Quotes of the Day:
“To educate a person in mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
- Theodore Roosevelt
“History by apprising them [the people] of the past will enable them to judge of the future. . . . It will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men: it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr
1. US journalist freed from Myanmar jail with ex-diplomat's aid
2. A complicated relationship: Biden and Xi prepare for meeting
3. Book Excerpt: Navy SEAL’s Behavior Led Teammates to Change Their Mission
4. Belarus Is Laying Tinder for a War. How Will NATO Respond?
5. A Dictator Is Exploiting These Human Beings
6. Taliban hold military parade with U.S.-made weapons in Kabul in show of strength
7. US Actions in Ukraine Backfiring as Risk of Russian Invasion Grows, Analysts Say
8. What the Taliban’s youngest fighters tell us about the future of the movement
9. The Stunning Lack of Accountability for the Botched U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan
10. EXCLUSIVE: General Atomics is secretly flying a new, heavily armed drone
11. America's lesson from Gaza: prepare for disinformation war
12. Senate ‘likely’ to move defense bill this week, Schumer says
13. How the CIA Lets America Down
14. Opinion | It’s Time to Get Honest About the Biden Doctrine
15. Japan ‘more than willing’ to help ensure AUKUS success
16. Does Security Assistance Work? Why It May Not Be the Answer for Fragile States
17. FDD | The May 2021 Israel-Hamas war was a stress test for normalization
18. Pacific Leaders Agree on Vaccines But Not on US Hosting APEC
19. Expand Israel-Arab-US military drills to counter Iran and its proxies
20. FDD | Sudanese Military Looks to Play Russia Against the U.S.
21. Consulting giant McKinsey profits off both sides of U.S.-China cold war
22. Opinion | Is America on the brink of a civil war?
23. Opinion | A Coke and a genocide (China and the Uyghurs)
24. All Over the Map: The Chinese Communist Party’s Subnational Interests in the United States
1. US journalist freed from Myanmar jail with ex-diplomat's aid
Good news.
US journalist freed from Myanmar jail with ex-diplomat's aid
AP · by GRANT PECK and DAVID RISING · November 15, 2021
BANGKOK (AP) — American journalist Danny Fenster, sentenced only days ago to 11 years hard labor in Myanmar, has been freed and is on his way home, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Bill Richardson said Monday.
Richardson said in a statement that Fenster had been handed over to him in Myanmar and would return to the U.S. via Qatar over the next day and a half.
“This is the day that you hope will come when you do this work,” Richardson said in a statement emailed from his office. “We are so grateful that Danny will finally be able to reconnect with his loved ones, who have been advocating for him all this time, against immense odds.”
Richardson said he negotiated Fenster’s release during a recent visit to Myanmar when he held face-to-face meetings with Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s military ruler.
Fenster, the managing editor of the online magazine Frontier Myanmar, was convicted Friday of spreading false or inflammatory information, contacting illegal organizations and violating visa regulations.
Fenster’s sentence was the harshest punishment yet among the seven journalists known to have been convicted since Myanmar’s military ousted the elected government of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi in February.
U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price condemned the decision, saying in a statement that it was “an unjust conviction of an innocent person.”
Frontier Myanmar Editor-in-Chief Thomas Kean welcomed the news of Fenster’s release, while calling for the country’s military rulers to release all journalists still behind bars.
“Danny is one of many journalists in Myanmar who have been unjustly arrested simply for doing their job since the February coup,” he said.
According to the United Nations, at least 126 journalists, media officials or publishers have been detained by the military since February and 47 remain in detention, including 20 charged with crimes.
Of the seven journalists known to have been convicted, six are Myanmar nationals and four were released in a mass amnesty on Oct. 21.
Richardson, who also served as governor of New Mexico and secretary of energy in the Clinton administration, has a record of acting as a sort of freelance diplomat.
He is best known for traveling to nations with which Washington has poor, if any relations — such as North Korea — to obtain the freedom of detained Americans.
Recently he has been involved in seeking freedom for U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela, another country with which Washington has strained ties.
Richardson has a long history of involvement with Myanmar, starting in 1994 when as a member of U.S. Congress he met Suu Kyi at her home, where she had been under house arrest since 1989 under a previous military government.
He last visited Myanmar in 2018 to advise on the crisis involving the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh after Myanmar’s military in 2017 launched a brutal crackdown.
In an interview with The Associated Press after his most recent visit to Myanmar, Richardson had said his talks there had focused on facilitating humanitarian assistance to the country, particularly the provision of COVID-19 vaccines,
He said his staff had been in touch with Fenster’s family, and when asked if there was hope for Danny Fenster’s release, he replied: “There’s always hope. Don’t ask any more.”
Shawn Crispin, Southeast Asia representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said Fenster “never should have been jailed or sentenced on bogus charges in the first place.”
“Myanmar’s military regime must stop using journalists as pawns in their cynical games and release all the other reporters still languishing behind bars on spurious charges,” Crispin added.
___
Associated Press writer Jon Gambrell in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
AP · by GRANT PECK and DAVID RISING · November 15, 2021
2. A complicated relationship: Biden and Xi prepare for meeting
I wonder what the oddsmakers are giving this meeting in regards to any substantive outcome?
Better to jaw jaw than war war.
A complicated relationship: Biden and Xi prepare for meeting
AP · by AAMER MADHANI · November 15, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping have slurped noodles together in Beijing. They’ve shared deep thoughts about the meaning of America during an exchange on the Tibetan plateau. They’ve gushed to U.S. business leaders about developing a sincere respect for each other.
The American president has held up his relationship with Xi as evidence of his heartfelt belief that good foreign policy starts with building strong personal relationships.
But as the two leaders prepare to hold their first presidential meeting on Monday, the troubled U.S.-China relationship is demonstrating that the power of one of Biden’s greatest professed strengths as a politician — the ability to connect — has its limits.
“When it comes to U.S.-China relations, the gaps are so big and the trend lines are so problematic that the personal touch can only go so far,” said Matthew Goodman, who served as an Asia adviser on the National Security Council in the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations.
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White House officials have set low expectations for Monday’s virtual meeting: No major announcements are expected and there’s no plan for the customary joint statement by the two countries at the end, according to administration officials.
The public warmth — Xi referred to Biden as his “old friend” when Biden visited China in 2013 while the then-U.S. vice president spoke of their “friendship” — has cooled now that both men are heads of state. Biden bristled in June when asked by a reporter if he would press his old friend to cooperate with a World Health Organization investigation into the coronavirus origins.
“Let’s get something straight: We know each other well; we’re not old friends,” Biden said. “It’s just pure business.”
Biden nonetheless believes a face-to-face meeting — even a virtual one like the two leaders will hold Monday evening — has its value.
“He feels that the history of their relationship, having spent time with him, allows him to be quite candid as he has been in the past and he will continue to be,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in previewing the encounter.
Biden and Xi, ages 78 and 68 respectively, first got to know each other on travels across the U.S. and China when both were vice presidents, interactions that both leaders say left a lasting impression.
Of late, there have been signs that there could be at least a partial thawing after the first nine months of the Biden administration were marked by the two sides trading recriminations and by unproductive exchanges between the presidents’ top advisers.
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Last week, for example, the U.S. and China pledged at U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, to increase their cooperation and speed up action to rein in climate-damaging emissions.
Monday’s meeting — the two leaders’ third engagement since Biden became president — comes amid mounting tensions in the U.S.-China relationship. The two held long phone calls in February and September where they discussed human rights, trade, the pandemic and other issues.
Biden has made clear that he sees China as the United States’ greatest national security and economic competitor and has tried to reframe American foreign policy to reflect that belief.
His administration has taken Beijing to task over committing human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in northwest China, squelching pro-democracy efforts in Hong Kong and resisting global pressure to cooperate fully with investigations into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.
Tensions have also risen as the Chinese military has flown increasing numbers of sorties near the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing considers part of its territory.
Chinese officials have signaled that Taiwan will be a top issue for the talks. Biden has made clear that his administration will abide by the long-standing U.S. “One China” policy, which recognizes Beijing but allows informal relations and defense ties with Taipei. Chinese military forces held exercises last week near Taiwan in response to a visit by a U.S. congressional delegation to the island.
The president intends, in part, to use the conversation to underscore the need to establish “guardrails” in the relationship to ensure that the two sides in the midst of their stiff competition avoid “unintended conflict,” according to a senior administration official who briefed reporters on White House planning for the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The official said the video call is expected to last “several hours,” adding that the White House was hopeful that the two leaders’ seeing each other would allow for greater depth to their conversation than their two earlier calls this year.
Other U.S. presidents have held that bonding with a geopolitical adversary can be a good foreign policy strategy. George W. Bush faced ridicule after his first meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin when he claimed that he had “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush would go on to host the Russian leader at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and bring him to his father’s estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, where the 43rd and 41st presidents took the Russian president fishing.
Putin ultimately frustrated Bush and the relationship was broken after Russia’s 2008 invasion of its neighbor Georgia.
Donald Trump went from disparaging North Korea’s Kim Jong Un as “rocket man” to declaring the two “fell in love” in an exchange of letters as the U.S. president unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Kim to give up the regime’s nuclear weapons program.
Biden’s personal approach to foreign policy is in part informed by the fact that he’s been on the international scene for much of the last half-century, author Evan Osnos noted in the biography “Joe Biden: The Life, the Run, and What Matters Now.”
“You can drop him into Kazakhstan or Bahrain, it doesn’t matter — he’s gonna find some Joe Blow that he met 30 years ago who’s now running the place,” Julianne Smith, a Biden adviser, told Osnos.
With Beijing set to host the Winter Olympics in February and Xi expected to be approved by Communist Party leaders to serve a third five-year term as president next year — unprecedented in recent Chinese history — the Chinese leader may be looking to stabilize the relationship in the near term.
Slowing economic growth and a brewing housing crisis also loom large for Beijing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a CBS’ “Face the Nation” interview aired Sunday warned the deepening of Beijing’s problems could “have global consequences.”
At the same time, Biden, who has seen his polling numbers diminish at home amid concerns about the lingering coronavirus pandemic, inflation and supply chain problems, is looking to find a measure of equilibrium on the most consequential foreign policy matter he faces.
Biden would have preferred to hold an in-person meeting with Xi, but Xi has not left China since before the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The virtual meeting was proposed after Biden mentioned during a September phone call with the Chinese leader that he would like to be able to see Xi again.
AP · by AAMER MADHANI · November 15, 2021
3. Book Excerpt: Navy SEAL’s Behavior Led Teammates to Change Their Mission
This will be a tough book to read. It may go to the bottom of my "to-read" pile.
Book Excerpt: Navy SEAL’s Behavior Led Teammates to Change Their Mission
In ‘Alpha,’ a Times reporter details the SEALs culture that fostered Eddie Gallagher’s rise and sheds new light on the events that led to his trial (and acquittal) in a polarizing war crimes case.
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Navy Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher arriving at military court at Naval Base San Diego in June 2019. Chief Gallagher, who was on trial for war crimes, was acquitted on the most serious charges.Credit...KC Alfred/ZUMA Wire/Alamy Live News
Published Nov. 13, 2021Updated Nov. 14, 2021
Throughout the contentious trial of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL chief accused of killing a prisoner in Iraq in 2017, Navy prosecutors never mentioned the name of the Islamic State fighter he had actually been charged with murdering. He was just “the kid” or “the victim,” sometimes “the dirtbag” — not even “John Doe.” In “Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs,” the New York Times reporter David Philipps names and writes a chapter about the captive, a 17-year-old whose father had desperately tried to stop him from running away to join ISIS. The teenager’s name is Moataz, and his father did not know he was dead until he saw his son’s photo in media coverage of the trial.
This is one of many revelations in the book by Mr. Philipps, who covered Chief Gallagher’s trial and acquittal for The Times, and whose detailed new reporting of those events and what led to them is based on dozens of interviews, thousands of text messages, and thousands of pages of court transcripts, service records and confidential military documents. “The Line,” a docuseries on Apple TV+ that was inspired by The Times’s reporting on the case, premieres on Nov. 19.
The book paints a picture of Chief Gallagher that contradicts the image presented by his defenders in court and by some conservative media outlets. In “Alpha,” the SEAL platoon members, deployed in Mosul, worry their chief is becoming “unglued” — abusing opioids and other drugs, stealing, and putting their lives at risk so he can court more battlefield action without any tactical gain. Both in Iraq and after they break their code of silence to report him, platoon members fear he might kill one of them.
In the edited excerpt below, during their time in Mosul, they also worry he is indiscriminately killing civilians. This account is based on the author’s coverage in The Times, Navy investigators’ interviews and investigation files, photos, Navy service records, texts between Eddie Gallagher and several SEALs, and SEALs’ court testimony and their interviews with the author. — Grace Maalouf
Dylan Dille scanned the medieval maze of old Mosul through the black-rimmed eye of his scope. The senior sniper was hidden about 750 meters away in a pile of rubble across the Tigris River. As he searched the alleyways and street corners, he could feel his heart beat under his body armor and his brow go tense because he knew Eddie was hunting, too, and he would have to try to get the first shot.
It was June 2017, four months into the deployment. Eddie had given up on going back to the roof of the pink house and instead had settled on a new place that the SEALs in Alpha called the Towers. The site was two buildings on the east bank of the Tigris standing side by side across the green water from old Mosul. Around the Towers stood the ruins of a carnival grounds still filled with rides and a weed-choked park where locals once spent holidays. The Towers had high ceilings and curving staircases designed to host lavish celebrations. But the war had left the park waist-high with weeds and littered with unexploded shells, and the Towers were little more than bombed-out gray concrete bones.
At the base of the Towers, a modern six-lane concrete bridge had once crossed the river, but it and every other bridge across the Tigris had been destroyed. The center lay broken in two by a massive airstrike, as if snapped by a mighty karate chop. The pieces had fallen into the water, leaving two jagged stumps that jutted out over the river.
The battle for Mosul was in its last desperate weeks. Block by block the Iraqi Army had pushed ISIS into one corner of the old city with its back up against the river. Alpha had set up across the river to shoot the enemy in the back. The platoon spent day after day there, harassing ISIS from the rear while the Iraqi Army attacked from the front.
Old Mosul presented the SEALs with a tangle of civilians and enemy targets. They passed and intermingled on the street. Watching through his scope, Dille tried to hunt for details that distinguished the two. He could see the faded floral print on a woman’s hijab as she stepped out of her house, too colorful to be the dress of ISIS. He spotted a man in an old bowling shirt who had been bent over the engine of his car on and off for days but had still not gotten it running. Just a local, he decided. Rarely did he see actual fighters with guns venture out.
They were too smart for that. But he hunted for men who seemed out of place: the ones who crossed the street with too much purpose for a besieged city where there was nowhere to go. In his scope he could see the sweat on their faces, their darting looks. Some of them walked while gripping tightly the arm of a child, their clenched fingers around the small arm, showing that they were using a local boy as a shield. It was a confusing, complex tangle, but a sniper watching long enough could tease apart threads and find the targets.
Unfortunately, Dille quickly learned that his chief had no interest in taking the time to establish who was who. The first morning the snipers arrived at the Towers, the chief climbed up the curving stairway to the top floor of the north building and set up a tripod and a small folding chair in the middle of a room with a blown-out wall.
He almost immediately started shooting one round after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. Dille scrambled to his own rifle and checked the chief ’s angle to try to line up his scope so he could see what Eddie was shooting at. He spotted a sandbank along the river where a narrow alley came down to the water. About fifty people had gathered to wash in the water. Dille saw the crowd scatter amid the shooting and sprint back into the city. Dille’s angle didn’t give him a full view of ground level on the riverbank, so he wasn’t sure if Eddie had hit anyone, but about one thing he had no doubt: These people weren’t legit targets.
At the same spot a few days later, Dille saw three women making their way along a path through deep reeds. He heard Eddie start firing and saw the women turn and disappear into the reeds. Had they been wounded or killed? Dille couldn’t be sure, but he was increasingly sure his chief was shooting at anyone he saw, civilian or fighter, man or woman.
Dille realized his mission in Mosul would have to shift. He had come to the Towers to kill ISIS. Instead he was going to have to keep Eddie from killing civilians. He would do it by firing warning shots to scare people away before Eddie could spot them. The strategy came to him instinctively one morning a few days after Alpha had started operations in the Towers. Eddie had set up in a bathroom that offered a good view of the city from the north tower. Dille and Dalton Tolbert [his friend and fellow sniper] both wanted to stay as far away from Eddie as possible, so that day they set up in the south tower.
That morning, Dille spotted a man coming down a road leading to the river with a boy. They were at a spot where Dille could see them for about a half block before they came into Eddie’s view. Dille focused his scope on the pair. He noticed the man wasn’t gripping the boy by the arm. Instead, it was the boy who was leading the man along, gently pulling him by the sleeve. It was a small detail that told everything: They were family, and almost certainly not enemy fighters.
Dille had to do something before Eddie could get a shot. Knowing he had only seconds, he aimed a few meters in front of the pair and just a degree off to the side, hoping a bullet would hit the dirt in the road and scare them back. He squeezed the trigger. He saw a splash of dust and watched the pair scurry back the way they came. As they ran, he breathed a sigh of relief.
‘The Weekly’ on Eddie Gallagher
Watch never-before-released video and confidential interviews with the Navy SEALs who accused Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of war crimes.
See never-before-released video and confidential interviews with the Navy SEALs who accused Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher of war crimes.Credit...John Gastaldo/Zuma Wire
That night Dille told Tolbert what he had done. He was almost ashamed to admit it. He knew shooting warning shots was a quiet form of insurrection against Eddie and might even help ISIS, but he felt he had no choice. To his surprise, Tolbert smiled and said he had been doing the exact same thing. They agreed to keep doing it to try to buy time. When their lead petty officer, Craig Miller, had left, he told them he had reported Eddie to the commanding officer, Lt. Jake Portier, and that Lieutenant Portier vowed to take care of it, so a fix was in the works. Both snipers hoped they could limit the damage until Eddie was removed.
Key Findings From the Baghuz Airstrike Investigation
Card 1 of 5
Uncovering the truth. Over several months, The New York Times pieced together the details of a 2019 airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State. Here are the key findings from the investigation:
The U.S. military carried out the attack. Task Force 9, the secretive special operations unit in charge of ground operations in Syria, called in the attack. The strike began when an F-15E attack jet hit Baghuz with a 500-pound bomb. Five minutes later, the F-15E dropped two 2,000-pound bombs.
The death toll was downplayed. The U.S. Central Command recently acknowledged that 80 people, including civilians, were killed in the airstrike. Though the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials, regulations for investigating the potential crime were not followed.
Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.
American-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day described finding piles of dead women and children. In the days following the bombing, coalition forces overran the site, which was quickly bulldozed.
It was a high-stress operation. A warning shot had to hit close enough to scare off a target, but not so close that it accidentally killed. Snipers had to read the subtle clues to decide who deserved a warning and who didn’t. But because Eddie shared much of the same field of fire as the other snipers, they often only had seconds to spot a person, make a decision and line up a shot before Eddie got a chance to fire.
It was the opposite of what sniper work was supposed to be. Dille and Tolbert had gotten a small taste of what the real work was like before Eddie’s constant shooting put them on a new mission. One morning, Dille was scanning the street life for targets when he spotted a man in a saffron-and-gold robe hustling down a side street amid the dusty locals. He had a long, bushy beard but no mustache and full, round cheeks that suggested he was not sharing in the besieged city’s hunger. “Check this dude out,” Dille called over to Tolbert, who was tucked behind some rubble a dozen feet away.
“Talk me on,” Tolbert said. He traced his scope along the outlines of the city as Dille guided him verbally in a hopscotch of known landmarks until he was at the right street: the green mosque, then the grassy bank, side street to the north.
“Looks like homeboy is doing a little too good,” Tolbert said. They watched him. He hurried down the road and turned down a side alley. There he peered around furtively, then crawled through a rat hole pecked in the wall of a house. Dille swung his scope to the front of the house. It seemed normal enough. No fighters on the roof, no young men loitering outside. The two snipers waited and watched. They saw members of a family come in and out through the front door. The man in the robe was not one of them.
“Definitely something shady,” Tolbert said.
Chief Gallagher walks with his wife, Andrea Gallagher, after being acquitted on most of the serious charges against him during his 2019 trial. Credit...John Gastaldo/Reuters via Alamy
The SEALs’ rules of engagement didn’t require a target to be armed. If snipers saw someone they reasonably thought was aiding ISIS in any way, they could shoot. But both men were extremely careful, knowing every bad shot could galvanize the locals against them and build support for the enemy.
Tolbert and Dille kept their scopes trained on the house, figuring the man with the saffron robe would eventually emerge. Finally, they saw him crawl out of the hole. The snipers both instinctively slid their fingers to their triggers. No one would crawl from a rat hole like that instead of using the front door unless he was ISIS. As the man squeezed out of the rat hole, Dille centered him in his scope. So did Tolbert. Just as Tolbert was putting pressure on his trigger and exhaling to fire, Dille took the shot. Dille would later remember that shot as an example of what his work was supposed to be: Calm. Calculated. Considered. Justified. He wouldn’t get many more like it.
Eddie’s shooting forced a shift. Now the snipers had to race to keep people from getting murdered. Every day when Dille lay down behind his rifle, his heart would pound as he watched the street and searched for the next person to come around the corner, knowing he would have only a few seconds to decide whether to save or end a life.
Karma was still the driving force of the platoon, but it had flipped. Instead of inflicting the cosmic payback on evildoers, Dille was now trying to protect the world from one. It was exhausting. The tension of being forced to fire at people to make them flee in terror without accidentally killing them left him covered in sweat. The pressure of spending hour after hour hunting, knowing he had lives in his hands, fried his nerves. By the end of each day he tottered down the winding stairs with his hands shaking, physically and emotionally drained. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep it up.
4. Belarus Is Laying Tinder for a War. How Will NATO Respond?
Hybrid warfare in the gray zone. Yes, this seems to be quite a test for the alliance.
Excerpt:
Does an accidental conflict involving breaching of borders and escalating shooting constitute an armed attack? That’s not an abstract question. In Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s member states “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence.” Should a shooting war erupt at Belarus’s border with a NATO country, the alliance’s members would swiftly have to agree whether the situation constitutes an armed attack.
Belarus Is Laying Tinder for a War. How Will NATO Respond?
The weaponization of migrants shows how gray-zone tactics flummox an alliance set up to deal with conventional or nuclear attacks.
Belarus Is Laying Tinder for a War. How Will NATO Respond?
If you wanted to cause a war, here’s a formula with high odds of success. Send thousands of migrants to your border, have your border force try to push them into a neighboring country, and fire warning shots when your neighbor’s soldiers try to keep the migrants out. In such a tense situation, the other country’s soldiers might misinterpret the shots and fire back. At Belarus’s border with Poland, such an accidental conflict is now a concrete risk. What will NATO do if it comes to pass?
“The potential for escalation is extremely high,” Estonia’s defence minister, Kalle Laanet, told a defense conference on Nov. 10.
The situation on Belarus’s border with Latvia, Lithuania, and especially Poland was, in fact, already escalating. For weeks, Belarusian authorities had been arranging for migrants to fly to Minsk and then transporting them to the border, where the migrants tried to illegally enter the three neighboring countries. But over the weeks the migrants had grown bolder, or more desperate, as all three countries reinforced their borders with barbed wire and more guards. As Laanet spoke, crowds were again trying to force their way into Poland. Some of the migrants were using shovels and felled trees to try to bring down the fence now protecting the border, and others were being shoved by Belarusian forces.
A week earlier, Belarusian soldiers had threatened to open fire at Polish forces across the border. In a subsequent incident, Belarusian forces fired shots—thought to have been blanks—at Polish soldiers. Polish soldiers, meanwhile, have fired warning shots into the air as migrants lunged at the border; on one occasion, migrants hit a soldier with a tree branch. There are concerns in Poland that migrants are receiving tools from Belarus with which to attack Polish forces.
It takes no flight of the imagination to consider what might happen next. Polish soldiers hearing Belarusian guns must instantly decide what sort of shots are being fired at them. They may conclude it’s live rounds.
This is a realistic possibility, considering that President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus—the instigator of his country’s weaponization of migrants—seems hell-bent on harming the EU and NATO. In fact, Lukashenko seems to revel in his growing reputation as not merely an authoritarian leader but a madman, which gives him the liberty to launch any action conceived by his imagination.
And the long-time Belarusian leader is bringing Russia into the fray. On Nov. 11, the two countries announced they’ll begin conducting joint combat alert patrols at Belarus’s border with Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. “This ring around the Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine must be monitored by Russian and Belarusian servicemen," Lukashenko said in a statement. On the same day, Russian nuclear bombers conducted a monitoring mission in Belarusian airspace.
Skirmishes involving troops on the border, skirmishes involving migrants, and now the addition of Russia: the situation at Belarus’s border with its NATO and EU neighbors is an accidental conflict waiting to happen. It would take just one group of Polish or Baltic soldiers responding to Belarusian shots—or shooting at migrants attacking them with clubs, logs, and similar tools—for a dangerous escalation to erupt. The Belarusians, now assisted by Russian forces, would clearly fire back, and the other side would respond to that fire. What’s more, in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania there are NATO troops stationed there as part of the alliance’s Enhanced Forward Presence, or EFP. “They demonstrate the strength of the transatlantic bond and make clear that an attack on one Ally would be considered an attack on the whole Alliance,” as NATO explains in an EFP factsheet. And on Nov. 12, Poland announced that British troops had been sent to its border—with NATO allies—on a reconnaissance exercise.
Does an accidental conflict involving breaching of borders and escalating shooting constitute an armed attack? That’s not an abstract question. In Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s member states “agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence.” Should a shooting war erupt at Belarus’s border with a NATO country, the alliance’s members would swiftly have to agree whether the situation constitutes an armed attack.
NATO has some experience discussing this kind of question. The alliance deemed the 9/11 attacks, which used civilian aircraft against civilian buildings, an “armed attack,” and subsequently helped the United States topple the Taliban. But the 9/11 attack was backed by Afghanistan, not a major geopolitical rival.
Two decades later, the alliance hasn’t figured out how to respond to something that looks and walks like an armed attack by a rival but officially isn’t one. Some of the alliance’s 30 members would likely argue that NATO should try to defuse the situation. Others would argue that weaponizing migrants and triggering a conflict constitutes a 21st-century armed attack and that NATO should punish Belarus. What that punishment would be is, of course, entirely unclear: part of the beauty of aggression in the gray zone between war and peace is that that liberal democracies can’t respond in kind. NATO just isn’t send thousands of migrants into Belarus.
Given that aggression in the grey zone between war and peace is extremely attractive—involving minimal cost in blood and treasure—Belarus’s weaponization of migrants highlights a troubling reality: NATO is set up for conventional and nuclear war, but its adversaries have long expanded beyond conventional and nuclear war.
Aleksandr Lukashenko will force NATO to quickly decide how to respond to gray-zone aggression. And let’s not forget that EFP was set up precisely to assure the Baltic states and Poland of NATO’s support if their Eastern neighbors should try any tricks. If one of the EFP soldiers is harmed in clashes with Belarusian forces, migrants, or both, NATO will have little choice but to respond with force.
5. A Dictator Is Exploiting These Human Beings
We have to start with first principles. If a dictator is exploiting them how do we counter that exploitation? Perhaps it is taking care of the exploited. The question is how to do that. But what is the dictator's end game (the one in Belarus and the one in Russia)?
If he seeks to destabilize the EU how does the EU prevent itself from becoming destabilized over this tragic event? Perhaps by doing the right thing in dealing with the humanitarian crisis.
Excerpts:
But it is precisely because Lukashenko is a cynical autocrat who is using human beings as weapons, and precisely because his scheme is designed to undermine democratic values, that the Polish government’s response has been so disastrous. The democratic world can and should come up with a response to this kind of provocation based on respect for the rule of law, transparency, and human decency. To send people back, repeatedly, into a dangerous situation, knowing they might die, is immoral, in addition to being a violation of international law. To pretend that this is only a hybrid war, and not simultaneously a humanitarian crisis, is to misunderstand profoundly what is happening on the ground.
Part of the answer, as I’ve said, could lie in a consolidated international response of a kind that the Poles should have called for months ago. Already, pressure from the EU seems to have persuaded Iraqi Airways to stop flights from Baghdad to Minsk, and Turkish Airlines says it won’t sell any more one-way tickets from the Middle East to Minsk either. But the strange fact that the Polish border remained for so long open to trade with Belarus also requires some examination. Why aren’t sanctions higher, stiffer, faster? Why has it taken the EU so long to impose more of them?
A Dictator Is Exploiting These Human Beings
Belarus’s ruler has used asylum seekers to destabilize the EU. And he’s not the only one profiting politically from their misfortune.
A small Kurdish boy is sitting on the ground in a damp Polish forest, a few miles from the eastern border with Belarus. The air is heavy with cold and fog. The boy is crying.
Around the boy, sitting in a circle, are his parents, uncles, and cousins, all from the same village near Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan. There are 16 of them, among them seven children, including a four-month-old infant and an elderly woman who can scarcely walk. They don’t speak Polish, or English. One of the boy’s relatives, a man named Anwar, speaks Arabic. Through a translator, Anwar says that the family has been in this forest, moving back and forth between Poland and Belarus, for two weeks. They have eaten nothing for the previous two days.
Surrounding the boy and his family is another circle, this one containing people with cameras. The people holding the cameras are Polish, Swedish, Slovenian, German, Japanese, American. I am one of them. We were all given this precise location on Tuesday by Grupa Granica, a Polish volunteer organization created in the past couple of months to help migrants; its name simply means “Border Group.” The group’s spokesperson sent out text messages with the GPS coordinates of this family because they wanted as many journalists as possible to record the moment when Anwar asks the Polish border guards for asylum. He will hold up a sign, in English. The translator, Jakub Sypiański, also a member of Grupa Granica, will translate his request into Polish as well. Sypiański explains that if media are present, it will be more difficult for Polish border guards to ignore the request and to force Anwar, the boy, and the rest of the family back into the forest, back toward the border, as they have forced other, similar families back toward the border over the past several weeks. Sypiański tells me later that he has personally seen families ask for asylum, only to be taken back to the border immediately afterward.
The scene has a false kind of familiarity because we in the West have all seen this combination of players—migrants, journalists, humanitarian volunteers—in photographs or on television before. But the sequence of events that brought this particular small boy to this particular forest is very strange, when you think about it. So many tragedies were required to create the conditions for it, including wars in Iraq and Syria, the rise of Islamic extremism, and the failure of democracy in Belarus. Stranger still is that fact that this boy’s fate has been determined, and will go on being determined, by the political calculations of two people whom he will never meet, and whose names he surely does not know. One of them is Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. The other is Jarosław Kaczyński, the chairman of the Polish ruling party, the country’s de facto leader, the man who tells the Polish president and prime minister what to do.
Lukashenko’s brutality is far greater. Belarus’s dictator remains in power in his country only thanks to the violence he has used to suppress the large, sophisticated, and articulate democratic opposition. More than 800 political prisoners now sit in his jails. Many have been beaten or tortured. Thousands have moved abroad. The European Union and the United States have sanctioned him for these crimes, and now he is seeking revenge, not just against particular democracies but against democratic values more broadly, the values that he wants to defeat at home as well as abroad: respect for human rights, the rule of law, impartial justice.
Lukashenko seeks not only to show his contempt for these things but to destroy the international institutions that maintain them. Last May, he used his country’s air-traffic controllers to hijack an Irish commercial airplane and force it to land, in order to arrest a dissident onboard. And last summer, he launched a program of state-sponsored human trafficking designed not only to deceive people in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere about the ease with which they can get into the European Union via his capital, Minsk, but also to take their money along the way.
To get to the Polish border, for example, Anwar said that his family traveled by bus from Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Istanbul in Turkey. There they would have purchased visas for Belarus and airline tickets to Minsk. Though Anwar did not say what he paid, others have been charged fees that represent, in that region, a small fortune. A recent documentary short, Visa to Nowhere, put together by Outriders, a Polish journalists’ collective, contains an interview with a Syrian who was living in a refugee camp in Lebanon but planning to travel to Europe via Belarus. He had paid $6,000—money collected from his extended family in Lebanon and Europe—for the travel package, and he was convinced it was worth it. He had been messaging people who had made the trip on Facebook, and they made it sound easy: “They suffered for some days, then they made it through Poland.” That seemed a small price to pay for what he wanted: “a dignified life.” Outriders also taped a travel agent in Beirut, who told them that a visa alone would cost $1,300—money that, presumably, goes to the Belarusian government.
Once they arrive in Minsk, the migrants stay in hotels, which they also pay for, though sometimes they sleep at the airport. Videos posted on social media have shown them clustered in large groups in central Minsk, and there are stories of them buying up rubber boots and winter clothes. What happens next is murky. Some pay to be taken to the border—Anwar said the cost was $300 for each car full of people—but others report having been escorted by uniformed men, probably border guards. When they arrive at the border fence, they are told to cross it—illegally. Trucks transport them along the border, and the Belarusian border guards help them to find deserted areas where crossing is easy. Anwar said that border guards used wire cutters to cut the border fence and allow his family to pass through. Others have been given wire cutters and told to do it themselves.
At that point, they have no other choice. They are not allowed to go to the formal border checkpoints to ask for asylum, though some ask to do so. They are not allowed to return to Minsk, even if they beg to be allowed to return home. The Belarusian border guards point guns in their faces, beat them, and tell them they have no option. And so they start walking westward.
This human-trafficking project began last summer, initially on Belarus’s border with Lithuania, which, like Poland, is a member of the EU. The number of migrants at first was small. But as it grew, the Belarusian border guards began driving people to the Latvian border, and to the Polish border too. Now, with thousands of people arriving in Minsk from the Middle East each week, the situation is changing again. On Monday, the Belarusian border guards gathered hundreds of migrants together and orchestrated a mass assault on the border near the Polish town of Kuźnica. Last night, Belarusian border guards gave the migrants cans of tear gas to use against Polish border guards; they also turned on strobes and lasers so that the Poles couldn’t see what was happening. So far, the Polish police and soldiers who are now massed along the border have held the line. But hundreds of people remain camped along the border, waiting for—something.
Lukashenko’s tactics are diabolically cynical: weaponize human desperation, lure people into making a risky and dangerous journey, take their money, force them to break the law. On the Polish side, Kaczyński’s tactics are cynical too, but differently so. Like Lukashenko, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party also wants to remain in power. But because his country is still, for the moment, a democracy, he needs popular support. (Here I should state for the record that I am married to an opposition politician in Poland.)
One of the ways Kaczyński has built popular support in the past is through the use of fearful, anxious, and xenophobic rhetoric. At the time of the previous European migrant crisis in 2015, Kaczyński warned that refugees from Syria were carrying “parasites and protozoa”; he said they would use churches as “toilets.” This time around, the Polish interior minister and the Polish defense minister actually appeared together on the main evening news, on the taxpayer-funded state television channel, and solemnly played a clip from a film showing a man having sex with a horse. This, viewers were told, was a video found on a telephone in the forest, and it showed one of the migrants camped on the border. In reality, the clip came from a piece of bestiality pornography made in the 1970s and widely available on the internet. But the message was clear: These people are animals.
In this very narrow sense, the migration crisis is useful to Kaczyński. COVID-19 rates are rising again, inflation is very high, corruption is rampant, but now he can change the subject: Poland has been invaded by sick, diseased Muslims, and only I can fix it. In August, the government announced a policy of “pushback”: Anyone found illegally in Poland would be sent back to the border. In early September, the Polish government declared a state of emergency in the border areas, set up checkpoints, and prohibited journalists and humanitarian organizations from entering the locked-down area. In October, Kaczyński called for a “radical strengthening of the army” too.
At the same time, Kaczyński has refused, on principle, to accept any help from the European Union, presumably because that would rob him of the only-I-can-fix-it narrative. But the EU has learned a lot since 2015. The EU’s border service, Frontex, is actually headquartered in Warsaw, and could offer assistance to Polish border guards. A spokesperson for the EU home-affairs commissioner told me that the resources of the European Asylum Support Office and other sources of emergency funding could be made available to the Polish government too. Lithuania and Latvia have taken advantage of these offers, but the Polish government wanted none of them. Nor has Polish diplomacy made any effort to galvanize a unified, international response: sanctions against Lukashenko, for example, or an EU-sponsored mass-information campaign across the Middle East. Instead, Polish party leaders carry on a petty war of words with the EU and barely speak to the Biden administration at all.
In domestic political terms, this might prove a success: The militarized rhetoric of war, invasion, and struggle, now used constantly on state television, seems to be helping to shore up the ruling party’s slipping poll numbers. But on the ground, this policy has created moral, humanitarian, and legal chaos. In reality, migrants who are “pushed back” to the Belarus border do not cross it, return to Minsk, and fly home. They can’t. Instead, they try repeatedly—eight, 10, 20 times—to cross the border. The Polish border guards periodically announce how many people they have stopped but really, these are the same people getting caught over and over again. Some run out of food: People from the Middle East are hardly in a position to live off the land in a Central European forest by hunting wild boar. Grupa Granica has collected reports of at least 13 deaths. On the Belarusian side, there could be many more.
But the incompetence is just as bad as the chaos. Even on its own terms, “pushback” has failed disastrously. Lukashenko has not been deterred. On the contrary, Poland’s hybrid-war rhetoric seems to have encouraged him to find new ways to troll Polish border guards and pile in more Belarusian troops, as if this really were a war and they really were needed. Besides, Poland has a long border with Belarus, the resources of the Polish army and police are finite, and the migrants have a huge incentive to find a way into the EU: They are afraid they might die otherwise. A Warsaw taxi driver told me that he had already been asked if he wanted to get into the lucrative business of ferrying people across Poland, from the Belarusian border to the German border. He told me that he said no, but others have clearly made a different decision. Police in Germany report that more than 9,000 people have now entered that country after traveling from Poland via Belarus, almost all in the past two months. Some of those who do get through boast of their luck on social media, which encourages more to come.
A different kind of chaos has descended on the people who live in the border areas, both inside the strefa—the locked-down zone, which extends a couple of miles inside the country from its frontier with Belarus—and along its edges. This is a famously quiet, famously beautiful part of Poland. Białowieża, a national park along the border, contains the last remaining primeval forest in Europe, as well as the largest remaining herd of European bison. The region normally attracts bird-watchers, photographers, and artists, which is part of what makes the situation so jarring. Katarzyna Wappa, who lives in the famously charming town of Hajnówka, just outside Białowieża, now has to cross checkpoints and show ID in order to visit her grandmother. “Białowieża has more soldiers than inhabitants,” she told me. “All of the Białowieża hotels are full of soldiers; the stadium is now a tent city housing soldiers.”
But the armored cars rumbling past wooden houses offer nothing to local residents, nothing to help them cope with the surreal situation they find themselves in. The Polish government’s official policy is that no one gets through, so nothing has to be done. In fact, almost everyone in the area has encountered starving, disoriented people from all kinds of places—Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon—struggling across their fields and gardens, hiding behind trees. Sometimes they have become too weak to walk, or are too frightened to ask for help. How are they supposed to react? Wappa told me that she simply finds it impossible to do nothing: “If I know that someone is dying outside my fence, outside my garden, my town … I have no option. I can’t allow someone to die of hunger, thirst, or cold right next to me.” Besides, she said, “it’s not normal that saving someone’s life might be a crime.”
She is one of many local people who have organized makeshift warehouses, stockpiling food, water bottles, winter clothes, and cellphone batteries in spare rooms and garages. They have also improvised, together with Grupa Granica and volunteers from the rest of Poland, a miraculously efficient patrol system. Their phone numbers circulate on Arabic social media; groups of migrants pass them back and forth. When people become desperate, they call. Volunteers respond by carrying blankets, shoes, and thermoses filled with soup into the forest.
Some more experienced organizations, including the Polish Red Cross and a popular national charity, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (known by the Polish acronym WOŚP), have created more formal systems to collect donations from around the country. The WOŚP warehouse that I visited was indeed filled with foil blankets, water bottles, and other supplies. This weekend a larger, more experienced medical-emergency NGO has announced that it will come to the border and help too. Still, the state is absent, international organizations are absent, and until now it’s mostly been amateurs trekking into the forests to help, mostly amateurs who are facing impossible medical, moral, and legal choices. Do they call for an ambulance when someone who is clearly ill begs them not to, because they fear being captured by the border guards? Do they bring food and water to a family of migrants camped in the forest—and then just go home and leave them there?
Polish government policy has also created an information vacuum that volunteers have also been forced to fill. Grupa Granica now organizes press conferences and keeps in touch with dozens of international journalists. Yet it too is staffed by people who have never done anything like this before. Iwo Łoś, the organization’s press spokesperson, is a doctoral candidate in sociology who has postponed everything, including the submission of his thesis, to do what has suddenly become a full-time job. Sypiański, the translator, is also close to getting his doctorate in medieval history—he is an expert on relations between the Arab world and Byzantium—but has spent the past month at the border instead. Theoretically the border guards also have a spokesperson. But after our encounter with the Kurds in the forest, my Polish colleague texted her to ask what had happened to the family. We never received a response.
None of which is to say that this crisis has some easy, obvious alternative solution, because it does not. Neither Poland nor the rest of the EU can open its borders to the millions of people who would like to go there. Neither Warsaw nor Brussels should give in to blackmail from Minsk. The Polish government has every right to defend its borders, especially since the status of the people who have managed to cross them is murky. They have indeed broken the law and destroyed the fence. Although some would have a genuine case, many do not qualify for political asylum. They want to go to Germany because they have family there, because they think they can get jobs there, because the prospect of another decade in a refugee camp in Lebanon or Turkey is so grim. In any case, asylum is something you are meant to request when you reach the first country where you are safe. Some say they should have asked in Minsk, though that’s difficult to do when you are immediately bused to the border. Americans will recognize all of these dilemmas from their own border with Mexico.
But it is precisely because Lukashenko is a cynical autocrat who is using human beings as weapons, and precisely because his scheme is designed to undermine democratic values, that the Polish government’s response has been so disastrous. The democratic world can and should come up with a response to this kind of provocation based on respect for the rule of law, transparency, and human decency. To send people back, repeatedly, into a dangerous situation, knowing they might die, is immoral, in addition to being a violation of international law. To pretend that this is only a hybrid war, and not simultaneously a humanitarian crisis, is to misunderstand profoundly what is happening on the ground.
Part of the answer, as I’ve said, could lie in a consolidated international response of a kind that the Poles should have called for months ago. Already, pressure from the EU seems to have persuaded Iraqi Airways to stop flights from Baghdad to Minsk, and Turkish Airlines says it won’t sell any more one-way tickets from the Middle East to Minsk either. But the strange fact that the Polish border remained for so long open to trade with Belarus also requires some examination. Why aren’t sanctions higher, stiffer, faster? Why has it taken the EU so long to impose more of them?
An even more important part of the answer might lie in speeding up and expanding the legal processing of migrants. In fact, many of the people who make it to Germany will have their cases examined, will be found not to merit asylum, and will then be sent back. This procedure will take a couple of months, which sounds like a lot unless you remember that similar procedures on the U.S.-Mexico border can take several years. What if an emergency system were created to make that process happen even faster? Those people who genuinely qualify for refugee status or deserve some kind of special consideration could then stay, while the rest would be sent home. The sight of large airplanes carrying people back to Erbil from Warsaw might finally persuade others not to come. David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, an organization that provides long-term aid to refugees around the world, told me that “the speed of processing is vital, so that those with the appropriate claims are quickly accepted, but those who do not qualify are just as quickly sent back.” In the meantime, no one would die in the forest.
There isn’t much time. If the situation does not change quickly, we may soon witness tragedy on a much broader scale. Video clips circulating online already seem to show Belarusian soldiers shooting in the air near the border. What if they start shooting straight across it? Russian troops appear to be exercising alongside Belarusian troops near the Lithuanian border. What if they swoop down to Krynki or Białowieża to defend their Belarusian allies? Even if a direct confrontation is avoided, a sharp change in the weather could create a different kind of crisis. Snow can fall in Poland in late November and December. Last year it did. If that happens, hundreds and possibly thousands of people are going to freeze to death.
But I began with a single Kurdish boy for a reason, so let me end with him too. For the truth is that almost everyone with an interest in perpetuating this crisis, or in taking advantage of this crisis, or in profiting politically from this crisis doesn’t want you to see him. They want you to see masses, migrants, or Muslims robbed of humanity and lacking faces and names. They want you to see “waves” of people, “hordes” of people, anonymous migrants who have allowed themselves to become bullets in a hybrid war. But a mass tragedy is really just a set of individual tragedies. Remember that when you see one starting to unfold.
This story was originally published by The Atlantic. Sign up for their newsletter.
6. Taliban hold military parade with U.S.-made weapons in Kabul in show of strength
Excerpts:
Most of the weapons and equipment the Taliban forces are now using are those supplied by Washington to the American-backed government in Kabul in a bid to construct an Afghan national force capable of fighting the Taliban.
Those forces melted away with the fleeing of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani from Afghanistan - leaving the Taliban to take over major military assets.
Taliban officials have said that pilots, mechanics and other specialists from the former Afghan National Army would be integrated into a new force, which has also started wearing conventional military uniforms in place of the traditional Afghan clothing normally worn by their fighters.
Taliban hold military parade with U.S.-made weapons in Kabul in show of strength
Reuters · by Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam
KABUL, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Taliban forces held a military parade in Kabul on Sunday using captured American-made armoured vehicles and Russian helicopters in a display that showed their ongoing transformation from an insurgent force to a regular standing army.
The Taliban operated as insurgent fighters for two decades but have used the large stock of weapons and equipment left behind when the former Western-backed government collapsed in August to overhaul their forces.
The parade was linked to the graduation of 250 freshly trained soldiers, defence ministry spokesman Enayatullah Khwarazmi said.
The exercise involved dozens of U.S.-made M117 armoured security vehicles driving slowly up and down a major Kabul road with MI-17 helicopters patrolling overhead. Many soldiers carried American made-M4 assault rifles.
Most of the weapons and equipment the Taliban forces are now using are those supplied by Washington to the American-backed government in Kabul in a bid to construct an Afghan national force capable of fighting the Taliban.
1/4
A military helicopter is pictured during the Taliban military parade in Kabul, Afghanistan November 14, 2021. REUTERS/Ali Khara
Those forces melted away with the fleeing of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani from Afghanistan - leaving the Taliban to take over major military assets.
Taliban officials have said that pilots, mechanics and other specialists from the former Afghan National Army would be integrated into a new force, which has also started wearing conventional military uniforms in place of the traditional Afghan clothing normally worn by their fighters.
According to a report late last year by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), the U.S. government transferred to the Afghan government more than $28 billion worth of defence articles and services, including weapons, ammunition, vehicles, night-vision devices, aircraft, and surveillance systems, from 2002 to 2017.
Some of the aircraft were flown into neighbouring Central Asian Countries by fleeing Afghan forces, but the Taliban have inherited other aircraft. It remains unclear how many are operational.
As the U.S. troops departed, they destroyed more than 70 aircraft, dozens of armoured vehicles and disabled air defences before flying out of Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport following a chaotic evacuation operation. read more
Additional reporting by Kabul bureau Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky
Reuters · by Gibran Naiyyar Peshimam
7. US Actions in Ukraine Backfiring as Risk of Russian Invasion Grows, Analysts Say
Excerpts:
In recent weeks, Russian units have been moving into the border region around eastern Ukraine, much like they did in the spring, when fears rose of a new Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Some of the Russian troops deployed there never left, and now more are arriving.
The deployments have been more covert this time, analysts say, and appear unconnected to any training exercises.
That has added to concerns that a larger threat looms in Ukraine's east, where a separatist war has raged for the past seven years.
US Actions in Ukraine Backfiring as Risk of Russian Invasion Grows, Analysts Say
STUTTGART, Germany -- The U.S. military's stepped-up activities around Ukraine have turned into a new "red line" for Moscow that could increase the risk of a large-scale Russian invasion of the country, some military analysts are cautioning as Russian troops mass on Ukraine's border.
"There are very, very dark clouds on the horizon," said Michael Kofman, director of Russia studies at the Center for Naval Analyses.
The problem the U.S. military needs to solve is how to demonstrate solidarity with Ukraine and show a willingness to stand up to possible Russian aggression without provoking the escalation it seeks to avoid in the first place, Kofman said.
"We may be pushing too far, too fast," he said of U.S. military efforts around Ukraine, saying U.S. European Command will need to avoid "running on autopilot" as the security landscape shifts.
In recent weeks, Russian units have been moving into the border region around eastern Ukraine, much like they did in the spring, when fears rose of a new Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Some of the Russian troops deployed there never left, and now more are arriving.
The deployments have been more covert this time, analysts say, and appear unconnected to any training exercises.
That has added to concerns that a larger threat looms in Ukraine's east, where a separatist war has raged for the past seven years.
Retired Marine Corps officer and Russia expert Rob Lee, in an analysis of Russia's spring buildup, said the most likely explanation for that movement was an attempt to signal to the U.S. and NATO that it should avoid accelerating Ukraine's path into NATO, selling arms to the country or imposing new sanctions on Russia.
"This was a demonstration that Russia could respond asymmetrically to anti-Russian policies adopted by the US and NATO by employing military force against Ukraine," Lee wrote in an analysis for the nonpartisan Foreign Policy Research Institute.
The motives this time are much the same, Kofman said, adding that angst in Russia over what it regards as persistent U.S. and NATO activity in Ukraine has shifted Moscow's red lines over the past year.
For Moscow, a possible attempt by Ukraine to join NATO has been long regarded as provocative.
"That position has changed to … it's now about (Western) defense cooperation in Ukraine, which can amount to the same de facto outcome," of NATO membership in Russia's view," Kofman said. "This is the red line. It is not just formal membership."
In western Ukraine, the U.S. Army has been training Ukrainian troops since 2015, the year after Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula and backed separatist fighters in the east.
The U.S. also has increased military sales and aid to Ukraine and expanded its naval presence in the Black Sea along with other NATO allies.
Retired U.S. Navy Adm. James Foggo III, who led U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa and Allied Joint Forces Command, Naples, says a clearer allied military strategy in the Black Sea region would help deter Russia.
"There needs to be a strategy that addresses the key areas where you want to operate where there is a potential for heightened tensions as we are seeing in the Black Sea and in the Ukraine," said Foggo, who doesn't regard U.S. military actions in the Black Sea as escalatory.
Allies also need to find a way to keep lines of communication open with Moscow to reduce the risks of miscalculation, said Foggo, now serving as dean of the newly established Center for Maritime Strategy in Arlington, Va.
Moscow has repeatedly denied accusations that it is stoking tensions in the region with its belligerent actions around Ukraine and in the Black Sea region.
The Russian Defense Ministry on Friday complained about air surveillance in the Black Sea region in what the agency termed increasing "aggressive U.S. military" action. U.S. 6th Fleet acknowledged Navy aircraft were engaged by Russian planes over international waters, calling the interactions "safe and professional."
Also on Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed Western media reports that Moscow has intentions to invade Ukraine as a "hollow and unfounded attempt to incite tensions."
"Russia doesn't threaten anyone," Peskov said, as cited by The Associated Press. "The movement of troops on our territory shouldn't be a cause for anyone's concern."
Still, some security experts and former U.S. military officials say Russian President Vladimir Putin's military buildup near Ukraine and more vocal complaints in recent weeks about NATO navies operating in the Black Sea are attempts to intimidate allies from bringing Ukraine into the fold.
Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who led U.S. Army Europe until 2017, said he believes Russia's actions over the last year, including the troop buildup along the Ukrainian border in March and alleged involvement in fostering a migrant crisis at the Polish-Belarusian border, are strategic in nature.
"This is part of an ongoing process to undermine Ukrainian government, to present Ukraine to the West as a failed state so that there is no further effort to integrate Ukraine into the West, into the EU ... or NATO," Hodges said.
Russia is being further emboldened by the European Union's failure to apply more political pressure on Moscow, he said.
"If Putin is confident that the West would not actually do anything if they pushed their forces further into Ukraine to take over more actual territory, I think they would do it," said Hodges, adding that allies are in position to create a deterrent.
One factor that complicates security matters is Europe's dependence on Russian gas pipelines to heat homes in the winter, giving Moscow significant leverage on issues such as sanctions.
In the event of a winter offensive, allied resolve would be tested by the reality that Russia "has it over a barrel" on energy, Kofman said.
"They have full control over how they deliver gas supplies to Europe," he said. "Winter is perfect time for a military operation."
Russian movements near the Ukrainian border since March have raised concerns among the U.S. and its NATO allies of a possible invasion. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, a claim the international community generally does not recognize. On Nov. 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Crimea forever a part of Russia.
March 31 – U.S. European Command raises awareness level about a buildup of 100,000 Russian troops along the Ukrainian border and in Crimea along with naval forces in the Sea of Azov.
April 22 – Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announces that Russian troops will withdraw from positions along the Ukrainian border.
Oct. 6 – NATO orders eight Russian diplomats to leave Belgium by Nov. 1, saying they were undeclared intelligence officers.
Oct. 18 – Russia announces its plan to end diplomatic engagement with NATO by Nov. 1 and terminates the activities of the NATO office in Moscow.
Oct. 30 – The destroyer USS Porter enters the Black Sea on routine patrol and is joined by USS Mount Whitney on Nov. 4. The day before, U.S. 6th Fleet announced that the replenishment oiler USNS John Lenthall was en route to the Black Sea. Moscow calls NATO and U.S. activity in the Black Sea a provocation.
Nov. 1 – Commercial satellite images suggest a buildup of Russian troops near the eastern border of Ukraine. Russia denounces the images as "low quality" fakes. Ukraine initially denies the buildup but two days later complains that Russia has sent 90,000 troops near its border.
Nov. 2 – CIA Director William Burns meets with Russian Security Council chief Nikolai Patrushev, warning Moscow of consequences if it steps up military action against Ukraine.
Nov. 8 – Belarusian TV images show border guards escorting an estimated 1,000 people to the Polish border, further escalating tensions in a brewing migrant crisis. U.S. analysts suggest that the situation is being manipulated by Russia to divert attention from its actions near Ukraine. The Kremlin denies involvement.
Nov. 10 – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says Russia would be making a "serious mistake" in committing any new aggressions against Ukraine.
8. What the Taliban’s youngest fighters tell us about the future of the movement
Ominous.
I recall visiting a Madrassa in the Philippines with the Imam of Baltimore who was visiting at the behest of the State Department. He would ask questions of the young people there such as where was the airplane invented? He would ask, was it in Russia, China, the United States, or Saudi Arabia? They would all answer Saudi Arabia. How do you overcome that kind of education that is really indoctrination?
Excerpts:
Omari, too, has no plans to leave his perch at Bagram.
“I will not go back to school,” he said. “I want to serve my country with my weapon.”
When asked whether his parents would object, he replied, “The Taliban is my family.”
Fatullah Khaiber, 20, was the only Taliban fighter interviewed who wanted an education. But even this decision is colored by the war: He wants to one day teach at a madrassa.
“I will share with my students the jihad we fought against 20 years of occupation,” said Khaiber, standing near a broken-down U.S. armored personnel carrier at the former U.S. military outpost in Ghazni. “I will tell them about the Americans and their acts, how they carried out night raids and bombings.”
He, too, said that Osama bin Laden was a hero.
What the Taliban’s youngest fighters tell us about the future of the movement
The Washington Post · by Sudarsan RaghavanNovember 12, 2021 at 11:36 a.m. EST · November 12, 2021
BAGRAM, Afghanistan — Born a year after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Esmatullah Omari grew up to despise America. At 12, he was trained by the Taliban to plant roadside bombs. At 16, he was attacking military convoys near Bagram airfield, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan and the epicenter of America’s longest war.
Now, Omari triumphantly stands guard at one of Bagram’s entrances. The Americans are gone, but the 19-year-old still doesn’t understand why they came in the first place. Once, he saw a video of planes hitting two tall buildings on a date he can’t recall, he said.
“But no one told me the story about what happened.”
Thousands of Americans who were either toddlers, infants or born after 9/11 joined the U.S. military to serve their nation, combat terrorism and foster democracy in Afghanistan. They included 11 of the 13 U.S. service members killed in a bombing by an Islamic State affiliate at Kabul’s airport in August during the last days of America’s two-decade-long conflict.
In Afghanistan, a parallel generation of Taliban fighters battled the Americans, their lives also distinctly shaped by the 9/11 attacks. Many were children when they first tasted war, trading their childhoods for what they were told was their duty as Muslims.
But they grew up in a world where the 9/11 attacks were either obscured or misrepresented in their lives. It was an alternate universe where a lost generation of rural Afghan youths had few opportunities and never benefited from billions of dollars in Western aid money that elevated the lives of countless Afghans. Filling the void were Islamic schools known as madrassas that shaped the minds of future young Taliban fighters, their learning and their childhoods inevitably cut short by the lure of jihad, or holy war.
The Washington Post interviewed 14 young Taliban fighters from seven parts of the country — all born between 2000 and 2003 — to see what motivated a generation to take up arms against U.S. forces when it had no memory of the 1990s Taliban movement, or its ouster in 2001 after the attacks of Sept. 11. What does their future look like in the new Afghanistan?
Many joined the Taliban after U.S. forces attacked their villages or killed their relatives. Some despised the corruption of the U.S.-backed Afghan government. Others were urged, even trained, to fight by relatives inside the Taliban. Preachers at their madrassas portrayed Americans as invaders seeking to kill Muslims and encouraged students to wage a religious jihad against the foreigners.
The young fighters were also fed a steady stream of revisionist history about 9/11 and positive imagery of al-Qaeda, especially its founder — the architect of the U.S. attacks, who was given safe harbor in Afghanistan by the Taliban during its previous rule.
“Osama bin Laden was a hero and a mujahid,” said Sharafuddin Shakir, 19, using the Arabic word for those engaged in a holy war. The lean fighter was surrounded by militants inside a former U.S. military outpost in Ghazni province that they now controlled.
His comrades nodded in agreement.
'Duty of everyone to fight'
Back in Bagram, Omari’s adolescent life seemed on a normal trajectory. He attended school, played every day with his cousins and friends in Nasru, a village close to the American base and about an hour-and-a-half drive from the capital, Kabul. His destiny, though, was already preordained.
His brother, five years older, was a Taliban member and so were his uncles and older cousins. From a young age, they instilled a sense that one day he would join them.
“This is the duty of everyone to fight against the invaders and infidels who occupied our land,” said his uncle Muhammed Karim, 48, in response to a question about why the Taliban recruited children. “Jihad is mandatory everywhere.”
Many of the previous generation in the Taliban were also child fighters, and in rural Afghanistan, boys are often considered adults when they are capable of wielding a gun or helping the family.
“I was 14 when I fought against the Soviets,” said Sahijan, a middle-aged fighter with a thick salt-and-pepper beard, referring to the U.S.-funded campaign by Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s to drive out the occupying Soviet forces. Like many Afghans, he uses one name.
One day, Karim and other family members decided to educate Omari in war. They taught him to make an improvised explosive device, or IED. Then, they took him out for some real-life experience. Boys were less suspected of being bombers.
“He was 12 then,” recalled Gul Zaman, 42, another uncle, smiling. “He was given explosives to plant on the side of the road. We took him with us whenever we were carrying out any operations.”
When Omari was 16, U.S. and Afghan troops learned about a suicide-bombing mission that his brother was planning. The troops raided Nasru and fatally shot his brother.
“I was in grade eight, but when my brother was martyred, I left school,” said Omari.
He formally joined the Taliban, replacing his brother. His next assault, he said, was an ambush of a military convoy approaching Bagram. He traveled to other provinces, he said, staging roadside bombings. “In every mine blast on an armored vehicle or Humvee, five to six people were killed,” Omari said with no emotion. “I felt happy when I successfully attacked a vehicle.”
Omari was motivated by what he and many others in his village viewed as the brutal conduct of American forces and their Afghan allies, who conducted airstrikes and counterterrorism raids. Stories of torture and other abuses inside the U.S.-run jail in Bagram reverberated through the village and surrounding areas.
“The foreign troops killed many innocent people in our area on misleading information by their spies,” said Omari, who is tall and wiry and wore a camouflage jacket, black Nike sneakers and a cap with white Islamic markings. In his left hand, he clutched an American M-4 rifle that he found inside Bagram.
A few months after his formal recruitment, Omari’s younger brother joined the Taliban, as did several teenage cousins.
Only Islamic verses
They included Qari Mutawakil, who also had dropped out of school at 14 and joined the insurgency after witnessing abuses by U.S. and local forces, he said.
In Kabul, his peers were listening to Western and Bollywood music, signs of the new freedoms ushered in by the U.S.-backed government and Western funding. The only tunes Mutawakil and his comrades heard were Islamic verses, as ordered by the Taliban.
“I never listened to music, only the jihadi anthems,” said Mutawakil, a hefty fighter with a boyish voice who is now 18. “Music is not good. It is a sin.”
He began fighting in other provinces after he was trained to use a gun and make roadside bombs. His first operation targeted an Afghan national army base, he said.
When asked whether he had heard of 9/11 or of planes hitting the twin towers, Mutawakil said he had not, adding, “I was not in this world 20 years ago.”
His reasons for battling the Americans were more nuanced than those of the other fighters.
“They came here to root out Islam,” said Mutawakil. “They came to establish democratic rule here and wanted to use us for their own interests. They wanted to make us as they are. They wanted to kill our clerics and eliminate our religion.”
Those clerics played an important role in recruiting Gul Muhammed Heymat. In the eastern province of Paktika, he learned about the American forces in his madrassa.
Then, his teachers dictated what was required of him as a good Muslim.
“They told us about the Americans, that they have invaded our country and committed atrocities against the people,” said Heymat, now 18, whose wavy black hair peeked out from his skull cap. “We were told to fight jihad against the invaders.”
The clerics never mentioned the 9/11 attacks in their conversations or the presence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, said Heymat. All the students were told, he said, was that the Americans came “to protect their interests” and “to carry war here.”
They were also told that bin Laden was a good Muslim and a mujahid.
Two years ago, Heymat and his childhood friend Assadullah Tassal, 21, joined the Taliban, fighting mostly against the government in Paktika.
In other madrassas, the goal was to graduate teenage suicide bombers.
Muhammad Sajid, 21, knows. His brother, Shamsur, detonated his explosive vest as a convoy of American vehicles passed a decade ago, he said. And Sajid was ordered to continue the tradition in his family five years ago. He was sent to a madrassa in northwest Pakistan, operated by the Haqqani network, an al-Qaeda-linked group aligned with the Taliban.
“I was myself a would-be suicide bomber,” said Sajid, who looks younger than his years. “I got the training at the Haqqani madrassa.”
He was taught to make explosives, wrap them in a vest and hook them to a detonator. Three years ago, he was ordered to go to Nangarhar province and await orders for his operation. But he was captured by government security forces and jailed, he said. Sajid was released this year from prison after Taliban fighters seized the area. He still regrets that he failed in his mission.
“I was ready to become a martyr,” Sajid said.
Questions over 9/11
In Ghazni, Shakir, too, was ready to die for his beliefs. Like many of the young Taliban fighters, he was ignorant of 9/11. “I don’t know about these 9/11 attacks, and I did not watch the videos of that attack,” he said.
He not only refused to believe that al-Qaeda and bin Laden orchestrated them, but he questioned whether the attacks even happened. “It was not true,” said Shakir. “The Americans invaded Afghanistan on the pretext of 9/11, but the real motive was that they were against the true Islamic rule in Afghanistan.”
Even senior Taliban officials try to whitewash the terrorist act. In August, Zabihullah Mujahid, the top Taliban spokesman and acting information minister, declared there was “no proof” that bin Laden was involved in the attacks.
As he stood sentry at Bagram, Omari finally learned about the 9/11 attacks — the version his older relatives and comrades wanted him to hear, that is.
“I watched the planes crash into the buildings in America in the TV,” explained Sahijan. “That was preplanned by the Americans in order to attack Afghanistan.”
“No al-Qaeda was here,” said Karim, Omari’s uncle. “Where was Osama bin Laden killed? He was killed in Pakistan. What happened on 9/11 was just an excuse to fight al-Qaeda. But, in reality, they had planned to attack Afghanistan.”
As they spoke, Omari nodded, taking in their words.
“Let the Americans show us proof that a single al-Qaeda member was either killed or captured in Afghanistan,” Karim continued.
“We don’t know who did the 9/11 attacks,” Omari said finally.
The U.S. government “only announced it under the name of al-Qaeda,” he added.
On a recent sunny Friday afternoon, scores of fighters of all ages gathered at an amusement park near Kabul, following the all-important Juma prayers. Some put down their guns and hopped on to a swinging pirate-boat ride. They screamed with delight, seemingly regaining their childhood, if only briefly.
Heymat and Tassal were at the park together. It was their first time in Kabul, and they were enjoying the sights and activities that had eluded them after a lifetime of war. But that’s all they have ever known. Despite the widening of their world, they cling to a sense of importance and belonging that the Taliban provides.
“Even now, when there is no fighting, to keep security and serving the country is also a form of jihad,” said Tassal. “We want to be mujahid.”
Other young Taliban fighters still see enemies everywhere and refuse to put down their weapons. They have no choice. Most have grown up with no education and no skills.
“Now Daesh has come here,” said Mutawakil, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “They carried out a bomb attack in Kunduz the other day. I took up arms to fight for the will of God and embrace martyrdom, which is a respectable way to die.”
“I will not find a job,” he added. “We will remain with our guns.”
That raises concerns about whether this generation of young Taliban members, trained in warfare and explosives, will turn to crime or violence, especially at a time when Afghanistan’s economy is in free-fall and the Taliban interim government is unable to pay salaries.
Omari, too, has no plans to leave his perch at Bagram.
“I will not go back to school,” he said. “I want to serve my country with my weapon.”
When asked whether his parents would object, he replied, “The Taliban is my family.”
Fatullah Khaiber, 20, was the only Taliban fighter interviewed who wanted an education. But even this decision is colored by the war: He wants to one day teach at a madrassa.
“I will share with my students the jihad we fought against 20 years of occupation,” said Khaiber, standing near a broken-down U.S. armored personnel carrier at the former U.S. military outpost in Ghazni. “I will tell them about the Americans and their acts, how they carried out night raids and bombings.”
He, too, said that Osama bin Laden was a hero.
Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar and Mohammadullah Aryen in Kabul contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Sudarsan RaghavanNovember 12, 2021 at 11:36 a.m. EST · November 12, 2021
9. The Stunning Lack of Accountability for the Botched U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan
Note this while reading this essay:
ROBERT M. BERG is an active-duty combat-arms officer, a commissioned officer of 20-plus years, and was an enlisted infantryman for three years before that. He has served all over the world, from lowest-level tactical units all the way up to strategic planning at the Pentagon. ROBERT M. BERG is his pen name.
The Stunning Lack of Accountability for the Botched U.S. Drone Strike in Afghanistan
November 10, 2021 6:30 AM
A review cleared any officers of wrongdoing for a strike that killed civilians. This is a disgrace.
NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE
A
ccountability for the botched drone strike by the U.S. military that killed ten civilians in Kabul must lie somewhere. Having personally conducted countless dynamic-targeting situations while running current operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq, I can attest that you do not just strike a car you have been actively tracking for eight hours that is loaded with civilians without people making serious mistakes. Likely these mistakes came at much higher levels than Air Force lieutenant general Sami Said’s review cared to look.
What I find most interesting is that Said focused all his comments on the “strike cell” and the information that our military had at the time. While I am not for micromanaging our current operations cells, where this strike would have been tracked and processed, it is hard to believe that general or flag-level officers (abbreviated GOFOs, a term used to refer to general or admiral-level officers within our military) were not directly involved in approving this strike. Who were these GOFOs, and how actively were they tracking the situation? We don’t know. But we should.
According to the Associated Press, Central Command (CENTCOM) claims it was tracking the car for about eight hours. AP further reported that, according to Said, two minutes before the strike there was evidence that a child was present in the strike zone. The targeting team clearly missed this evidence. But that leaves another pressing question unanswered: How many people were in the car at the time of the strike? I have personally witnessed the aftermath of numerous car bombs, including one that killed one of our unit medics. Never has there been more than one person inside the suicide vehicle.
There is another question worth asking. In instances such as this, a single person has final-strike authority. So who authorized the strike for the supposed car bomb that had multiple occupants? I suspect it was a GOFO. It is the job of such an officer to be a dispassionate observer and to approve such a strike. Said conveniently leaves out who the approving authority of the strike was. But that is where at least one level of accountability should rest. That, however, would require accepting culpability for a completely botched strike at senior levels. It’s much easier to clear low-level troops of blame and then call the incident investigated.
Intelligence failures do happen. But Said and CENTCOM steered well clear of any comments on why the intelligence was faulty. What gave the targeting team “reasonable certainty” that an imminent threat was present? While I am not advocating releasing anything that would compromise sources or methods, it seems reasonable to address as fully as possible how the intelligence got it this wrong. Again, they had eight hours to develop more intelligence. Was this a case of trusting the Taliban to provide reliable information? Exposing this would not compromise any sources or methods. But it would expose the gross incompetence of Pentagon and White House officials.
Was there pressure to respond to the suicide attack that killed 13 U.S. service members only days before this strike? It is hard to discount pressure from Pentagon and White House officials to live up to President Biden’s declaration that “we will hunt you down and make you pay.” While it seems highly unlikely that Biden himself had direct knowledge of this strike before it happened, it would be gross negligence for GOFOs and senior defense and intelligence officials not to be directly involved with tracking this target. What does Said have to say about the influence of these GOFOs, defense, and intelligence officials on the strike? Nothing. Again: This would bring accountability for senior officials likely responsible for the failures that led to the deaths of ten civilians.
Another key question still unanswered, even after Said’s report: What Rules of Engagement (ROE) were American forces operating under when conducting the strike? CENTCOM mentioned the strike was conducted with “reasonable certainty” that there was an imminent threat to American troops at the Kabul airport. Did the strike team need an “imminent threat” to U.S. forces before it could conduct a strike?
If the targeting team had an ROE that would have allowed for a strike for “hostile intent” during the eight hours of tracking the vehicle, they could and should have struck the target when collateral-damage concerns were at the lowest, long before it became an “imminent threat” to U.S. forces. While it would have still been tragic to kill a single occupant in the vehicle, strike teams in dynamic-targeting situations are always looking for targeting windows that minimize collateral-damage concerns. Why didn’t they here?
There does not seem to be much doubt that the targeting team believed they were tracking a car bomb. The three most likely reasons to hold a strike on a target that has demonstrated “clear hostile intent” — in which there is no other purpose for a car bomb than blowing people and things up quite indiscriminately — are possible intel gain, the lack of a strike platform sufficient for the strike, or your ROE does not allow for it.
In a car-bomb situation, you would never hold a strike for possible future intel gain. The mobility and lethality of a car bomb make it an indiscriminate weapon and a threat to everything around it. Also, car bombs do not drive around loaded for action, simply to return to a base, which negates any reason to continue to simply track the vehicle for possible intel gain. Any “dry run” attacks would be conducted without the vehicle armed — indeed, most likely in a different vehicle. As for lacking a sufficient strike platform: That seems unlikely here, as I suspect the overwatch platforms were armed, and the threat posed by a potential car bomb would warrant the highest targeting priority.
That then leaves insufficient ROE. Neither Said’s comments nor his report covered this. Addressing insufficient ROE would involve looking at the possible culpability of Pentagon and White House officials. But it is clear that Said had no intention of scrutinizing anyone at this level, as that would require holding senior officials accountable. It is at least worth asking, however: Why was the strike delayed for eight hours?
It is also worth considering whether the failure here was simply one of gross negligence in setting up an insufficient Command and Control (C2) structure to facilitate strikes against threats within Afghanistan to our forces. It is easy to forget, in the series of complete failures leading up to the Afghanistan withdrawal, that as far back as early July 2021, Defense spokesman John Kirby discussed how we will retain “over the horizon” strike capability in Afghanistan. But it soon became painfully clear that this was not the case.
The failure to provide sufficient resources to the C2 element to conduct strikes was well outside the scope of the comments made by Said or CENTCOM. This failure again would point to senior officials and possibly even into the White House itself. Leaving questions like this unanswered is a complete failure of any investigation and protects senior officials from having to answer uncomfortable questions.
The clear pattern here is that the Pentagon intentionally overlooked potential failures of GOFOs, senior defense and intelligence officials, and White House officials to shield them from culpability in the deaths of ten civilians. This is yet another black eye in the national embarrassment of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Instead of actually investigating the failures that led to this strike, Said simply cleared low-level operators who were under-resourced, fed bad intelligence, placed under political pressure from possibly as high up as the president, and operating under restricted ROE they did not set. To take any investigation seriously to clear the Department of Defense and Biden administration of “misconduct or negligence” for the strike, we need to look much higher than the “strike cell.” What a complete disgrace and just the latest example of senior officials skirting any accountability.
ROBERT M. BERG is an active-duty combat-arms officer, a commissioned officer of 20-plus years, and was an enlisted infantryman for three years before that. He has served all over the world, from lowest-level tactical units all the way up to strategic planning at the Pentagon. ROBERT M. BERG is his pen name.
10. EXCLUSIVE: General Atomics is secretly flying a new, heavily armed drone
Let's get on with the naming contest.
Excerpts:
The name and designation of the new drone have not been disclosed, but General Atomics intends to roll out photos and specifications of the system by the end of the year, the sources said.
General Atomics has not begun discussions with the US military or potential international customers about the drone yet. The system was designed with Army’s Future Command and Special Operations Command in mind — particularly SOCOM’s Armed Overwatch program — and could also be a natural fit for the Marine Corps or any other expeditionary force, the source said.
However, it remains unclear whether the aircraft will find an interested customer with the US military, as there is no direct path to procurement for the aircraft.
SOCOM notably did not pick any unmanned systems when narrowing its field of potential Armed Overwatch competitors to three manned aircraft: the Textron AT-6E Wolverine, L3Harris AT-802U Sky Warden, and Sierra Nevada Corporation M28/C-145 Wily Coyote, according to Aviation Week. But one source said General Atomics believes SOCOM could re-evaluate its pool of contenders after seeing the capabilities of the new UAS.
EXCLUSIVE: General Atomics is secretly flying a new, heavily armed drone - Breaking Defense
The new yet-unnamed drone can carry up to 16 Hellfire missiles at a time — double the load of an MQ-1C Gray Eagle.
A new General Atomics drone prototype, whose existence was first reported by Breaking Defense, shares common DNA with the extended range MQ-1 Gray Eagle pictured here. (General Atomics)
DUBAI: General Atomics has built and flown a prototype of a deadly new drone with significantly more firepower than the US military’s current unmanned aircraft inventory, including the capability to launch a whopping 16 Hellfire missiles.
The unmanned aerial system — whose existence has not been previously been reported — made its first flight this summer at the company’s Desert Horizon test grounds in the Mohave Desert, two sources with knowledge of the program told Breaking Defense.
General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley declined to comment on this story.
The new drone, which was funded with internal investment funds, features key enhancements meant to make it more suitable to operate in austere conditions. It needs less than 800 feet to take off or land the aircraft, making it possible to launch and recover it from rough airfields, dirt roads, dry riverbeds, or possibly even onboard ships, one source said.
Its maximum payload of 16 Hellfire missiles is double the MQ-1C Grey Eagle’s Hellfire loadout, and four times as much as the typical number carried by the MQ-9 Reaper.
The new drone’s design borrows heavily from the extended range version of the MQ-1C Gray Eagle, the sources said, but has noticeably longer wings. It also features avionics and other capabilities — like automated takeoff and landing — taken from other General Atomics platforms.
A source acknowledged that arming the aircraft with a full load of 16 Hellfires will take a toll on the aircraft’s endurance, while cutting down on space, power and cooling for sensors or other mission systems. However, the company believes that shortfall is overcome by the drone’s ability take off closer to a conflict and quickly launch some of its missiles, thus dropping weight from the aircraft and lengthening the time it can stay in the air.
“If you can take off from anywhere and rapidly reload, it changes your endurance,” the source said. “As you’re unloading ordinance, you actually are extending your time [on station].”
The name and designation of the new drone have not been disclosed, but General Atomics intends to roll out photos and specifications of the system by the end of the year, the sources said.
General Atomics has not begun discussions with the US military or potential international customers about the drone yet. The system was designed with Army’s Future Command and Special Operations Command in mind — particularly SOCOM’s Armed Overwatch program — and could also be a natural fit for the Marine Corps or any other expeditionary force, the source said.
However, it remains unclear whether the aircraft will find an interested customer with the US military, as there is no direct path to procurement for the aircraft.
SOCOM notably did not pick any unmanned systems when narrowing its field of potential Armed Overwatch competitors to three manned aircraft: the Textron AT-6E Wolverine, L3Harris AT-802U Sky Warden, and Sierra Nevada Corporation M28/C-145 Wily Coyote, according to Aviation Week. But one source said General Atomics believes SOCOM could re-evaluate its pool of contenders after seeing the capabilities of the new UAS.
Meanwhile, there is no existing Army program of record for a more expeditionary successor to the MQ-1C Gray Eagle, though General Atomics is hopeful that the new drone will be able to meet emerging Army requirements.
The company has also tailored the new drone to fill capability gaps from potential international customers like the Italian navy for shipboard operations, the source said. It could also be a good fit for countries like Indonesia and the Philippines that may be operating in islands without developed airfields or paved runways.
11. America's lesson from Gaza: prepare for disinformation war
Here is a possible truism: "No one who is the victim of disinformation ever responds quickly or effectively enough."
The lesson from Gaza will be, as Joe Collins Richard Hooker said in the title of their book about Afghanistan and Iraq, lessons encountered but not learned.
Unless there is a dedicated information operations red team anticipating all the enemy disinformation actions and through a "pre-mortem" process identifying all the things that might go wrong in the information domain victims of disinformation will never be able to respond quickly or effectively enough. And even with a strong red team process to identify the disinformation before it is deployed leaders must accept the analysis of the red team and the recommendations of information planners and PSYOP professionals to proactively counter the disinformation or better yet act with initiative to dominate the information space.
America's lesson from Gaza: prepare for disinformation war - Breaking Defense
A pair of retired top American officers say Israel did not respond quickly or effectively enough to the information war waged by Hamas earlier this year.
A young child dressed in the uniform of the Ezz-Al Din Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Hamas movement as a ceasefire came into effect on May 21, 2021 in Gaza City, Gaza.(atima Shbair/Getty Images)
Following the May outbreak of fighting in Gaza, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America gathered 10 former top American military officers to study the conflict and draw conclusions for how it could apply to Pentagon operations in the future. In the op-ed below, Charles Wald, the retired Deputy Commander of United States European Command, and Robert Ashley, the retired Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, write with Blaise Misztal of JINSA that the biggest lesson learned related to information warfare.
While the US may be turning its focus towards the Pacific, the Middle East still has military lessons to teach. This is particularly true of the May 2021 conflict between Israel and armed Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip. Israel has termed its operations the “first artificial intelligence” war, but perhaps the most important takeaway has to do with disinformation.
May’s 11-day conflict, the fourth major round of hostilities since Hamas violently took control of Gaza in 2007, made up for its brevity with intensity. Hamas’ deployment of advanced capabilities, civilian shields, and disinformation are characteristics of tactics US forces will likely encounter. And while Israel’s ability to dominate Gaza’s finite battlespace was an advantage American planners cannot count on, Israel’s operational and technological innovations, and its challenges in the informational domain, should help shape how US forces prepare for their next conflicts.
Hamas entered this conflict with updated offensive capabilities and plans. Its most visible advance was its high sustained rate of rocket fire, including barrages of up to 150 rockets fired at a single target, all meant to overwhelm Israel’s Iron Dome air defense system. Hamas also sought to attack Israeli forces with anti-tank missiles, unmanned aerial and submersible vehicles, naval forces, and an electronic warfare capability designed to jam Iron Dome radars.
Despite these advancing capabilities, Hamas neither expected nor sought a military victory against Israel. Instead, its primary strategic objectives during this round of fighting were political and informational: Hamas sought to boost its own standing among Palestinians while delegitimizing Israel. A critical part of this strategy was Hamas’ use of human shields — placing its military assets and infrastructure among Gaza’s dense civilian neighborhoods — to both complicate Israeli operations and, when civilian casualties occur, wage a disinformation campaign to accuse the IDF of violating the law of armed conflict.
Israel, for its part, sought purely operational-level military objectives, and did not appear to have a strategy for changing the foundational dynamics that have led to repeated hostilities with Hamas. Nor did it effectively contest Hamas in the information domain, even as both disinformation (intentionally false or misleading messages spread by Hamas) and misinformation (false information unknowingly amplified by the media or public) against Israel proliferated, particularly on social media. Israeli messaging focused on providing details about its military operations, but did not make the case for the legality of its actions, dispute false information, or call attention to Hamas’ troubling use of civilian shields.
This created a strategy mismatch — because each side was pursuing fundamentally different objectives, both Israel and Hamas consider themselves to have triumphed in the conflict. This seeds the ground not only for repeated future conflicts — you can’t deter future military action if the other side thinks it won — but also encourages Hamas to continue leveraging the information domain to gain political and strategic advantage over Israel.
Instead, determined to restore deterrence and degrade Hamas’ military capabilities, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) deployed a series of operational and technological innovations, both before and during the conflict, to accelerate their ability to find and fix targets. These included increased transparency in sharing data, deploying artificial intelligence to identify targets, battlefield management systems to push intelligence to combat units, and precision weapons and munitions.
As part of their new “Momentum” doctrine, the IDF began operations with a high tempo of strikes against pre-planned and predominantly fixed Hamas military targets, and only increased the pace of strikes over time. The IDF hit as many targets in 11 days as during seven weeks of fighting in 2014. Due to its swift and massive use of force, Israel rendered unusable much of Hamas’ tunnel networks and stopped nearly all of Hamas’ offensive operations, other than rocket and mortar fire.
Israel’s large, pre-planned target set made possible this high operational tempo. Gaza’s size and proximity to Israel allows the IDF to constantly monitor their enemies. Utilizing an extensive network of electronic sensors, including ground-based, onboard UAVs and F-35 multi-mission aircraft, and subterranean seismic monitors along the border, the IDF has collected billions of pieces of intelligence. To sift quickly through all that data to identify targets, Israel broke down stovepipes in how data is managed, introduced artificial intelligence and man-machine teams, and made organizational changes to enable information sharing. This also helped generate hundreds of new targets, and maintain a high ops tempo, during the conflict.
Using updated battlefield management systems, the IDF pushed strike packages and real-time information about the surrounding areas to combat units. By matching munition payload and fusing to the target and using American-supplied precision guided munitions, including Joint Direct Attack Munition tail kits, the IDF turned its intelligence into highly accurate airstrikes.
Fighting terrorist adversaries on a relatively small, close-in, and finite battlespace may make the Gaza conflict appear to resemble the wars of the last two decades, rather than the great power competition and multi-domain battles that the United States is preparing for now. Yet, the detailed study we have undertaken of this conflict, with ten other retired senior US military officers under the auspices of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA), reveals trends and complexities that are relevant for study today.
Great power competition is underway, and we already know it will not manifest solely as major combat operations. Whether Iranian-backed militias, Russia’s “little green men” and private military contractors, or Chinese “fishing boat” flotillas, state actors are increasingly fighting like unconventional forces. By keeping their operations below the threshold of war and denying state involvement, nation state actors can hope to create facts on the ground without triggering a US response.
While the current preference in Washington might be to avoid engaging in such contingencies in order to maintain a force posture and readiness better suited to high-end threats, military leaders should also develop plans for responding to and/or deterring adversaries operating at the lower end of the conflict-competition spectrum.
Any such plans must learn from Israel’s shortcomings in the most recent conflict, particularly its ceding of the information domain to the adversary. The ability of Hamas to discredit Israel by spreading disinformation presents other actors for a strategic playbook for constraining a superior military force by exploiting a particular vulnerability of democracies: their susceptibility to public opinion.
US competitors have already begun to leverage disinformation for local and global effect. Russian information operations and Chinese “wolf warrior diplomacy,” including doctored images of Australian forces holding a knife to an Afghan child’s throat posted to social media, already define how these autocratic states compete with the United States and its democratic allies. To confront these challenges, the United States should prepare to contest future conflicts emphatically and preemptively, in the information domain as much as in the physical. This is not just a challenge for the US military but requires a comprehensive approach, updating and strengthening the informational tools — like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America — that the United States deployed effectively in the Cold War.
It is also important to recognize how future US conflicts might differ from the conditions Israel faced in its latest Gaza conflict. US forces will confront adversaries in environments significantly more complex than Gaza — just as densely populated by civilians, but farther afield, with more limited intelligence, little to no air dominance, and in a contested electromagnetic spectrum — while remaining committed to complying with legal protections of civilians.
In preparation for such operations, the United States should make investments, together with partners like Israel, in new technologies to counter adversaries’ advancing capabilities, enable mitigating risk to civilians, and allow it to operate more quickly and precisely, and therefore more decisively, in complex environments. And it should recognize that deploying some of these innovations — such as the new Joint All-Domain Command and Control system — requires overcoming organizational, as much as technological, obstacles.
As near-peer competitors adopt strategies that include conflict below the traditional threshold of war, irregular warfare, and information operations, the US military can learn from the experiences of its Israeli partner in how to fight such adversaries effectively, efficiently, and legally.
Charles Wald, USAF (ret.), was the Deputy Commander of United States European Command. Robert Ashley, USA (ret.), was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. They both served on the Gaza Conflict Task Force at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America. Blaise Misztal is JINSA’s Vice President for Policy.
12. Senate ‘likely’ to move defense bill this week, Schumer says
Excerpts:
With three weeks of legislative work left in the 2021 congressional calendar, House and Senate lawmakers will have limited time to negotiate a compromise to finalize a bill before the end of December.
While this process typically begins over the summer, it’s feasible to pass the bill before year’s end, said Arnold Punaro, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director who is now chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association’s board.
“SASC knows how to deal with both hundreds of amendments and also tough-vote amendments,” Punaro said. “They are experts at managing what is in most years the largest bill on the floor. This would also let them officially conference in early December and get the bill to the president by Christmas, even with all the chaos on the CR and debt ceiling.”
Senate ‘likely’ to move defense bill this week, Schumer says
WASHINGTON ― The Senate is “likely” to vote on its long-delayed annual defense policy bill this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Sunday letter to lawmakers.
The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, a bipartisan package meant to make the U.S. economy more competitive against China and bolster U.S. supply chains, may be added to the Senate’s 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, Schumer, D-N.Y., also said in the letter.
Schumer will seek a vote to repeal the 2002 Iraq war authorization. Based on a bill from Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Todd Young, R-Ind., the move would represent a step toward Congress reclaiming its constitutional war-making powers from the presidency.
Schumer said he was raising the defense bill Monday amid further delays for the Democrats’ ambitious Build Back Better legislation, a $1.75 trillion social spending and climate bill that must first pass the House.
RELATED
The short-term budget deal approved by Congress freezes billions of dollars in planned Pentagon acquisitions programs, as well as some of President Joe Biden’s top priorities to deter China. It could be months before they move ahead.
The House finalized its draft of the measure in September, but a version passed by the Senate Armed Services Committee has been awaiting a full chamber vote since July. Now it will likely face final passage on a calendar crowded with the major Democratic legislation, action to raise the country’s debt limit and a possible continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown.
Schumer said he’s hopeful Congress would reach an agreement on a 2022 federal spending package, but Republicans and Democrats are still at odds, meaning Congress will very likely have to pass a CR before the current stopgap legislation expires Dec. 3.
With three weeks of legislative work left in the 2021 congressional calendar, House and Senate lawmakers will have limited time to negotiate a compromise to finalize a bill before the end of December.
While this process typically begins over the summer, it’s feasible to pass the bill before year’s end, said Arnold Punaro, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff director who is now chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association’s board.
“SASC knows how to deal with both hundreds of amendments and also tough-vote amendments,” Punaro said. “They are experts at managing what is in most years the largest bill on the floor. This would also let them officially conference in early December and get the bill to the president by Christmas, even with all the chaos on the CR and debt ceiling.”
Joe Gould is the Congress and industry reporter at Defense News, covering defense budget and policy matters on Capitol Hill as well as industry news.
13. How the CIA Lets America Down
Excerpts:
But I fear that Mr. McMaster errs irremediably in his tacit premise that the U.S. armed forces, as they now exist, can win wars such as the one recently lost in Afghanistan. I refer to wars against insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists or bandits, indistinguishable from the local population at large, who do not require military equipment too large to be concealed.
The U.S. armed forces perform very well against enemies assembled in conveniently targetable mass formations or enemies that rely on high-contrast airfields, military bases, battle tanks, warships, etc. Conversely, the U.S. cannot fight low-contrast enemies who cannot be spotted and targeted remotely. To do that, human intelligence is needed: CIA or other field officers who speak local languages well enough to pass, can physically blend in, identify insurgents, uncover their gatherings and direct attacks on them.
How the CIA Lets America Down
‘Counterinsurgency warfare’ is a nullity without human intelligence.
WSJ · by Nov. 14, 2021 1:37 pm ET
The lobby of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va.
Photo: saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster has solid credentials as a military thinker and leader at the operational level of war, and he is perfectly correct in writing that political leaders can best reward patriots who fight for the country by ensuring that the outcome is a victory, not a defeat (“Honor Veterans by Having the Will to Win a War,” op-ed, Nov. 11).
But I fear that Mr. McMaster errs irremediably in his tacit premise that the U.S. armed forces, as they now exist, can win wars such as the one recently lost in Afghanistan. I refer to wars against insurgents, guerrillas, terrorists or bandits, indistinguishable from the local population at large, who do not require military equipment too large to be concealed.
The U.S. armed forces perform very well against enemies assembled in conveniently targetable mass formations or enemies that rely on high-contrast airfields, military bases, battle tanks, warships, etc. Conversely, the U.S. cannot fight low-contrast enemies who cannot be spotted and targeted remotely. To do that, human intelligence is needed: CIA or other field officers who speak local languages well enough to pass, can physically blend in, identify insurgents, uncover their gatherings and direct attacks on them.
Such people exist in the movies. In real life, U.S. intelligence officers—unlike their relevant foreign counterparts—simply refuse to learn foreign languages and are not compelled to do so by their superiors. They also insist on remaining very safely “under official cover” within U.S. diplomatic missions or military installations. Most CIA officers don’t even do that, remaining in the agency’s vast stateside facilities. It is not for them to live like a local in Tehran or undercover in Beijing. That is for those other intelligence services that get by on 1% of the CIA’s budget or less.
Without people on the ground, the U.S. cannot defeat insurgents. With Afghanistan, the entire edifice of “counterinsurgency warfare” has now been exposed as a nullity. The CIA failed even to report that the Afghan “army” was nothing but a form of outdoor relief, operated by racketeers in the guise of Afghan officials, right up to the presidential level. U.S. generals had testified that it was imperative to continue spending $3 billion a year in Afghanistan on U.S. trainers alone. They were not contradicted by U.S. intelligence on the ground because there was none.
Edward N. Luttwak
Chevy Chase, Md.
Mr. Luttwak, a consultant to governments and militaries, is author of “Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook,” “Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace” and other books.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by Nov. 14, 2021 1:37 pm ET
14. Opinion | It’s Time to Get Honest About the Biden Doctrine
The last two sentences will be cause for much passionate debate!
Excerpt:
A year after President Biden’s election, we’re beginning to see the contours of his foreign policy: He has something for everyone.
Conclusion:
To some, adopting people-centered policies at the national and global levels might seem so fanciful as to be delusional. But history shows that it is possible to change course, even drastically. Just over a hundred years ago, the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and turned its back on the League of Nations. At the time, no one would have predicted that a quarter century later, President Franklin Roosevelt would be a principal architect of the United Nations and that the United States would embrace a set of global institutions designed to maintain peace, prosperity and security. Gen Z and many millennials are already thinking in planetary terms, putting people ahead of states. It is time for the rest of us to catch up.
Opinion | It’s Time to Get Honest About the Biden Doctrine
Guest Essay
It’s Time to Get Honest About the Biden Doctrine
Nov. 12, 2021
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Ms. Slaughter is C.E.O. of New America, a think tank and civic enterprise.
A year after President Biden’s election, we’re beginning to see the contours of his foreign policy: He has something for everyone. For balance-of-power realists, he has countered China by working much more closely with “the Quad” — India, Australia, Japan and the United States — and creating a new British, Australian, U.S. nexus with the AUKUS submarine deal, no matter how clumsily handled.
For liberal internationalists, he has re-engaged with global institutions: rejoining the World Health Organization and the U.N.-sponsored Paris Agreement to limit climate change and recommitting to NATO. For those advocating “restraint” in America’s military might, he has ended at least the visible “forever wars.”
And for democracy and human rights activists committed to a values-based foreign policy, Mr. Biden will be hosting a Summit for Democracy next month. The administration has also ratcheted up both its rhetoric and its actions on human rights issues, accusing China of both genocide and crimes against humanity for its treatment of its Uyghur population and authorizing sanctions against several officials responsible for the war and humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia.
Yet when everyone gets something, no one gets everything, which is why the core principles of Mr. Biden’s worldview have been hard to pin down.
Not for lack of trying, however. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that Mr. Biden is continuing many of Donald Trump’s “America First” policies in a different guise. Joshua Shifrinson, a Boston University professor, and Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, claim that the Biden Doctrine is “pragmatic realism,” pursuing U.S. interests “in a competitive world” and changing course as necessary to achieve them.
On the values-based side of the foreign policy ledger, a growing number of observers insist that the real Biden Doctrine is to preserve and prove “the supremacy of democracy” worldwide. As Jonathan Tepperman, former editor in chief of Foreign Policy, argues, the “global contest between democracies and autocracies” provides an “organizing principle” to link investing in infrastructure and industrial policy at home, pursuing a foreign policy for the middle class and working to build coalitions of democracies abroad.
Perhaps Mr. Biden is perfectly comfortable with multiple “Biden Doctrines.” He might say that reconciling conflicting impulses and brokering compromises is his trademark as a politician who knows how to get things done.
The problem is that swinging from one framework and set of goals to another without a set of clear principles and priorities risks falling radically short of the progress that the world needs on existential issues. What difference does it make whether the United States “beats China” if our cities are underwater, the Gulf Stream stops warming northern Europe and the United States, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees are on the move? If we destroy the biodiversity on the planet? If millions more people die from serial pandemics? If people the world over do not have the means to flourish and care for one another?
It is time to break free of 20th-century thinking. Two decades of Mr. Biden’s 50-odd years in public life were spent during the Cold War and a third during the 1990s with the United States as a hyperpower. For most of this period great-power competition and making the world safe for democracy were fused. “People” issues were relegated to human rights advocates and development experts. Diplomacy and defense were the provinces of nations and the field of international relations.
The frameworks, paradigms and doctrines of that era, of any kind, are simply insufficient to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Bolder thinking is required, thinking that shifts away from states, whether great powers or lesser powers, democracies or autocracies. It is time to put people first, to see the world first as a planet of eight billion people rather than as an artificially constructed system of 195 countries and to measure all state actions in terms of their impact on people. Instead of competing with China today on one issue and cooperating tomorrow on another, Mr. Biden must prioritize cooperation on global issues and challenge other nations, regardless of whether they are democracies, autocracies or something in between, to join in.
This approach is known as globalism, which has a bad name because of its association with globalization. But globalism is actually closer to localism, to beginning with people, where they live and what they need, regardless of what colored square on the map they happen to be born in. It is a people-centered rather than a state-centered approach to problem-solving on a global scale. It does not pretend that governments don’t exist or don’t matter, but rejects the idea that interstate rivalry matters as an end in itself — the essence of geopolitics.
Opinion Conversation The climate, and the world, are changing. What challenges will the future bring, and how should we respond to them?
Globalism also sees government officials as a set of actors who can contribute to either global problems or global solutions. To succeed as problem solvers, however, they must work side by side with global corporations and networks of cities, civic groups, faith groups, universities, scientists and others. These actors are not just “helpers” or catalysts or constituents. They are players in global politics.
Mr. Biden sometimes seems to be moving in this direction. His speech to the U.N. General Assembly in September laid out a long list of global problems, from health and climate change to inequality and corruption. In my view, his greatest foreign policy achievement to date was to secure a minimum global corporate tax rate of 15 percent, ensuring that corporations worldwide pay at least a portion of their fair share for the public goods — from roads to intellectual property laws — that they rely on and that benefit all citizens. The Biden administration also embraces an “all of society” approach to fighting climate change.
Time and again, however, Mr. Biden’s other goal — of beating China, or more broadly of lining up the democracies to beat the autocracies — gets in the way. This week, thanks to the work of John Kerry, the climate envoy, the United States and China reached an important agreement to cooperate on deeper cuts to both carbon dioxide and methane emissions. It’s not enough, however, and misses a larger opportunity to mobilize the United States, China, the European Union and India as co-leaders on a global climate challenge.
The lure of competition — often on the edge of conflict — with a rival superpower is just too strong, both for Mr. Biden and for the tight-knit band of brothers who form the core of his foreign policy team. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, are veterans of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” a concept designed and advanced in large part by Kurt Campbell, now the White House Asia czar.
From the perspective of 20th-century geopolitics, it makes sense for the Biden administration to approach its relationship with China as one in which the United States has many different goals: economic, military and diplomatic. On some issues, like climate or health, we seek China’s cooperation. On many more, like military primacy, freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, fair trade, intellectual property rights, cybersecurity and human rights, our relationship requires competition and coercion. Hence we have the frequent trade-off debate, in which China hawks have demanded that Mr. Kerry not give an inch to get concessions on Chinese emissions or to encourage other actions that are necessary to stop the globe from warming another degree.
From a people-first perspective, saving the planet for humanity must be a goal that takes precedence over all others. The United States should openly challenge China to a competition to see which country can deliver the cleanest and safest environment for its people while at the same time increasing their well-being. Which country can build and deploy clean technologies the fastest? Which country can help the most developing countries upgrade their infrastructure and wean themselves off carbon?
It should be possible to develop common measures to assess the climate impact of China’s Belt and Road investments versus the Build Back Better World initiative — a project of the Group of 7 wealthiest economies — and the E.U.’s Global Gateway investments and to agree on a set of nongovernmental organizations charged with applying and publicizing these metrics. Global youth movements, from the Sunrise Movement in the United States to the China Youth Climate Action Network and Greta Thunberg’s followers everywhere, would be ideal candidates.
When it comes to the Covid-19 pandemic, if our collective goal really is to vaccinate and treat as many people as possible worldwide, then it’s time to ignore geopolitics. Back in September, the Biden administration’s global vaccine summit brought together over 100 governments and an additional 100 global actors to commit to vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s people by 2022. China has said that it is now working with 19 nations to produce vaccines and cooperating with another 30 countries on vaccine distribution through the Belt and Road Initiative. Indeed, President Xi Jinping of China proposed a Global Vaccine Cooperation Action Initiative at the Group of 20 summit last month, without an apparent response from the United States. Aboard Air Force One, on his way to Rome, Mr. Sullivan told reporters that “the main thrust of the effort on Covid-19 is not actually traveling through the G20.” My translation: The Chinese and their partners have one effort and the United States and its partners have another.
Mr. Biden believes in the inherent value and ultimate superiority of democracy. He sees it as the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and agency, and that can deliver well-being and prosperity for the greatest number of people. So do I. But this conviction, which was as reflexive as breathing for most Americans during the 20th century, must now be put to an empirical test, starting at home.
Mr. Biden gets this, in part. He has made clear that the United States must demonstrate that our democracy can in fact represent and deliver results for our own people. Bolder thinking would insist that the United States face all the ways in which our democracy has fallen short for millions of our people and accept at least the possibility that other forms of government could be better. Beyond U.S. borders, the contest between democracy and autocracy should be an open competition to see which governments can deliver more — materially, intellectually, spiritual and all the other ways we measure human flourishing — for their people. One measure might be which country does the most to achieve the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, as assessed by a global coalition of civic organizations.
Globalism is not mushy government idealism — far from it. It does not deny the existence or importance of government — at the local, state, national and international levels — or of intergovernmental diplomacy. But it insists that the great-power games, as deadly as they have been and could still be, must give way to planetary politics, in which human beings matter more than nationalities. Competition itself is fine and natural, but it needs to be competition to achieve a goal that benefits us all.
Under normal circumstances, administrations set goals and navigate the conflicting interests that are the essence of politics. They muddle through one crisis, one summit, one speech at a time. But we are not living in normal times. As Mr. Biden understands and is striving to achieve on the domestic front, it’s time for bold, transformative change. To vaccinate fewer people globally in the hope of demonstrating American or even democratic superiority is a moral calamity that will hurt us all.
To some, adopting people-centered policies at the national and global levels might seem so fanciful as to be delusional. But history shows that it is possible to change course, even drastically. Just over a hundred years ago, the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and turned its back on the League of Nations. At the time, no one would have predicted that a quarter century later, President Franklin Roosevelt would be a principal architect of the United Nations and that the United States would embrace a set of global institutions designed to maintain peace, prosperity and security. Gen Z and many millennials are already thinking in planetary terms, putting people ahead of states. It is time for the rest of us to catch up.
Anne-Marie Slaughter (@SlaughterAM) is C.E.O. of New America, a think tank and civic enterprise. She served as director of policy planning for the U.S. Department of State, the first woman to hold that position, from 2009 to 2011. Her latest book is “Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics.”
15. Japan ‘more than willing’ to help ensure AUKUS success
Excerpts:
He said both Australia and Japan needed to put their best efforts into maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait not only to support a fellow democracy of almost the same population as Australia but also to safeguard an economy that is a key part of global supply chains, and a vital one when it comes to semiconductors.
On Australia–Japan security ties, Yamagami said he was looking to the ‘near future’ for the conclusion of long-running negotiations on the reciprocal access agreement that would allow much closer cooperation between Australian and Japanese forces.
‘This will constitute a game-changer,’ he said.
‘There will be an institutionalisation of a framework so that we can conduct more frequent joint exercises and drills both in Australia and in Japan.’
Despite the growing focus on the security aspects of the relationship, there is also substantial growth on the economic front.
Yamagami pointed out that for the 40 years from 1968 to 2008, Japan was Australia’s largest trading partner and that hydrogen, infrastructure development and space cooperation are likely to take economic ties to new levels.
Japan ‘more than willing’ to help ensure AUKUS success | The Strategist
Japan’s ambassador in Canberra has indicated his country will provide assistance to Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States to ensure the AUKUS agreement is a successful one.
In an interview with ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings, Shingo Yamagami said while AUKUS’s initial focus would be Australia’s acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, Japan could help in other areas flagged in the agreement such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum technologies.
‘We have been told there are some instances or areas where AUKUS members may need Japanese cooperation and participation and we are more than willing to do our contribution.’
The ambassador said his country’s welcoming of AUKUS at the highest levels has come because it will help to bolster deterrence and therefore stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
‘The key message is deterrence; here Australia and Japan can do a lot more in terms of contributing to peace and stability in our region.’
The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia and Japan as well as the US and India is also important in this respect, and Yamagami said it was heartening to see the Quad had now reached a commitment at the level of an annual leaders’ meeting when not long ago it was restricted to officials.
The countries have made pledges beyond traditional security, including to provide a billion Covid-19 vaccine does by the end of 2022.
He said the Quad was a vehicle for promoting a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’ and that there was a lot of room for cooperation with like-minded countries in Southeast Asia and Europe.
‘Quad is not an exclusive club, Quad is not an Asian NATO.
‘Quad is more than China. We are looking at the bigger picture, we are looking at the regional order—how to maintain the rules-based order, how to maintain peace and prosperity and security for all in the region.’
Deterrence is necessary to uphold that order when it’s challenged by emerging powers like China undertaking unilateral attempts to change the status quo.
It was expected that China would abide by the rules of the World Trade Organization and not engage in a campaign of economic coercion against Australia, for example, as well as accept the rulings of the UN tribunal that in 2016 rejected China’s claims on the South China Sea.
‘So it’s fair to say many observers are so disappointed and we have to ask were our expectations satisfied? If not, how can we achieve it?
‘We would like to welcome them into the rules-based order, but at the same time if rules are not observed then we have to resort to deterrence in order to maintain prosperity and stability. That’s the route we have to take from now on.’
He said both Australia and Japan needed to put their best efforts into maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait not only to support a fellow democracy of almost the same population as Australia but also to safeguard an economy that is a key part of global supply chains, and a vital one when it comes to semiconductors.
On Australia–Japan security ties, Yamagami said he was looking to the ‘near future’ for the conclusion of long-running negotiations on the reciprocal access agreement that would allow much closer cooperation between Australian and Japanese forces.
‘This will constitute a game-changer,’ he said.
‘There will be an institutionalisation of a framework so that we can conduct more frequent joint exercises and drills both in Australia and in Japan.’
Despite the growing focus on the security aspects of the relationship, there is also substantial growth on the economic front.
Yamagami pointed out that for the 40 years from 1968 to 2008, Japan was Australia’s largest trading partner and that hydrogen, infrastructure development and space cooperation are likely to take economic ties to new levels.
16. Does Security Assistance Work? Why It May Not Be the Answer for Fragile States
Not everything "works." There are no silver bullets or cookie cutter solutions to every political, economic, and security situation.
Have we not tested these assumptions in practice?
Excerpts:
The logic behind support for fragile states is compelling, but it is based on largely untested assumptions about the ability of security assistance to reduce security deficits in weak states. While the United States has invested heavily in building the capacity of security forces in conflict-affected states over the past two decades, it has dedicated few resources to evaluating whether these efforts actually work, or whether providing this assistance has had unintended consequences that could undermine US security in the long-term. One unintended consequence that deserves particular attention is the potential for increased state repression. Changes in the quality of governance in a state should always be included as critical measures of security assistance effectiveness because poor governance, and abusive state security forces, in particular, can cripple US efforts to contain threats from violent nonstate actors and stabilize conflict-affected regions over the long term. Heavy-handed state responses to domestic threats may yield temporary security gains but are ultimately detrimental to US interests.
Yes of course this has happened. But what is the cause? Was it security assistance or insufficient policy, strategy, and diplomacy? Most importantly what would happen if we did not try to assist the security sector? But this is a very important point:
Our study provides strong empirical evidence that supplying weapons and military aid to post-conflict governments can increase government repression. But that does not mean that every government that receives foreign military aid or arms transfers uses that capacity to abuse its citizens, or that the United States should never provide security assistance to post-conflict governments. The receipt of lethal aid from foreign governments is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient, mechanism for turning post-conflict countries into repressive states.
We need additional research to determine whether conditioning aid on good governance or greater emphasis on security sector reforms can counteract the general tendency of states to use aid for the purpose of enhanced repressive capacity against civilian populations.
Does Security Assistance Work? Why It May Not Be the Answer for Fragile States - Modern War Institute
Over the past two decades, the United States has increasingly turned to security assistance as a solution to a wide range of problems in weak and conflict-affected states. It has provided security assistance as a strategy for peacebuilding, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and countering violent extremism. Yet, as Mara Karlin, assistant secretary of defense for strategies, plans, and capabilities, observes, “History shows that building militaries in weak states is not the panacea the U.S. national security community imagines it to be.” And new research on post-conflict countries adds to growing evidence that strengthening security forces in fragile states can exacerbate the underlying causes of extremism and violence.
Post-conflict countries face numerous challenges, including political instability and pervasive insecurity. Even after an armed conflict has officially ended, portions of the state’s territory may remain outside the central government’s authority, political violence can persist, and the socioeconomic toll of war can result in high rates of violent crime. At the same time, the security sector may be in disarray, depleted from the war effort, and under a mandate to reform under the terms of a peace agreement.
All of these conditions seem to suggest that security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—could be critical to building enduring peace and security in post-conflict countries. This assumption is particularly attractive given the conviction shared by many policymakers that fragile states are a threat to US national security. Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for example, has warned that “in the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States’ safety and security—a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack—are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory.” The solution, he argues, is greater investment in building the capacity of the security sector in fragile states.
The logic behind support for fragile states is compelling, but it is based on largely untested assumptions about the ability of security assistance to reduce security deficits in weak states. While the United States has invested heavily in building the capacity of security forces in conflict-affected states over the past two decades, it has dedicated few resources to evaluating whether these efforts actually work, or whether providing this assistance has had unintended consequences that could undermine US security in the long-term. One unintended consequence that deserves particular attention is the potential for increased state repression. Changes in the quality of governance in a state should always be included as critical measures of security assistance effectiveness because poor governance, and abusive state security forces, in particular, can cripple US efforts to contain threats from violent nonstate actors and stabilize conflict-affected regions over the long term. Heavy-handed state responses to domestic threats may yield temporary security gains but are ultimately detrimental to US interests.
What Can US Security Assistance Achieve?
Since 9/11, the US government has dramatically increased its efforts to build the capacity of foreign security forces, particularly in weak and conflict-affected states. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, from $5.7 billion to over $24 billion per year. In fiscal year 2020, the United States provided security assistance to at least 133 countries—almost 70 percent of the independent countries in the world. Seventy-one of those countries received at least $1 million each in military aid from the United States. At the same time, there has been a significant shift in authorities for security assistance programs from the State Department to the Pentagon, with a particular emphasis on a set of missions broadly labeled “Building Partner Capacity (BPC)”—“training, mentoring, advising, equipping, exercising, educating and planning with foreign security forces, primarily in fragile and weak states.”
Security Assistance and Human Security
The results of our analyses provide strong evidence that both military aid and arms transfers to post-conflict governments increase state repression.
Why would military aid increase human rights abuses? The answer may lie in political leaders’ incentives in the post-conflict environment. In theory, military assistance provided to a post-conflict country could contribute to greater security for citizens by enabling the government to establish a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within the state. But building the capacity of the security sector does not necessarily increase citizen security in fragile states.
Like all transitional governments, post-conflict regimes must choose the extent to which they will emphasize two opposing strategies for maintaining power. On one end of the spectrum, regimes can choose a good governance strategy—using state resources to provide goods and services to the broader population to facilitate economic growth and legitimize their rule. At the other end of the spectrum, leaders can choose a restricting and repressing strategy—minimizing the number of supporters the regime needs to stay in power, directing state resources to the members of that small coalition, and forcefully repressing potential challengers.
Both strategies have costs in addition to benefits for leaders. Pursuing a good governance strategy reduces the share of state wealth and power leaders can claim for themselves; providing citizens with civil liberties makes it easier for opposition movements to organize and press their demands. On the flip side, repression stifles economic growth, requires substantial investment in a repressive apparatus, and can trigger a backlash, increasing violent domestic dissent. In Kenya, for example, harsh counterterrorism measures targeting Somali immigrants and Kenyans of Somali descent have propelled Muslim youth to join violent extremist groups like al-Shabaab.
Military Aid Can Incentivize Repression and Discourage Good Governance
Foreign military aid can unintentionally tip a post-conflict regime’s cost-benefit calculus away from a good governance strategy in favor of a restricting and repressing strategy by lowering the costs, and increasing the expected benefits, of repression.
rely on taxing domestic production to raise revenue have greater incentives to provide the public goods and services, including citizen security, that enable economic growth. And dependence on taxing citizens forces governments to prioritize the population’s perceptions of the government’s legitimacy. If the government can fund and equip state security forces with external resources, making it less dependent on taxation, citizens have less leverage to demand government accountability. Moreover, unlike development or humanitarian aid, military aid and arms transfers directly increase the capacity of state security forces to defend the regime against domestic threats to their survival—removing another means by which the public could hold the regime accountable.
What Do These Findings Mean for US Policy?
Our study provides strong empirical evidence that supplying weapons and military aid to post-conflict governments can increase government repression. But that does not mean that every government that receives foreign military aid or arms transfers uses that capacity to abuse its citizens, or that the United States should never provide security assistance to post-conflict governments. The receipt of lethal aid from foreign governments is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient, mechanism for turning post-conflict countries into repressive states.
We need additional research to determine whether conditioning aid on good governance or greater emphasis on security sector reforms can counteract the general tendency of states to use aid for the purpose of enhanced repressive capacity against civilian populations.
We also need more research on the effectiveness of US efforts to professionalize partner security forces. Title 10 of the US Code grants the Department of Defense authorization to train and equip foreign security forces and requires that every assistance program include training “on the law of armed conflict, human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law.” Furthermore, the fiscal year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the Pentagon evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of all its security cooperation activities. However, as of 2019, officials acknowledged they had not evaluated the effects of human rights training on the behavior, practices, or policies of recipients.
Traditional arguments for continuing to provide aid to abusive regimes often assume that even a corrupt, inept, and repressive government is better than the alternatives—political instability, state security forces too weak to deter or contain violent nonstate actors, or even violent seizure of the government by an extremist organization. This perspective is shortsighted. There is mounting evidence state repression actually fuels violent extremism. An increase in state violence against civilians can also be an indicator that military equipment and training are being diverted from their intended purpose to suppress domestic political opposition to the regime.
Recent events in Afghanistan provide stark evidence that even massive investments in building the capacity of weak state security forces can be undermined by governance failures. Policymakers should recognize that providing military aid and arms transfers to fragile states could undermine long-term stability and good governance—and ultimately harm US foreign policy objectives.
Patricia Lynne Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
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.
Image credit: Tech. Sgt. Kelly White, US Air Force
17. FDD | The May 2021 Israel-Hamas war was a stress test for normalization
Conclusion:
The war demonstrated that the Palestinian issue is still an emotional one. The Arab world has decidedly not given up on Palestinian nationalism. At the same time, the new diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states weathered the storm.
FDD | The May 2021 Israel-Hamas war was a stress test for normalization
fdd.org · by Jonathan Schanzer Senior Vice President for Research · November 12, 2021
With the signing of the Abraham Accords last year, a rare sense of optimism washed over the Middle East. Many in Israel believed that these agreements signaled that the Arab world had given up on the Palestinian cause. Perhaps that was too optimistic. The decision to normalize relations with Israel meant that these countries would prioritize developing a working relationship with a nearby Middle Eastern country. It did not mean that they would renounce Palestinian nationalism. The Gaza war of May 2021 made that abundantly clear.
During those 11 days of war, the new diplomatic relations between Arab states and Israel faced a significant test. Nevertheless, as one senior Emirati official stated during a July briefing I attended, “they did not fail.”
At the onset of the crisis, all four countries – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan – criticized Israel. Khartoum rebuked Israeli responses to Hamas rocket attacks as “coercive action.” Abu Dhabi called on Israel to “take responsibility for de-escalation” at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where violence had flared. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI noted that Israeli “violations” could “fuel tensions.” Bahrain punched the hardest, calling upon the Israeli government “to stop these rejected provocations against the people of Jerusalem.”
Gulf states that were widely believed to be considering diplomatic ties with Israel also weighed in. Saudi Arabia condemned Israel’s “flagrant violations” during the war and called on Israel to end its “dangerous escalation.” Oman, which had recently hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2018, also rebuked Israel, stating that the sultanate “salutes the resilience of the Palestinian people and their legitimate struggle and calls for achieving peace based on international legitimacy and a two-state solution.”
The visuals of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza certainly elicited a visceral reaction from many Arab observers. Some Gulf Arab contacts of mine from the Gulf expressed anger over some of Israel’s social media messaging during the war. In particular, they found one tweet objectionable because it cited the Quran to justify Israel’s military response against Hamas.
All of this served to underscore that change does not happen rapidly in the Middle East. Official change may have come quickly with the signing of the Abraham Accords. However, attitudes about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict itself were not going to change overnight.
Still, a particularly positive message came out of the United Arab Emirates. Ali al-Nuaimi, the chairman of the defense affairs, interior, and foreign relations committee of the UAE federal national council, published an article in Newsweek after the war. In the piece, he asserted that the “Palestinian people’s rights and hopes have been hijacked by Hamas to serve an Iranian agenda.” He called upon the rest of the region to work together to sideline Iran and its proxies.
Bahrain’s foreign minister also had a positive message, which he shared with the American Jewish Committee in June. “Hopefully, the people of the region can see the benefits, and, in particular, the Israelis and Palestinians can see the benefit of the peace,” he said. For Bahrainis, he said, “the most important benefit is that the values of the Bahrainis are being really recognized. We are sending the message from a small nation, saying that peace is the way forward.” He concluded, “We need the international community to convince Iran that it cannot prosper by trying to subvert and undermine other countries.”
In one troubling sign from Morocco, however, the country’s Islamist prime minister hosted Hamas leader Ismael Haniyeh in Rabat in mid-June. But even there, one could discern some positive signs. When the prime minister sent a letter of support to Hamas, the kingdom would not permit him to do so on official letterhead. Instead, he was forced to use the Islamist Justice and Development Party’s letterhead. A few short months later, Yair Lapid, Israel’s new Israeli foreign minister visited the country, where he signed three separate agreements, and opened full diplomatic ties between the two countries.
For its part, the Sudanese government officially welcomed the end of the war. During the conflict, the president of Sudan’s transitional Sovereignty Council asserted that “normalization has nothing to do with Palestinians’ right to create their own state,” stressing that the Israel-Sudan normalization agreement represented “a reconciliation with the international community which includes Israel.” After the war, he also boldly declared that Sudan had ruled out resuming ties with Iran, noting that his country viewed the Islamic Republic as a “security threat.”
The war demonstrated that the Palestinian issue is still an emotional one. The Arab world has decidedly not given up on Palestinian nationalism. At the same time, the new diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab states weathered the storm.
Jonathan Schanzer is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC. He is the author of the new book Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War (FDD Press). Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer.
fdd.org · by Jonathan Schanzer Senior Vice President for Research · November 12, 2021
18. Pacific Leaders Agree on Vaccines But Not on US Hosting APEC
Excerpts:
In all, APEC members account for nearly 3 billion people and about 60 percent of the world’s GDP.
Many countries in Asia face the challenge of balancing Chinese and U.S. influence on the economic and geopolitical fronts.
China claims vast parts of the South China Sea and other areas and has moved to establish a military presence, building islands in some disputed areas as it asserts its claims.
Both Taiwan and China have applied to join a Pacific Rim trade pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, with Beijing saying it will block Taiwan’s bid on the basis that the democratically governed island refuses to accept that it’s part of Communist-ruled China.
Officials said they made significant progress during some 340 preliminary meetings. APEC members had agreed to reduce or eliminate many tariffs and border holdups on vaccines, masks and other medical products important to fighting the pandemic.
Pacific Leaders Agree on Vaccines But Not on US Hosting APEC
Russia reportedly refused to support the U.S. hosting the gathering in 2023, derailing the matter for now in the consensus-driven grouping.
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Pacific Rim leaders agreed to do all they can to improve access to coronavirus vaccines and reduce carbon emissions, but failed to reach agreement on whether the U.S. should host talks in two years’ time.
U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping were among those taking part in the online meeting of 21 leaders at the end of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum on Saturday, which was being hosted virtually by New Zealand.
The focus was on areas in which the unlikely mix of leaders could find common ground. But the failure of the group to endorse a U.S. bid to host APEC in 2023 pointed to the deep divisions that lie just beneath the surface.
The White House issued a statement after the meeting that did not address the hosting issue. Biden focused instead on deepening economic partnerships in the region with the goal of fair and open trade, and noted that America has shipped 64 million vaccine doses to APEC economies.
A joint statement by the leaders obtained by The Associated Press before its planned release said APEC believes widespread access to vaccines is a priority.
“Because nobody is safe until everyone is safe, we are determined to ensure extensive immunization of our people against COVID-19 as a global public good,” the statement read.
The APEC leaders said they supported efforts to share vaccines equitably and to expand vaccine manufacture and supply, including through the voluntary transfer of vaccine production technology.
The statement also said APEC supports improving trade in COVID-19 vaccines and related medical products, including through streamlined customs procedures.
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The deep rifts between some members of the group were highlighted this week by a warning from Xi against allowing tensions to cause a relapse into a “Cold War” mentality — as well as a behind-the-scenes struggle between the U.S. and Russia.
A Southeast Asian delegate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of not being authorized to publicly discuss the issue, said Russia had refused to support U.S. hosting the gathering unless some of its diplomats are removed from a U.S. blacklist or allowed to enter the U.S. to participate.
The delegate said the U.S. resisted Russia’s demands because issues involving America’s security are considered “non-negotiable.” The delegate added that China had stayed silent on the U.S. offer. U.S. officials also would not comment.
APEC works on a consensus basis so Russia’s objections were enough to derail the U.S. bid, at least for now.
In other areas of agreement, the group emphasized the importance of the World Trade Organization as an arbiter of trade rules. APEC said they wanted to see a pragmatic, multilateral response to COVID-19 at a WTO ministerial meeting later this month.
APEC also said that climate change posed “unprecedented challenges” to the world.
“We acknowledge the need for urgent and concrete action to transition to a climate resilient future global economy and appreciate net zero or carbon neutrality commitments in this regard,” the statement read.
In all, APEC members account for nearly 3 billion people and about 60 percent of the world’s GDP.
Many countries in Asia face the challenge of balancing Chinese and U.S. influence on the economic and geopolitical fronts.
China claims vast parts of the South China Sea and other areas and has moved to establish a military presence, building islands in some disputed areas as it asserts its claims.
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Both Taiwan and China have applied to join a Pacific Rim trade pact, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, with Beijing saying it will block Taiwan’s bid on the basis that the democratically governed island refuses to accept that it’s part of Communist-ruled China.
Officials said they made significant progress during some 340 preliminary meetings. APEC members had agreed to reduce or eliminate many tariffs and border holdups on vaccines, masks and other medical products important to fighting the pandemic.
19. Expand Israel-Arab-US military drills to counter Iran and its proxies
Expand Israel-Arab-US military drills to counter Iran and its proxies
Defense News · By Bradley Bowman and Ryan Brobst · November 12, 2021
Naval forces from Israel, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the United States are conducting a five-day multilateral maritime security operations exercise in the Red Sea. The exercise marks the first time Manama and Abu Dhabi have participated overtly in a combined military exercise with Israel, and it is the latest indication that the actions of the Islamic Republic of Iran are incentivizing unprecedented security cooperation between the United States, Israel and key Arab countries.
This week’s exercise is focused on “visit, board, search and seizure tactics” and includes at-sea training onboard the amphibious transport dock ship Portland, according to a statement by U.S. Naval Forces Central Command. The purpose of the exercise is to help the maritime interdiction teams from different countries operate more effectively together.
The primary catalyst for this growing Israeli-Arab security cooperation is Iran’s continued efforts to sow instability and export terrorism throughout the Middle East. Tehran uses its terror proxies to attack, undermine and control its neighbors — and sends them weapons to threaten Americans, Israelis and Arabs alike. This furthers the Islamic Republic of Iran’s objectives while enabling the regime to escape the consequences.
Iranian arms, for example, fuel the conflict in Yemen, where there is little hope of sustainable peace and improvement in the humanitarian situation so long as the Houthis enjoy a reliable supply of Iranian weapons. Iran also smuggles arms to militias and proxies in Iraq and Syria as well as to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza. Hamas and PIJ used that Iranian support to launch more than 4,300 missiles, rockets and mortars toward Israeli civilians over 11 days during the May 2021 Gaza conflict.
Some of Iran’s weapons shipments go via ground or air, but many of them travel via maritime routes for at least part of the trip. Regardless, Tehran’s goals are the same.
Any effective response must include a more robust and effective campaign to interdict Tehran’s arms smuggling to its terrorist proxies. This week’s exercise can help make that a reality, but the United States, Israel and its Arab partners should not stop there. Clearly, a more capable and unified military coalition is needed.
As a start, the United States and Israel should make clear to Riyadh that they would welcome Saudi participation in a future iteration of the ongoing multilateral Red Sea exercise as a next step in Israel and Saudi Arabia’s tiptoe toward overt security cooperation.
Israel should also invite the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt to participate in the next Noble Dina maritime exercise, and should invite Abu Dhabi to send aircraft and fighter crews to the next Israel-hosted Blue Flag exercise.
For their part, the Emiratis should invite Israel to participate in the next UAE-hosted Desert Flag air exercise and in the next UAE-U.S. Iron Union ground exercise hosted by the United Arab Emirates. Participating militaries could use the Iron Union exercise to practice defending against swarms of drones, such as the kind Iran is proliferating around the region.
In addition, Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi should work with Athens to invite Egypt and Jordan to join the next Greek-hosted Iniochos exercise as full participants. And the Pentagon should encourage both Israel and the United Arab Emirates to send robust contingents to the next Red Flag exercise at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
Perhaps someday the Iranian people will have the government they deserve. In the meantime, steps such as these can help the United States, Israel and their Arab partners improve military readiness, strengthen regional security and make it more difficult for the Islamic Republic of Iran to export terrorism throughout the Middle East.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Ryan Brobst is a research.
20. FDD | Sudanese Military Looks to Play Russia Against the U.S.
FDD | Sudanese Military Looks to Play Russia Against the U.S.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow - John Hardie Research Manager· November 12, 2021
Speaking to Sputnik News last week in his first interview since his October 25 military putsch, Sudan’s top general, Abdul-Fattah al-Burhan, offered a qualified commitment to a previously suspended agreement to establish a Russian naval logistics facility near Port Sudan. Moscow may seek to exploit Khartoum’s post-coup international isolation to boost Russia-Sudan ties, while Burhan likely hopes that prospect will lead the West to soften pressure over the coup.
Despite Bashir’s fall in 2019, Moscow maintained good relations with Sudan’s military, which committed to uphold earlier agreements on mining, energy, and defense. In November 2020, Putin approved a 25-year Russia-Sudan agreement for the naval logistics facility. The facility — permitted to host up to 300 military and civilian personnel and four naval vessels, including nuclear-powered ones, plus air defense and electronic warfare assets — would bolster Russia’s military presence and influence in the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Africa.
Yet the Sudanese military’s chief of staff, Mohamed Othman al-Hussein, cast doubt on the deal just days later, saying it was still “pending review.” In the spring of 2021, following reported pressure from Washington, which had restored ties with Sudan after Bashir’s ouster, Khartoum suspended the agreement, reportedly demanding that Russia remove already-installed equipment.
In June, Hussein announced Khartoum was “renegotiating” the deal, which he said “can be continued if we find benefits and profits for our country.” In September, Russian state media cited a Sudanese military source as saying that Khartoum wants economic assistance in exchange for a five-year agreement extendable up to 25 years.
On October 25, however, Sudan’s military seized power, dissolving the country’s civilian-led transitional government and military-civilian Sovereign Council and arresting key civilian political figures, including Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok. Mass protests ensued. In response, Washington joined European and Gulf allies in condemning the coup and suspended $700 million in aid.
Moscow may seek to capitalize on Khartoum’s international isolation. On October 28, Reuters reported that Sudan’s military had obtained Moscow’s “green light” ahead of the coup, lobbying Russia to block any UN Security Council sanctions. The New York Times cited a U.S. official as saying that Russia encouraged the putsch, hoping to secure commercial advantages and the naval facility, although Russian media note that resolving the latter issue will be impossible until Sudan’s political situation stabilizes.
Following the coup, Moscow watered down a UN Security Council statement so that it “expressed serious concern about the military takeover” instead of condemning it. Russian diplomats blamed Sudan’s political crisis on “foreign interference,” while stressing respect for Sudanese sovereignty — code for looking the other way as the military tightens its grip. On Wednesday, a senior Russian diplomat expressed hope that Khartoum would soon approve the naval agreement.
During last week’s Sputnik interview, Burhan praised Sudan-Russia military ties and Moscow’s stance on the coup. But when asked about the naval agreement, he was more guarded: “The creation of this base is part of an existing agreement. We keep regularly discussing the matter, and there are some faults that have to be remedied. We are committed to international agreements and will continue to implement it to the end.”
Burhan likely hopes to warn the West that continued pressure will lead Khartoum to cozy up to Moscow. Washington should continue defending the Sudanese people’s democratic aspirations while taking care not to push Sudan’s military too far into Moscow’s arms. For example, Washington should be open to civilians other than Hamdok leading a restored civilian government — a sticking point in ongoing talks with Sudan’s military.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where John Hardie is research manager and a Russia research associate. For more analysis from Hussain and John, please subscribe HERE. Follow Hussain on Twitter @hahussain. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Hussain Abdul-Hussain Research Fellow · November 12, 2021
21. Consulting giant McKinsey profits off both sides of U.S.-China cold war
As it should (come under scrutiny)
Consulting giant McKinsey profits off both sides of U.S.-China cold war
McKinsey in recent years has faced accusations of alleged conflicts of interest in its bankruptcy work and other fields.
NBC News · by Dan De Luce and Yasmine Salam · November 13, 2021
WASHINGTON — Global consulting giant McKinsey & Co.’s work with both the Pentagon and powerful Chinese state-owned enterprises poses a potential risk to national security that federal agencies can no longer ignore, lawmakers and critics say.
McKinsey’s consulting contracts with the federal government give it an insider’s view of U.S. military planning, intelligence and high-tech weapons programs. But the firm also advises Chinese state-run enterprises that have supported Beijing’s naval buildup in the Pacific and played a key role in China’s efforts to extend its influence around the world, according to an NBC News investigation.
There is no evidence or allegation that McKinsey has damaged U.S. national security, and U.S. authorities have not charged the firm with violating federal contracting laws related to its work with Chinese clients.
But with tensions high between China and the U.S., McKinsey’s business operations in both countries are coming under growing scrutiny. Critics say the firm, the world’s largest consulting company, needs to divulge more details about its work in China, particularly amid concerns in Washington about Beijing’s industrial espionage, arms buildup and intellectual property theft.
Apart from its consulting in China, McKinsey has come under sharp criticism from lawmakers and faced legal challenges over alleged conflicts of interest in other fields.
The company this year agreed to pay $573 million to settle allegations from 49 states that its work for opioid manufacturers helped "turbocharge" sales of the drugs, contributing to a deadly addiction epidemic. At the same time the firm was working for the pharmaceutical companies, McKinsey was advising the Food and Drug Administration on its prescription drug policy, according to court documents.
Asked about its work in China and the United States, McKinsey told NBC News that it abides by U.S. laws on federal contracting and that it has extensive internal rules to prevent conflicts of interest and to protect clients’ information.
“We follow strict protocols, including staffing restrictions and internal firewalls, to avoid conflicts of interest and to protect client confidential information in all of our work. When serving the public sector, we go further: in addition to managing potential staffing conflicts, we are subject to our Government clients’ organizational conflict of interest requirements and comply with these obligations accordingly,” a company spokesperson, Neil Grace, said in an email.
The Pentagon and other federal government agencies rely on McKinsey to carry out often sensitive work touching on national security strategy, cybersecurity and cutting-edge technology, paying the firm hundreds of millions of dollars for its advice and data-crunching.
Since 2008, McKinsey has undertaken over $851 million worth of consultant work for the federal government, with the Defense Department as the top client, generating nearly a third of the firm’s government revenue.
A F-35 fighter plane flies over the White House in Washington in 2019.Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images file
“I can't see how you could work in the areas they're working in for the Defense Department and at the same time have the extensive connections in China, and not be compromised,” said Marianne Jennings, a professor of legal and ethical studies in business at Arizona State University. “If you just step back objectively, there's a great deal of risk here for the United States.”
In four federal contracts obtained by NBC News, including with the Defense Department and the Navy, McKinsey made no mention of its clients in China or any possible conflict of interest. Under federal law, contractors must disclose any possible conflicts of interest.
But McKinsey does not view its consulting for Chinese enterprises as a conflict, and experts say the federal government often doesn’t focus on a contractor’s foreign clients. Instead, federal officials usually look at whether a company has foreign ownership or control, and vet contractors’ employees for any security concerns. Still, the burden is on the contractor to divulge even the appearance of a potential conflict.
Lawmakers from both parties and critics of McKinsey worry its work with Chinese state-owned companies could allow Beijing access to valuable information associated with the firm’s extensive consulting with U.S. government agencies, possibly giving China an upper hand in its competition with the U.S. Even if no secret material was obtained by China, McKinsey could inadvertently provide Beijing with valuable insights into senior leadership and strategic thinking in the U.S. government, critics say.
In the past 13 years, McKinsey has worked on more than 60 contracts for different branches of the armed services and agencies within the Defense Department and there has been an uptick in the federal agency’s use of its services in the last five years, according to the federal government website USA spending.gov.
Some of McKinsey’s work in Washington grants employees access to secret information, requiring a security clearance. A 2015 contract between the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency and McKinsey obtained by NBC News gave McKinsey’s team access to classified information.
The CIA hired McKinsey to help with a major reorganization of the agency during the Obama administration. After the 9/11 attacks, McKinsey advised the FBI on building its intelligence-gathering capability.
Information about the potential scope of McKinsey’s work with the intelligence community is not publicly available, as details about the intelligence budget remain classified. But a former senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News that McKinsey continues to do consulting work for the intelligence agencies.
The Pentagon’s Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) vets contractors before they are given access to classified information. The agency “takes seriously our responsibility to ensure only trusted personnel — both federal and contract — have access to classified information,” said spokesperson Christopher Bentley.
For contractors, the agency ensures that companies “are not adversely influenced or controlled by foreign interests,” Bentley said.
But the agency declined to comment about McKinsey’s work for the federal government. McKinsey was awarded a contract this year worth $1.2 million to advise the DCSA.
In China, vast state-owned or controlled enterprises have sought out McKinsey for “strategic” advice. Some of McKinsey’s clients were blacklisted in 2019 and 2020 by the U.S. government as actively undermining U.S. national security interests. (All blacklisting occurred after McKinsey’s contracts were already in effect.)
U.S. authorities say one of the blacklisted firms, the China Communications Construction Company (CCCC), and its subsidiaries built a network of artificial islands in the South China Sea, a project that the U.S. and its allies see as an attempt to intimidate and coerce neighboring countries that have competing claims in the waterway. CCCC’s dredging fleet constructed more than 3,000 acres worth of islands that have been turned into a string of military bases, with naval ports, runways, hangars, missile sites and radar, experts say. The Defense Department last year placed the firm on a list of companies deemed to have ties to the Chinese military.
The Commerce Department also placed CCCC on a separate blacklist and warned that transactions with Chinese firms on the list carry a “red flag,” recommending U.S. companies “proceed with caution with respect to such transactions.”
China Communications Construction Company put out a press release in 2015 promoting McKinsey’s role at a conference outlining the firm’s latest five-year plan.
McKinsey “made recommendations regarding the company's overall strategic objectives, business portfolio strategy, organizational control strategy, strategy implementation path, core competency development, and other aspects,” it said.
McKinsey has acknowledged commercial links to China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), a state-owned conglomerate that has played a key role in China’s naval expansion and Beijing’s bid to extend its global reach. COSCO has not been blacklisted by the U.S. government.
A Cosco Shipping Lines Co. container ship in the Yangshan Deepwater Port in Shanghai, China, in 2019.Qilai Shen / Bloomberg via Getty Images file
In a 2020 federal court filing related to McKinsey’s advisory role in a bankruptcy case, the firm cited its connection to COSCO. That same year, the shipping company said in a press release that it had received advice from McKinsey.
As part of China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” COSCO has been pouring Chinese government money into ports around the world and other logistics hubs. COSCO in recent years has bought a majority stake in the Greek port of Piraeus, invested in a new container terminal in the United Arab Emirates, and purchased a major stake in the Peruvian port of Chancay.
COSCO is among a core of state-owned enterprises that are part of the country’s defense industrial base and are given special status by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, according to regional analysts. The company has provided logistical support to the Chinese navy’s escort operations in the Gulf of Aden and experts say it serves as the maritime logistical arm for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
Meanwhile, McKinsey advised the U.S. Navy on plans to modernize its network of naval shipyards.
McKinsey, which set up business in China in the 1990s, says on its website it employs more than 1,000 people at six offices across the country and has carried out more than 1,500 “engagements” with Chinese clients in the past five years.
According to McKinsey, the firm’s work in China is carried out through a separate legal entity and most of its consulting does not involve state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
“The vast majority of that work is for the private sector, including with U.S. and other multinational companies. Our limited work with SOEs focuses on the same core commercial and operational topics on which we serve other major corporations,” Grace, the company spokesperson, said.
The company declined to discuss its work with specific Chinese clients, including those that appear on U.S. government blacklists.
Grace said McKinsey follows an extensive internal policy to evaluate potential clients and does not serve political parties anywhere in the world or defense, intelligence, justice or policing institutions in countries with low rankings on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index.
But experts say major state-owned companies in China are virtual arms of the ruling Communist Party and have senior party officials embedded in the enterprise’s leadership.
Asked about its relationship with Chinese enterprises with ties to the country’s military, Grace said, “Consistent with our client service policy, we do not serve any clients in China on topics connected to defense, intelligence, justice or police issues.”
According to the company’s policy manual, McKinsey employees “are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, whether real or perceived, and to consult with relevant firm leaders and governance bodies on how best to handle the situation.”
McKinsey also maintains strict standards on protecting data and ensuring “information security,” Grace said.
“All client information, whether from the U.S. government or any other client, is subject to broad safety and security procedures that we regularly assess and test to ensure that the firm is deploying rigorous security measures," he said. "We follow all U.S. government requirements for handling its sensitive data — including where appropriate doing work on separate IT devices or only on client systems — and employ the requisite hardware and other security protocols to meet our obligations."
Founded in 1926, McKinsey has built up a vast consulting business with 36,000 employees and dozens of offices around the globe, advising governments and top corporations. Known for its connections in the upper echelons of corporate power and for shaping how American companies operate, McKinsey has a loyal alumni network, including numerous CEOs and top government officials.
The firm is able to operate behind a wall of “confidentiality” partly because the management consulting industry is virtually unregulated, both in the U.S. and around the world, according to experts.
The tight-lipped firm says the principle of confidentiality allows it to protect the interests of its clients. But critics say McKinsey’s insistence on secrecy allows it to operate without accountability, and to provide advice to clients whose interests might be diametrically opposed.
“I don't think they have much compunction about working for anyone at all,” McDonald said.
Under federal contracting law, companies are required to disclose any conflict of interest, or appearance of a conflict, when bidding on a proposal, and to present a plan to address the conflict. It remains unclear if McKinsey has disclosed any potential conflicts of interest due to its work with Chinese firms, including in its contracts for the Defense Department.
In the four federal contracts obtained by NBC News between McKinsey and the Defense Department, the Navy and Customs and Border Protection, the consulting firm did not cite its clients in China or any apparent conflicts of interest.
For a 2018 contract for the Naval Information War Center Atlantic, which provides satellite communications and other information technology support for naval forces, McKinsey “did not make a disclosure of possible appearances of conflict of interest,” a Navy spokesperson said.
The U.S. Navy “was unaware of McKinsey’s work with any Chinese state-owned enterprises,” the spokesperson added.
For the 2015 contract between McKinsey and the Pentagon’s Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which runs the military’s computer network, the agency “was not aware of any conflict of interest or a possible appearance of a conflict of interest” concerning the contract, said Mary Constantino, spokesperson for DISA.
Asked about hiring McKinsey in the future, Constantino said the agency “cannot speculate on prospective work and has no pending awards.”
A spokesperson for the Defense Department, Jessica Maxwell, said that “each contract is examined individually” and the department “won’t speculate on future contracts or bids for contracts. “
Sen. Marco Rubio, R.-Fla., has demanded that the firm offer more information about its work in China and explain how it prevents possible conflicts between its consulting business for the U.S. government and for Chinese clients.
In a November 2020 letter to McKinsey, Rubio complained that the firm had failed to directly respond to many of his questions in earlier correspondence. The senator wrote he was concerned the firm “either wittingly or unwittingly — is aiding the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to supplant the United States.”
The senator asked McKinsey if it sought to avoid working with Chinese clients in areas of critical national security interest to the U.S., including telecommunications, the military and health care.
The firm did not directly answer the question but said it could not disclose information on specific clients or engagements because of its “contractual and professional obligations to maintain confidentiality,” according to Rubio’s letter.
Rubio also asked McKinsey what kind of safeguards the firm had in place to ensure its work for U.S. government entities did not inform its work with Chinese companies. The firm provided no answer, Rubio wrote.
In addition to the exchange of letters, Rubio’s senior staff and top policy advisers met with members of McKinsey’s global leadership team via Zoom in March, according to a congressional aide present.
“Most of the meeting consisted of generalities, platitudes and broad denials of wrongdoing or conflicts of interest. Every time a member of Sen. Rubio’s staff asked specific questions, McKinsey’s leadership repeated that they could not discuss their clients,” the congressional aide said.
Rubio told NBC News the federal government should stop hiring McKinsey for consulting work.
“There is no reason the U.S. Government should continue using McKinsey given the company’s inability to provide clear, direct answers about its work in China,” Rubio said in an email.
The McKinsey spokesperson confirmed the company’s senior leadership in the U.S. and Asia met via Zoom with Rubio’s staff this year.
“We have discussed our approach to client selection with the senator's office at length, including the diligence efforts we undertake to ensure that each client engagement complies with all necessary guidelines, regardless of where that service takes place,” Grace said.
“We also discussed with the senator's office our extensive internal safeguards to mitigate potential conflicts of interest and wall off sensitive information. We remain available to continue those discussions,” he added.
Rubio has proposed legislation that would require federal contractors to reveal any commercial ties with the Chinese government, military or state-controlled entities. Other lawmakers have proposed bills to prevent U.S. contractors from buying key technological equipment or solar panels from Chinese firms.
Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said it was important to know whether taxpayers' dollars are “fueling China’s military modernization.“
“If a federal contractor has ties to the [Chinese Communist Party] and its civ-mil fusion apparatus, the government should have tools to punish that behavior and rethink whether that company has the privilege of doing business with the U.S. government,” Rogers said.
The Chinese government and military’s increasingly tight control over the private sector is forcing the U.S. to “rethink our trade and commercial relationship,” including how federal contracts are vetted, said Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
McCaul said McKinsey’s work deserved “greater scrutiny” and the federal government needed to demand more transparency.
“Transparency is a core tenet of our democratic system. If the U.S. government is spending taxpayer dollars, it makes sense to understand how federal contractors are doing business with an adversary’s military,” McCaul said.
McKinsey is not the only consulting company doing business with the federal government and Chinese state-owned companies, and the emerging cold war between Beijing and Washington has created a dilemma for these firms, experts say.
U.S. defense contractors that work with the Pentagon are subject to strict laws and rules about what weapons and technology they can provide to foreign governments. But management consulting firms fall into a gray area, as they are selling advice, according to a former senior Pentagon official.
“If U.S. consultants gain knowledge about how the U.S. government works and transfer that knowledge to the Chinese government, that would be a red flag,” said the former official.
Ensuring nothing spills over to a foreign client poses a difficult challenge, the official said. “Call me a skeptic, there might be ways to firewall it, but I just don’t know if those are sufficient to protect national security.”
China also worries U.S. firms could hand over sensitive information to its adversaries in Washington, and has imposed increasingly tough restrictions on American companies operating in the country, experts say. U.S. companies operating in China are under pressure to store data locally, making them increasingly vulnerable to Beijing scooping up proprietary data.
In other work carried by McKinsey, the firm has faced accusations of conflicts of interest, and in some cases has apologized or agreed to costly settlements out of court.
Earlier this year, McKinsey agreed to pay nearly $600 million to settle investigations into its role in helping boost opioid sales. Lawsuits turned up documents showing how McKinsey pushed to ramp up sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin painkiller as a deadly opioid crisis gripped the country. The firm also sought to help Purdue fend off potential regulations by the FDA, even as it did consulting work for the FDA, according to court documents.
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform announced this month that it was launching an investigation into McKinsey’s consulting work for the opioid manufacturers, seeking documents regarding “the company’s conflict of interest, and its apparent failure to monitor and prevent harmful practices.”
McKinsey has come under federal investigation and been sued over allegedly flouting bankruptcy laws that require advisers to be disinterested advocates for clients and to disclose all relationships that might give rise to a conflict of interest.
In 2019, McKinsey paid $15 million to settle an inquiry by a unit of the Justice Department into whether it violated disclosure rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest in corporate bankruptcies. The firm, however, did not admit to any wrongdoing.
Last year, McKinsey agreed to forfeit millions of dollars in fees for advising Westmoreland Coal Co. in its bankruptcy, as part of a deal with federal officials probing Westmoreland’s compliance with bankruptcy laws.
In South Africa, the consulting giant became embroiled in a corruption scandal after authorities began a fraud investigation into a $120 million contract McKinsey had worked on with a public utility company, Eskom. The company had ties to the billionaire Gupta family, close friends of former President Jacob Zuma who were found to have pocketed public funds by South Africa’s anti-corruption watchdog in 2016.
Eskom workers cut illegal connections during a energy management and losses campaign in Gauteng, South Africa, on Sept. 29, 2020.Alet Pretoriu / Gallo Images via Getty Images file
McKinsey issued an apology in 2017 over the Gupta case, saying it was “embarrassed” by the individuals whose work “fell short of our standards.”
“There appears to be a pattern of behavior from McKinsey,” said Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. “Whether it be the health of Americans or the national security of our country, McKinsey has repeatedly taken actions that create serious concerns about conflicts of interest.”
McDonald, author of "The Firm," said the company’s bankruptcy work, its role in the opioid crisis and other examples show it has failed to regulate itself.
“They say the nature of the business is such that we maintain strict confidentiality. OK, well then in that case, you're the only ones that can regulate this,” McDonald said. “And all the recent evidence in the last few decades suggests that they are either incapable, inept or not inclined to do so.”
Dan De Luce
Dan De Luce is a reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Yasmine Salam
Yasmine Salam is a researcher in the NBC News Investigative Unit.
Katrina Lau and Gretchen Morgenson contributed.
NBC News · by Dan De Luce and Yasmine Salam · November 13, 2021
22. Opinion | Is America on the brink of a civil war?
For all who think believe that “patriots” might have to resort to violence to save the country (and that is 30% of Republicans, 17% of Independents, and 11% of Democrats according to the article below by leading scholar Brian Michael Jenkins) ) please lay out the strategy and campaign plan that will be executed that will same our country? What are the ends, ways, and means and the campaign objectives, lines of effort, and concept of the operation that will do that? Please walk through how our country will be a better place after the economy is destroyed and the revisionist and rogue powers and violent extremist organizations exploit our internal violence?
Opinion | Is America on the brink of a civil war?
NBC News · by Brian Michael Jenkins, senior adviser to the president of RAND · November 14, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbates political and geographical differences, leading to social warfare in schools and airports and hospitals over mask and vaccination mandates.
At least one noted American historian is comparing today’s pugnacious politics with that of the republic in the years leading up to the Civil War. And indeed, Americans around the country seem to endorse bellicose behavior. According to a survey published on Nov. 1, 18 percent of all Americans (30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of Independents and 11 percent of Democrats) believe that “patriots” might have to resort to violence to save the country. Another poll earlier in the year found that 46 percent of people thought the country was somewhat or very likely to have another civil war.
Are they right? Does America’s increasingly uncivil behavior mean we are heading toward civil war?
This has prompted renewed talk of secession. But that does not mean that civil war is on the horizon. For one thing, talk of secession is still just talk. The slouching of both political parties to their right and left extremes increases numbers and noise on the far edges. But most people have little time for political posturing and zealots’ fantasies.
The bellicose rhetoric and belligerent behavior displayed by and toward some of our elected officials also do not mean a civil war — a military contest between the states — is inevitable or even probable. A more likely scenario is a turbulent era of civil disturbances, armed confrontations, standoffs, threats, assassination attempts and other acts of political violence — in other words, one that is a lot like the last 200 years of American history.
Indeed, much of what we are seeing now has ample precedents. Those precedents don’t make our current circumstances any less ugly, but they do mean that we have been through similar outbreaks before and survived. However, just as civil war is not inevitable, there is no guarantee that the republic will not be fatally weakened or that the union will last — though the tensions we see nationwide seem more likely to produce localized brutishness rather than centralized armed conflict.
As the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville noted after touring the United States nearly two centuries ago — when democracy was still an uncommon form of government — what gave the country strength was that Americans had a strong sense of community. Today, the catalog of trends currently eroding that sense of community is depressingly long.
The increased polarization of our political system tops the list. It is a long-term trend, beginning in the 1970s, according to research at the RAND Corporation, that now manifests itself in the demonization of political opponents as primal enemies — tyrants, traitors, terrorists.
Polarization has also contributed to the loss of comity in political discourse, which has turned into crude insults, ad hominem attacks and the notion that profanity displays authenticity. Contemporary political rhetoric is seemingly intended to inflame passions, at times bordering on criminal incitement. Some news channels and the internet (along with foreign influence operations) stoke the differences, and facts are often irrelevant.
This uncivic culture makes vicious attacks and harassment of public officials common, discouraging ordinary people from entering public service while attracting zealots. And some political campaigns have gone to the dark side, with opaque financing and front organizations to evade campaign rules and tinker with the voting process. The mere advertisement that they are doing so calls into question the legitimacy of elections. It is behavior suitable to the Kremlin, not democracy.
Irreconcilable differences on social issues reinforce the political divide. Differences over racial injustice, abortion, gun control, immigration and LGBTQ rights increasingly determine whom one is willing to associate with, reinforcing self-segregation along political lines as we group with like-minded friends and partners.
Meanwhile, self-proclaimed citizen militias — driven mainly by far-right conspiracy theories — have surged since 2008, and especially in the past five years. The militia movement, estimated at around 100,000 members, differs from but overlaps with white supremacist, anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-left and misogynist groups in a constellation held together by their shared hatred of the federal government.
Americans don’t even have a sense of shared history. Is America’s story one of a moral crusade dedicated to defending the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of which we should be proud? Or is it a story of territorial expansion, slaughter, slavery and imperialism of which we should be ashamed?
Just as civil war is not inevitable, there is no guarantee that the republic will not be fatally weakened or that the union will last.
Yet for all these breaches, the United States in 1860 was more neatly divided than it is today. For all the implied homogeneity in “red” states and “blue” states, they are more complex mosaics — in terms of race, ethnicity and religion — than north versus south ever was. That bodes against a binary breakdown.
Heading into the Civil War, political loyalties were also more local. People looked to their state capital rather than to Washington. The United States had existed for only 73 years (as if only since 1948, from our perspective). The 11 original states to secede had spent an average of less than 50 years in the union. The economy was far less integrated.
And under President Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Army had a mere 10 regiments of infantry. Today’s U.S. military is a global institution, and state National Guard units are fully integrated into the U.S. armed forces. The Pentagon avoids politicization, and it would resist a civil war.
None of this precludes the real possibility of increased conflict. America has a rich history of violence. It is sobering to review the long list of armed rebellions, riots, attacks by and against striking workers and massacres of Indigenous people, immigrants and minorities that mark our history before and since the Civil War. But the historical record seems to indicate that the country has a high tolerance for violence without breaking apart.
Secession without war is also possible. If a handful of southern states voted to secede, would the north go to battle to preserve the union? If Californians wanted out, would South Carolina conservatives fight to keep them in? Or would the attitude in both cases be good riddance? Most likely, though, we won’t find out.
Of course, in the current environment, inflammatory events or overreactions could suddenly plunge the country into widespread disorder. A civil war seems unlikely — but the threat of civil wars cannot be dismissed.
NBC News · by Brian Michael Jenkins, senior adviser to the president of RAND · November 14, 2021
23. Opinion | A Coke and a genocide (China and the Uyghurs)
Excerpts:
At a congressional hearing in July, Coca-Cola executive Paul Lalli said the sponsors have no say in where the Games take place. “We support and follow the athletes wherever they compete,” Lalli said.
That may be true. Also true: There will be no “justice and equality” for the Uyghur women being kicked, raped and sterilized as the ice-dancing competition unfolds; no “respect and inclusion” for Uyghur infants being seized from their parents as skiers race down the slalom course.
“The future of a people may depend on swift, coordinated action by global actors,” the report says.
Or we all can pretend it’s not happening, grab a Coke and enjoy the Games.
Opinion | A Coke and a genocide
The Washington Post · by Fred HiattEditorial page editor Today at 9:00 a.m. EST · November 14, 2021
China’s Communist leaders, innovative in so many ways, appear to be perfecting a 21st-century approach to genocide.
With the Beijing Olympics less than three months away, will Coca-Cola and other sponsors of the Games celebrate with China while this is taking place? While, a few hours’ flight due west of the stadiums and ice rinks, an entire people is being slowly, deliberately erased?
We have learned to think of genocide as industrial-scale slaughter: gas chambers, killing fields, mass graves. A report published last week by the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, “To Make Us Slowly Disappear,” suggests that China may have found a different way, more insidious if no less monstrous.
The campaign against the Uyghur population of western China, a Muslim minority of about 12 million people inside a nation of more than 1 billion, began with conventional discrimination, escalated to intense surveillance and mass detentions, and now includes forcible sterilization and insertion of IUDs; separation of men and women through incarceration, forced migration and coerced marriages of Uyghur women to men from the ethnic Han majority; and mass kidnapping of Uyghur children, taken from their parents and placed in state “boarding schools.”
The campaign is not without terrible violence, torture and killing, as survivor accounts make clear. But, the report says, it hinges on something else: “coercive interventions of the Chinese government to prevent sizable numbers of Uyghurs from coming into being.”
This suggests that the deliberate goal is “to biologically destroy the group, in whole or in substantial part.”
One of the missions of the Holocaust Museum is “to do for victims of genocide today what was not done for the Jews of Europe.” The seriousness with which it accepts this responsibility is reflected in the meticulous caution of the well-documented report: Although both the Trump and Biden administrations have declared that China is committing genocide against the Uyghurs, the museum says it is “gravely concerned that the Chinese government may be committing genocide.”
Uncertainty is what China wants; it has constructed a formidable information blockade. Uyghur scholars were among the first targets of the mass detention campaign. Foreign scholars, correspondents and think-tank experts are kept out of the Xinjiang region where the crimes are being committed — and increasingly out of China altogether. And China attempts to silence even Uyghurs living abroad by locking up and abusing the relatives back home of anyone who dares speak out.
No one has been more victimized by this barbarity than the reporters of Radio Free Asia, who have done more than anyone in the past five years to reveal the truth.
“The Chinese government are very professional on how to hide their crimes,” one of those reporters, Gulchehra Hoja, said at a forum organized by the museum last week. Hoja, about whom I’ve written before, knows this all too well: Trying to silence her, the Chinese government locked up, as usual without charge or trial, her brother, her mother, her cousins, their spouses — nearly two dozen relatives in all.
As a result, we have indications, alarming snippets, satellite evidence — but far from the whole story.
The report says between 1 million and 3 million people are detained; Hoja says she believes the higher number, but it can’t be proven.
The report refers to more than 880,000 Uyghur children being put in boarding facilities — often after their parents are illegally detained — but that was only through 2019.
Researchers uncover dramatic drops in Uyghur birth rates — in 2019, “at least 186,400 fewer children were born in Xinjiang compared to what would have been expected if birth rates had remained static at the pre-2017 baseline,” the report says — but then China hides more data, so reports are dated, fragmentary and, almost certainly, far less terrible than the truth.
What is to be done? The report calls on China, which proclaims its innocence, to allow a U.N.-authorized commission access to Xinjiang to investigate. Certainly it should be at the top of President Biden’s agenda when he holds a tele-summit with President Xi Jinping on Monday.
Hoja puts it more simply: “Please, I ask international community, break silence,” she said. “This is not a Uyghur tragedy. This is a human tragedy.”
Will Coca-Cola and other Olympic sponsors really just pretend none of it is happening? “We stand with those seeking justice and equality,” chairman and CEO James Quincey declared last year.
On its website, the company boasts of being the longest continuous sponsor of the International Olympic Committee because they share the “same core values of friendship, respect, inclusion, integrity and excellence.”
At a congressional hearing in July, Coca-Cola executive Paul Lalli said the sponsors have no say in where the Games take place. “We support and follow the athletes wherever they compete,” Lalli said.
That may be true. Also true: There will be no “justice and equality” for the Uyghur women being kicked, raped and sterilized as the ice-dancing competition unfolds; no “respect and inclusion” for Uyghur infants being seized from their parents as skiers race down the slalom course.
“The future of a people may depend on swift, coordinated action by global actors,” the report says.
Or we all can pretend it’s not happening, grab a Coke and enjoy the Games.
The Washington Post · by Fred HiattEditorial page editor Today at 9:00 a.m. EST · November 14, 2021
24. All Over the Map: The Chinese Communist Party’s Subnational Interests in the United States
November 15, 2021 | Monograph
All Over the Map
The Chinese Communist Party’s Subnational Interests in the United States
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/11/15/all-over-the-map/
Introduction
Across the political spectrum, Americans are moving toward a consensus that China’s authoritarian regime poses the foremost threat to U.S. national security. Under the firm control of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the People’s Republic of China presents a challenge that goes well beyond the military, or even the technological, domain. Beijing seeks to shape global architectures, and through them to assert global control. Beijing’s ambitions are evident in its efforts to set global technical standards and control emerging infrastructure, to convert foreign dependence on Chinese resources and manufacturing capabilities into market-making power, and to influence international opinion through disinformation and propaganda.
These efforts target the public and private sectors. And in its efforts to influence governments, including the U.S. government, Beijing does not limit itself to the national level. Beijing also runs systematic campaigns to influence subnational — that is, state and local — governments.
Beijing understands that subnational political leaders respond to different incentives than do federal officials and authorities — and that those incentives may create favorable conditions for China’s influence campaigns. States and localities often prioritize the creation of jobs and economic growth, with less concern for national security risks. Beijing appeals to such economic interests to shift attitudes, open doors for China and Chinese entities, and foster relationships that can offset growing resistance in Washington to Beijing’s global agenda. Success on this score brings strategic and security returns for the CCP. It also obscures the extent to which short-term boons from economic cooperation may lead to long-term losses for the United States by hollowing out key industrial sectors and gradually offshoring jobs and economic growth.
In June 2019, the Minzhi International Research Institute, a Chinese think tank,1 and Tsinghua University’s Center of Globalization Studies published a survey of U.S. governors’ attitudes toward China. The report clearly articulates the logic of cultivating state and local officials as a counterweight to Washington’s increasing concern about China’s national security threat:
“In Washington, voices advocating a tough stance on China seem to have become mainstream and have growing momentum. [However,] in American politics, in addition to the White House and Congress, there is another type of decisive actor: the governors. Because of the federal system in the United States, governors can ignore the White House’s orders… And each federal member enjoys a certain degree of diplomatic independence… Therefore, as Washington’s overall attitude towards China toughens, the attitudes of the states are crucial.”2
Based on public statements, the Minzhi-Tsinghua survey finds that “among the 50 governors, 17 are friendly to China, 14 have ambiguous attitudes toward China, six are tough on China, and 14 have made no clear or public statement on China.” The report argues that “hardline” stances among U.S. governors are overwhelmingly human rights-related “and rarely involve economic and trade issues.”3
2019 Minzhi-Tsinghua Ranking of Governor Friendliness to China, by State
U.S. GOVERNORS CONSIDERED “FRIENDLY” TO CHINA IN THE MINZHI-TSINGHUA REPORT4
STATE
GOVERNOR
AlabamaKay IveyArizonaDoug DuceyColoradoJared PolisDelawareJohn CarneyIdahoBrad LittleIndianaEric HolcombMaineJanet MillsMassachusettsCharlie BakerMontanaSteve BullockNew HampshireChris SununuNorth CarolinaRoy CooperNorth DakotaDoug BurgumOregonKate BrownTennesseeBill LeeUtahGary HerbertVermontPhil ScottWest VirginiaJim Justice
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.
