that when the United States decided to end its presence in Afghanistan, and of course the United States has been responsible for the majority of the soldiers and has carried their part of the burden, all the way, there were no willingness from other European allies, Canada or the partner nations, to replace or to fill in after the United States.
Once that decision was made, by Stoltenberg’s account, allies had “many meetings at the ambassador level in February, March and April,” and then “we decided, together, 30 allies, that we would end the mission.” While allies may have made that decision together, their hands were already tied by the U.S. policy process.
Tradeoffs for Future U.S. policy Toward NATO?
Over the course of the 20-year U.S. mission in Afghanistan allied preferences did not appear to play a significant role in U.S. decision processes, even as U.S. decisions shaped NATO mission’s scope and approach. Afghanistan offers a striking datapoint in the record of U.S. decision-making on NATO issues. Allies did at times have differing viewpoints, including selecting their own approaches in regions under their control and specifying caveats for what their forces could and could not do, but they often followed the U.S. lead. Germany, for example, had a clear preference for pursuing a policy that avoided the use of military force. However, Germany’s prioritization of the need to act in concert with the United States and NATO led Germany to accept “rather against its own will” the need for combat operations. Similarly, the United Kingdom also shifted away from its preference for continuing a peacekeeping role in northern Afghanistan to undertake combat operations in Helmand in 2009.
The practical limits of allied inputs into the overall decision-making for the mission is striking given the scale of allied contributions and sacrifices. Following on the U.S. decision in 2009, U.S. troops peaked at about 100,000 in 2011, with allies contributing a maximum of approximately 40,000 troops at that time. Allies and partners would suffer 1,144 killed in the war, as compared with 2,465 U.S. personnel.
The question remains whether there would have been any difference in outcomes for the mission in Afghanistan or other NATO efforts if U.S. decision-making had given greater consideration to allied preferences. In principle, allies may be more likely to provide greater resources the more closely NATO policy reflects their own preferences. On the other hand, the U.S. government should also weigh value of allied contributions and opinions. Allied military capabilities are substantially less than those of the United States, and allies may be less willing to accept risk in employing their forces. But allies may propose limits on the employment of their forces because U.S. policies do not always reflect their primary objectives, and allies may also be able to offer new and creative approaches to policy problems. Further study of how allies’ preferences may differ from enacted policy, and how that shapes burden-sharing, would be welcome.
A second issue is that of NATO unity, which senior officials identify as a “center of gravity” for the alliance. The Taliban’s seizure of Kabul and crisis at the Kabul airport has led to striking criticism from close U.S. allies. If allies felt Washington had considered their views more in making the decision, they might have been more willing to support U.S. or NATO policy even when events did not go as anticipated. Such unity could be especially important in the event of a major conflict, where an adversary might try to exploit alliance unity to minimize NATO’s response.
The challenge of how to incorporate allied views into U.S. policymaking could require a reassessment of basic assumptions and bureaucratic processes. Bearing in mind that the starting point of a U.S. policymaking process is typically an assessment of U.S. interests, it might seem ill-advised to adjust U.S. goals and decisions because of the concerns of allies and partners. Policymakers have an understandable belief that U.S. preferences should never be placed second, even to those of close allies. However, it is notable that allies seem to routinely take account of U.S. policy in developing their own Afghanistan policy. Furthermore, from a decision process perspective, while allied views may be important for all stakeholders in U.S. policy processes — including the State Department, Department of Defense, and National Security Council — they are unlikely to be at the center of anyone’s concerns given other equities at stake. As a result, a U.S. interagency policy process that develops decisions by aggregating and elevating decision-making within these stakeholder departments and agencies often tends to deprioritize allied views relative to other factors. Another issue is that bringing allies into U.S. decision-making would likely require informing them of pre-decisional options. High profile decision-making on Afghanistan, among other issues, has frequently been disrupted by media leaks. Even with actions to minimize the risk of allies leaking U.S. information, sharing pre-decisional details with allies, even close allies, could pose an unacceptable risk of leaks that limit U.S. freedom of action.
Even if these bureaucratic challenges could be addressed, ideas of U.S. leadership remain to some degree at odds with greater consideration of allies’ preferences. Leadership is a recurring theme in discussions about U.S. foreign policy, of which Afghanistan is a telling example. The day after Obama announced his policy on Afghanistan in 2009, he gave a foreign policy speech at West Point where he explained his “bottom line: America must always lead on the world stage.” What exactly U.S. leadership means may not be well-defined, but at a minimum it appears to involve the United States influencing and setting the agenda for shared decisions.
Biden, and other future American policymakers, should not assume that U.S. leadership will increase allied burden-sharing or unity. Instead, they face a tradeoff between policies that are more narrowly based on U.S. interests and policies that more closely fit allied preferences but increase the costs and sacrifice borne by the United States. Allies may continue to support U.S.-preferred policies, but they could become increasingly dissatisfied. Prioritizing allied preferences would help to preserve alliance unity and maybe even strengthen burden-sharing.
Andrew Radin is a political scientist at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. From December 2018 to December 2020, he was detailed from RAND as a country director for Afghanistan in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The RAND Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy supported Radin’s work on this article.
17. Do the Reading, Do the Math: Lessons for the Military for an Uncertain Strategic Future
Excerpts:
The American military should plan for everything, all the time, and should be constantly refining those plans by applying staff power to the various problems thrown up by those plans, and by consulting experts needed to really understand those problems. The military should be building expertise, now, in the entire universe of potential problems that may come with future military conflict. It shouldn’t matter whose feelings are hurt by a plan to occupy and hold any piece of territory where US interests could conceivably lead to US military involvement. For each potential objective, there should have at least two plans, and there should be a small team working on a rewrite of those plans at all times. In this way America exercises her military’s collective brain muscle, either refining a common approach for projecting power and operationalizing American strategy or by exploring bold, disruptive options for victory. If these are not the purposes of military planning, what is?
Just as any sergeant major will tell you that quality physical training is the way to ensure the Army is made up of soldiers fit enough to meet the demands of tomorrow’s battlefield, achieving true understanding of the environments where the military will operate and repeatedly exercising the planning muscle to build up institutional and staff expertise is the way to ensure American military endeavors become more effective in achieving national goals. Whether the main consideration is a short-term concern with budgets or a long-term commitment to America’s national goals, everyone can agree that a military that doesn’t get the job done will eventually lose the confidence of its stakeholders.
Do the Reading, Do the Math: Lessons for the Military for an Uncertain Strategic Future - Modern War Institute
There is an apocryphal story that features the founder of the (now defunct) Army school of critical thinking, Colonel Steven Rotkoff. The story involves generals planning the Iraq invasion gaining access to inside, expert information that America’s military foray into that country would not be successful in its then-present form due to insufficient American resolve in the face of a massive and complex problem set. The story ends with the generals being unable to act on that information, as they realize that America’s war logic had its own, inexorable agenda. America’s mistaken premise was already baked into the war plan and there was no way to fix it.
“You are wrong. This is not going to be the liberation of Paris with pretty girls throwing flowers at your feet,” al-Khoei warned. “This is going to be post-Tito Yugoslavia. Everybody is going to kill everybody.”
The Two American generals looked at each other and shook their heads.
“How long do you think we should be prepared to stay in your country?” Thurman asked warily.
The imam pulled out another cigar, lit it, and took another long drag.
“How long have you been in Germany? Sixty years?” he asked. “That should be about right. It’s going to take two generations to change Iraq. Maybe then you can leave.”
Americans come across in this story as over-powered toddlers who don’t want to understand the complexity of a place and, at least at the institutional level, don’t want to be told that they don’t understand. America appears, collectively, as a confident ignoramus, at least in complex cultural matters—a population for whom E pluribus unum means that we must necessarily elide a rich understanding of our own cultural antecedents just to be good Americans. More broadly, however, this anecdote points to an overarching problem, which is how—in the wake of poor strategic outcomes in our post-9/11 wars despite a large outlay in blood and treasure—America can achieve her strategic goals more effectively. The amalgamated Long War that has spanned operational theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan, with associated missions in countries across a broad swath of the world, shows that America has the resources for ambitious military endeavors. But even with all the resources in the world, America still wasn’t effective. America does seem committed to demonstrating, repeatedly and spectacularly, how little Americans understand the environments in which America deploys military force. That lack of understanding means that the resources America brought to the fight have been misapplied to the battlefield, and the result was not victory. Perhaps closing this knowledge gap, as ever, holds the key to success.
Having clear goals is an essential starting point (ideally, perhaps narrow it down to one clear goal so there is less ambiguity as to when it has been met). Military goals are what the military understands and can most easily achieve. Liberate Kuwait from occupation by Iraqi forces (or, in the vernacular “clear Kuwait”) is straightforward and, as the world saw thirty years ago, achievable. More complex goals may extend the military’s capabilities and necessarily imply the use of other means of national power—the D(iplomatic), I(nformation), and E(conomic) in the DIME acronym. The literature of mission creep, and on the cost of not having clear national goals before we wage war, was extensive in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It is even more extensive after the fall of Kabul.
Beyond goal setting, the connecting of goals and goal accomplishment requires thought. Thought requires knowledge. This was the point of Rotkoff’s story and what led to his interest in critical thinking as a military discipline, or red teaming.
There was expertise—individuals and governmental elements both in Washington and in Saigon, both military and civilian apparat—devoted to strategic analysis. Effort was mounted, as is noted below, but it failed, not because of ignorance (vincible or otherwise) but because it was so disparate and fragmented that no analytical consensus was ever possible. The villain in the piece thus was not individuals but the system, which was never able to address itself in a meaningful way to the enemy, to his thinking, to his leadership, to his strengths, weaknesses, and choices.
Of course, many Americans—most, probably—don’t agree. They would like to think, naturally, that success is possible, and that America must simply determine what adjustments to the system must be made if she is to succeed in future conflicts. Accepting that the system is broken and resigning American military adventurism to repeated failure is just defeatist (and “un-American”). Still, there has been mounting evidence that these problems are systemic, and widespread, and have been immune to change even in the face of squandered blood, immense squandered treasure, as well as clear and unmet planning requirements.
So, how does America get out of her own way?
Are the lessons of recent conflict the same as the lessons of Vietnam? Should we recommit to the Weinberger or Powell Doctrine? The latter of these has been described as “a vision of U.S. strategy that does not shrink from using force, but only if vital national security interests are at stake. If they are, then the United States should defend those interests by taking the gloves off and doing whatever it takes.” In short, don’t fight without garnering national support for the fight. Once you decide that the conditions are right to initiate fighting, bring all the right national tools to bear on the fight. Is it as simple as realizing that America shouldn’t start a fight that she isn’t willing to finish?
Unfortunately, that is a formula for picking the right fights, not necessarily for winning the fights that are chosen for the military by the civilian decision makers. These criteria seek to impose a constraint on the civilian leadership in its decisions to commit to the use of military force. Perhaps that it what is ultimately needed, but that is a topic for the voters, not necessarily the military community.
The failure of the nation to bring all aspects of national power to bear on a strategic problem is certainly a factor in bringing about American failure in military conflict (America has to want to fight and want to win). That said, while a lack of national will can explain military failure, it cannot function as an excuse for it. Military leaders do not have the luxury of only being presented with missions that reflect the overwhelming support of the American people and their government. What steps can be taken to at least improve America’s chances of succeeding in military conflict, even a suboptimal one? In other words, how can the military improve America’s chances of hitting what the civilian leadership aims at?
A substantial portion of the answer to that question comes down to this: do the reading (to understand the operational environment) and do the math (by planning, planning, planning).
The first part of this—do the reading—is Sun Tzu stuff, not rocket science: know yourself, the enemy, and the terrain. What is required, however, is a broad view of “terrain,” one that includes culture. Success is possible. The military has demonstrated proficiency in understanding the friendly and enemy weapons of war and their employment on various types of terrain; it is the location- or theater-dependent factors that the military dislikes. Just as we spent years studying the Soviet Union to successfully act as a counterweight to its international ambitions, and much as we now study China, every theater in which the US military seeks to engage requires expert knowledge. The military just needs to swallow that pill. What this looks like in practice is less clear. It could mean recruiting more students of history and culture or trying to drive culture change with the existing force. But it needs to happen, however much the military has tried and failed to do this in the past.
The military keeps learning and forgetting the lesson: it again started caring more about reading the landscape of anthropology, language, human behavior, and culture during the Long War but then stopped because it was too difficult and the Army, for example, simply did not view it as generally important to battlefield success. At best, “culture” has been described as an area of cyclical interest in military circles, and the last cycle ended already. Afghanistan is the towering example that proves that view to be wrong.
Unless we want to keep fumbling around in the dark and have more Vietnams or Afghanistans, the current institutional view of culture as some additional, nice-to-have competency is wrong. As the authors of The Rise and Decline of Military Culture Programs, 2004–2020—a book that might yet become either the obituary for the latest US military efforts in this regard or a bible for those that champion them—put it:
Despite great efforts from many civilian and military personnel, we had largely failed to get across the basic point that the ability to understand and operate effectively in almost all missions requires an understanding of the cultural patterns of partners, local populations, and adversaries [emphasis added].
Achieving the enemy’s defeat is, at least in part, dependent upon an understanding of culture. Prevailing over an enemy in war involves depriving the enemy of both the means of resistance as well as the will to fight. Understanding the latter—what will break the enemy’s will to continue the fight—necessarily requires the commander to understand the enemy’s human characteristics (wants, desires, motivations). This is impossible without understanding the “squishy stuff.”
Even assuming the foregoing is all rubbish—and a knowledge of the enemy’s particular mental makeup is irrelevant if all that is required is his submission to a superior force, skillfully employed—all Phase III decisive action objectives are in service to a Phase IV vision of a stable, post-conflict end-state. However irrelevant one may find human factors to the hard grind of victory in kinetic combat, it is irrefutable that the object of the exercise can only be achieved with an understanding of the human factors present in the theater of operations.
The other part—do the math—is building, fortifying, and exercising planning staffs. In the nineteenth century it was said that one of the five perfect things in Europe beyond the Vatican’s curia, the British parliament, the Russian ballet, and the French opera, was the German general staff. In the American military planners are readily available and planning is cheap. Shockingly, such planning capabilities as we have we do not use. This is the opposite of the needed approach.
The American military should plan for everything, all the time, and should be constantly refining those plans by applying staff power to the various problems thrown up by those plans, and by consulting experts needed to really understand those problems. The military should be building expertise, now, in the entire universe of potential problems that may come with future military conflict. It shouldn’t matter whose feelings are hurt by a plan to occupy and hold any piece of territory where US interests could conceivably lead to US military involvement. For each potential objective, there should have at least two plans, and there should be a small team working on a rewrite of those plans at all times. In this way America exercises her military’s collective brain muscle, either refining a common approach for projecting power and operationalizing American strategy or by exploring bold, disruptive options for victory. If these are not the purposes of military planning, what is?
Just as any sergeant major will tell you that quality physical training is the way to ensure the Army is made up of soldiers fit enough to meet the demands of tomorrow’s battlefield, achieving true understanding of the environments where the military will operate and repeatedly exercising the planning muscle to build up institutional and staff expertise is the way to ensure American military endeavors become more effective in achieving national goals. Whether the main consideration is a short-term concern with budgets or a long-term commitment to America’s national goals, everyone can agree that a military that doesn’t get the job done will eventually lose the confidence of its stakeholders.
Garri Benjamin Hendell is a major in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. In addition to serving in leadership positions as a cavalry scout, he has graduated from courses in two of the specialized planning disciplines mentioned in the article, has served overseas as both a squadron plans officer and as a division strategic planner, and is currently assigned as a (non-ORSA) division assessment officer
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
18. Commander Optimistic About ‘Armed Overwatch’ Procurement Prospects
Excerpts:
Special Operations Command requested $193 million for the initiative in fiscal 2022, including $170 million to procure six aircraft.
However, lawmakers have indicated they still have concerns about the program. The Senate version of the 2022 NDAA would prohibit the acquisition of such systems until after the submission of a report on airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance requirements. It would also task the Pentagon’s director of cost assessment and program evaluation to provide an independent assessment of the program when President Joe Biden submits his budget request for fiscal year 2023, which is not expected until February or later.
Commander Optimistic About ‘Armed Overwatch’ Procurement Prospects
10/25/2021
By
U.S. Air Force photo by Ethan D. Wagner
The head of Air Force Special Operations Command is hopeful that lawmakers will allow the Defense Department to start procuring “Armed Overwatch” aircraft in fiscal year 2022.
AFSOC wants to buy 75 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms that can also provide close-air support to commandos on the ground in austere regions. Officials envision a manned, multi-role airplane for counterterrorism missions that can be operated at lower cost than high-end platforms. They also want a system that is commercially available, not a clean-sheet design.
However, the initiative ran into some hurdles after the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act barred Special Operations Command from beginning procurement in that fiscal year as originally planned. Lawmakers also requested additional analysis to evaluate whether other materiel solutions or existing aircraft might meet requirements.
“Congress asked for some additional analysis which we were able to provide through [a federally funded research-and-development center] that did some work for us on that,” AFSOC Commander Lt. Gen. Jim Slife told reporters recently at the Air Force Association’s annual Air, Space and Cyber conference. “In response to that, the congressional support seems to be firming up for Armed Overwatch.”
While the 2022 defense appropriations and authorization acts had yet to be passed, “the initial committee feedback that we’ve gotten has indicated that I think there’s a good likelihood that we’ll go into procurement in fiscal year ’22,” he added.
The command held a systems demonstration with industry over the summer, he noted.
“Essentially SOCOM was attempting to discern how ready industry was to produce a platform that met their requirements,” Slife said. “Three different vendors produced platforms that met every one of the demonstration requirements. And so, I feel very good about both industry readiness and also congressional support for going forward with the Armed Overwatch program.”
Special Operations Command requested $193 million for the initiative in fiscal 2022, including $170 million to procure six aircraft.
However, lawmakers have indicated they still have concerns about the program. The Senate version of the 2022 NDAA would prohibit the acquisition of such systems until after the submission of a report on airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance requirements. It would also task the Pentagon’s director of cost assessment and program evaluation to provide an independent assessment of the program when President Joe Biden submits his budget request for fiscal year 2023, which is not expected until February or later.
19. America’s Green Berets prepare for near-peer war
Are we going to send Special Forces against ICBM missile silos in China? Are we going to add the Indo-Pacific to 7th Special Forces Groups' area of responsibility? Are we in danger of "chasing the shiny thing?"
Excerpts:
For the Green Berets, this exercise at the JRTC was “a little bit of a departure from what we’re used to due to the fact that this is under the auspices of LSCO, which is large scale combat operations,” said Sgt. Major Afshin Aryana, from Company A, 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group.
The 7th group has a regional focus on operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has typically seen them support allies and partners conducting counterinsurgency and counternarcotics missions, the report said.
The group has also deployed detachments in support of operations in Iraq, as well as the recently concluded campaign in Afghanistan.
“Our mission here is to support 3rd of the 101st in large scale operations, largely initiated with our ability to take out integrated air defense systems [IADS],” Aryana explained.
“As you have these systems all around the battlefield, essentially, the radar in one area can pick up targeting for a rocket in another area,” he continued. “Unless you destroy the main system, the hub, at the end of the day, no aircraft can fly into that area.”
...
Taken together, it seems clear that the US military, along with the Green Berets and other special forces, is stepping up its presence and combat capability in the Western Pacific, and positioning for a conflict with China over the coming decades.
America’s Green Berets prepare for near-peer war
US Army Special Forces soldiers knocked out simulated enemy air-defense assets during a recent exercise
A Delta Force operative, now retired and living in Washington DC, admitted that the scariest thing he ever did was a HALO jump on a moonless night, over the Mediterranean Sea.
HALO is an acronym for “high altitude, low opening.”
That means that military special forces teams will jump out at a high altitude (generally 30 to 40 thousand feet), and they’ll freefall to a much lower altitude (as low as about 800 feet above the ground) before they deploy their parachutes.
By keeping the aircraft up high, it can remain out of range of anti-aircraft fire and surface missiles. It was a tactic used in missions during the Vietnam War, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and even in the Navy SEAL rescue of Captain Phillips in 2009.
The problem, he said, was that you couldn’t see the water, and had to rely on one’s altimeter, hoping you hit it right.
The other worry, as he floated amongst the waves — would the submarine be at the rendezvous point, as planned?
A typical day in the life of a Delta Force Op, of course, but it’s generally believed that the more one practises, the less chance one will freeze up when the real thing happens.
And this is why US Army Special Forces soldiers, more commonly referred to as Green Berets, knocked out simulated enemy air-defense assets during a recent exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, La., Joseph Trevithick at The War Zone reported.
They also sabotaged a mock port facility and collected intelligence on stand-ins for strategic targets, such as radar sites and missile silos.
This training highlights how the US military’s entire special operations community has been refocusing on preparing to support future higher-end conflicts, including against potential near-peer adversaries such as Russia or China, after decades of conducting low-intensity counter-terrorism missions.
America’s Special Forces, such as the US Navy SEALs pictured here, are refocusing their attention on an indo-Pacific conflict. Credit: Department of Defense.
There have been multiple reports this year that the Chinese military is dramatically expanding its silo-based intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) forces, the report said.
The number of new Chinese silos under construction exceeds the number of silo-based ICBMs operated by Russia, and constitutes more than half of the size of the entire US ICBM force.
The Chinese missile silo program constitutes the most extensive silo construction since the US and Soviet missile silo construction during the Cold War.
Elements of the Army’s 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) carried out these missions in support of troops from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division.
This appears to be the same exercise that, in September, saw mock enemy troops — also known as the opposing force (OPFOR) — use missile and machine-gun armed unmanned ground vehicles for the first time, the report said.
British Army soldiers from 4th Battalion, The Rifles — a specialized infantry unit — presently assigned to that service’s Special Operations Brigade, were also attached to the American special operations force for this exercise.
For the Green Berets, this exercise at the JRTC was “a little bit of a departure from what we’re used to due to the fact that this is under the auspices of LSCO, which is large scale combat operations,” said Sgt. Major Afshin Aryana, from Company A, 3rd Battalion, 7th Special Forces Group.
The 7th group has a regional focus on operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has typically seen them support allies and partners conducting counterinsurgency and counternarcotics missions, the report said.
The group has also deployed detachments in support of operations in Iraq, as well as the recently concluded campaign in Afghanistan.
“Our mission here is to support 3rd of the 101st in large scale operations, largely initiated with our ability to take out integrated air defense systems [IADS],” Aryana explained.
“As you have these systems all around the battlefield, essentially, the radar in one area can pick up targeting for a rocket in another area,” he continued. “Unless you destroy the main system, the hub, at the end of the day, no aircraft can fly into that area.”
In spite of its name, the 101st Airborne Division is actually an air-assault-focused unit that specializes in operations using helicopters.
“And an airborne unit that has planned an air assault, like the 101st, if we can’t get those birds on the ground, then the mission is already lost,” Aryana said.
Aryana also pointed out that commanders would not be able to take for granted their ability to regularly communicate with Green Berets in the field in future large-scale operations.
This would be especially true with regard to Operational Detachment Alphas (ODA), or A-Teams, the smallest Army Special Forces units, operating deep behind enemy lines.
“Just the simple writ large understanding that that is no longer on the table,” he said.
“We have to give good commander’s guidance for ODAs to operate for multiple days without constant guidance or real-time updates, to develop their own intelligence, and to be a more self-sufficient organization.
“This leads us and the ODAs to learn what we can and can’t do and it teaches a decentralized sense of leadership.”
The Fort Polk exercise falls very much in line with a recent push within the Army’s Special Forces community, in particular, to be prepared to carry out these kinds of tasks, which the service described broadly as the “Hard Target Defeat” mission — including covert and clandestine reconnaissance and intelligence gathering.
“That really replicates what we’ll see in future conflicts with multinational partners and our allies overseas in combat,” said Maj. Marshall McGurk, a Special Operations Trainer.
At US Indo-Pacific headquarters, strategic, operational and tactical teams are putting together new approaches for deploying American forces.
Gone are the large troop formations, armored capability and land-based tactics of the “forever wars” in the Middle East.
The Pentagon is hoping to include British, French and other NATO allies in the effort.
In addition to the sea service’s activities, the US Air Force will likely be shifting additional long-range land-attack bombers and fighters to Pacific bases that are widely distributed across Asia, including some very remote sites on smaller islands.
Meanwhile, the US Army will increase both combat power and mobility to deploy units forward in support of the red lines, including enhanced capability based in South Korea and Japan but easily capable of deploying to smaller islands throughout the region.
According to military planners, in the context of a US-China strategy, US Marines will be resolutely sea-based and able to sail into the waters of the South China Sea, well inside the island chains China relies on for defense.
Once inside, they will use armed drones, offensive cyber capabilities, Marine Raiders — highly capable special forces — anti-air missiles and even ship-killer strike weapons to attack Chinese maritime forces, and perhaps even their land bases of operations.
The Chinese militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea would be juicy targets, for example. In essence, this will be guerrilla warfare.
Taken together, it seems clear that the US military, along with the Green Berets and other special forces, is stepping up its presence and combat capability in the Western Pacific, and positioning for a conflict with China over the coming decades.
Sources: The War Zone, Air & Space, Federation of American Scientists, Nikkei Asia
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
