Happy Lunar New Year/Seollal - 많이 받으세요
Quotes of the Day:
“For there is no other way to guard oneself from flattery unless men understand that they do not offend you in telling you the truth.”
- Machiavelli
"Intelligence is not to make no mistakes, but quickly to see how to make them good."
- Bertolt Brecht
“When books are run out of school classrooms and libraries, I’m never much disturbed. Not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher… which I used to be.
What I tell kids is, don’t get mad, get even.
Don’t spend time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don’t walk, to the nearest non-school library or the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned.
Read whatever they are trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that’s exactly what you need to know.”
-Stephen King
1. Bomb shelters, guerrilla war: Building Ukraine's resistance
2. Gross Misinformation: we have no idea what we're doing or what we did
3. China eyes 'armed unification' with Taiwan by 2027: key academic
4. How Russia conducts false flag operations
5. Over 100 ex-Afghan forces, officials killed since US pullout: UN
6. Russia's one-sided reporting and blatant disinformation
7. How Irish Fishermen Took on the Russian Fleet and Won
8. Much Ado About Competition: The Logic and Utility of Competitive Strategy
9. Navy prepares F-35C recovery op in South China Sea as Japan issues salvage notice
10. If Red Hill Crisis Drags On, Hawaii May Not Renew Military Base Leases
11. Powell’s Fed has Asia bracing for a crash
12. US military drills with Pacific allies send a message to China, expert says
13. The United States must put the Navy first
14. The Problem with Permitting Putin’s “Sphere of Influence”
15. The Betrayal (Afghanistan) by George Packer
16. Both the Right and Left Have Illiberal Factions. Which Is More Dangerous?
17. Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan vs. Spotify
18. Biden Administration Backs Levant Energy Deal That Violates Bipartisan Caesar Sanctions
19. What the Ukraine Crisis Looks Like from Beijing
20. 'No war pls' — Gen Z is spamming Putin's Instagram asking him not to start World War III
21. FBI chief: Threat from China 'more brazen' than ever before
22. America Is Stronger Than It Looks
23. Opinion | How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?
24. What Are Hypersonic Missiles and Who’s Developing Them?
1. Bomb shelters, guerrilla war: Building Ukraine's resistance
Resistance operating concept. Unconventional deterrence.
Bomb shelters, guerrilla war: Building Ukraine's resistance
AP · by MSTYSLAV CHERNOV and LORI HINNANT · February 1, 2022
February 1, 2022 GMT
KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) — The table tennis coach, the chaplain’s wife, the dentist and the firebrand nationalist have little in common except a desire to defend their hometown and a sometimes halting effort to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian.
The situation in Kharkiv, just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border of Ukraine, feels particularly perilous. Ukraine’s second-largest city is one of its industrial centers and includes two factories that restore old Soviet-era tanks or build new ones.
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“This city has to be protected,” said Viktoria Balesina, who teaches table tennis to teenagers and dyes her cropped hair deep purple at the crown. “We need to do something, not to panic and fall on our knees. We do not want this.”
Balesina recalls being pressured to attend pro-Russia rallies during the protest movement that swept Ukraine after Russia attacked in 2014 — a year that utterly changed her life. A lifelong Russian speaker born and raised in Kharkiv, she switched to Ukrainian. Then she joined a group of a dozen or so women who meet weekly in an office building for community defense instruction.
Now her Ukrainian is near-fluent, though she still periodically grasps at words, and she can reload a sub-machine gun almost comfortably.
This wasn’t the life she expected at age 55, but she’s accepted it as necessary. Plenty of people in her social circle sympathize with Russia, but they’re not what drives her today.
“I am going to protect the city not for those people but for the women I’m training with,” she said.
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Among her group is Svetlana Putilina, whose husband is a Muslim chaplain in the Ukrainian military. With grim determination and not a hint of panic, the 50-year-old has orchestrated emergency plans for her family and for her unit: Who will take the children to safety outside the city? Who will accompany elderly parents and grandparents to one of the hundreds of mapped bomb shelters? How will the resistance women deploy?
“If it is possible and our government gives out weapons, we will take them and defend our city,” said the mother of three and grandmother of three more. If not, she at least has one of her husband’s service weapons at home, and she now knows how to use it.
Elsewhere in Kharkiv, Dr. Oleksandr Dikalo dragged two creaky exam chairs into a labyrinthine basement and refilled yellow jerrycans with fresh water. The public dental clinic he runs is on the ground floor of a 16-story apartment building, and the warren of underground rooms is listed as an emergency shelter for the hundreds of residents.
Dikalo knows how to handle weapons as well, from his days as a soldier in the Soviet Army when he was stationed in East Germany. His wife works as a doctor at Kharkiv’s emergency hospital and regularly tends to Ukrainian soldiers wounded at the front.
“If God forbid something happens, we must stand and protect our city. We must stand hand to hand against the aggressor,” Dikalo said. At 60 he’s too old to join the civil defense units forming across the country, but he’s ready to act to keep Kharkiv from falling.
A guerrilla war fought by dentists, coaches and housewives defending a hometown of a thousand basement shelters would be a nightmare for Russian military planners, according to both analysts and U.S. intelligence officials.
“The Russians want to destroy Ukraine’s combat forces. They don’t want to be in a position where they have to occupy ground, where they have to deal with civilians, where they have to deal with an insurgency,” said James Sherr, an analyst of Russian military strategy who testified last week before a British parliamentary committee.
There are growing calls in Washington for the CIA and the Pentagon to support a potential Ukrainian insurgency. While Russia’s forces are larger and more powerful than Ukraine’s, an insurgency supported by U.S.-funded arms and training could deter a full-scale invasion.
Polling of ordinary Ukrainians reviewed by intelligence agencies has strongly indicated there would be an active resistance in the event of an invasion, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. A spokesperson for the intelligence community declined to comment.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said recently that any escalation could hinge on Kharkiv. The city is also the base for Yevheniy Murayev, identified by British intelligence as the person Russia was considering installing as president.
“Kharkiv has over 1 million citizens,” Zelenskyy told The Washington Post. “It’s not going to be just an occupation; it’s going to be the beginning of a large-scale war.”
That is precisely what Anton Dotsenko fears. At 18, he was front and center in the wave of protests that brought down the pro-Russia government in 2014. Now he’s a 24-year-old tech worker, and he’s had enough upheaval.
“When people are calm and prosperous, and everything is fine, they don’t dance very well. But when everything’s bad, that’s when they party hard, like it’s the last time,” Dotsenko said during a smoke break outside a pulsing Kharkiv nightclub. “This is a stupid war, and I think this could all be resolved diplomatically. The last thing I would like to do is give my life, to give my valuable life, for something pointless.”
The young people dancing inside would say the same, he declared in Russian: “If the war starts, everyone will run away.”
This is what one nationalist youth group hopes to prevent. They meet weekly in an abandoned construction site, masked and clad in black as they practice maneuvers. The men who join that group or the government-run units have already shown themselves to be up for the challenge to come, said one of the trainers, who identified himself by the nom de guerre Pulsar.
“Kharkiv is my home and as a native the most important city for me to protect. Kharkiv is also a front-line city, which is economically and strategically important,” he said, adding that many people in the city are “ready to protect their own until the end,” as are many Ukrainians.
The same sentiment rings out among Ukrainians in the capital, Kyiv, and in the far west, in Lviv.
“Both our generation and our children are ready to defend themselves. This will not be an easy war,” said Maryna Tseluiko, a 40-year-old baker who signed up as a reservist with her 18-year-old daughter in Kyiv. “Ukrainians have a rich tradition of guerrilla warfare. We don’t want to fight Russians. It’s the Russians who are fighting us.”
___
Lori Hinnant reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, and Nomaan Merchant in Washington, contributed to this report.
AP · by MSTYSLAV CHERNOV and LORI HINNANT · February 1, 2022
2. Gross Misinformation: we have no idea what we're doing or what we did
An important follow-up to the Mad Scientist blog I forwarded yesterday. We should note that Matt Armstrong is one of our nation's experts on information and influence, psychological operations, political warfare, and public diplomacy. The blog post provided Matt the opportunity to educate us and correct misconceptions about various "information organizations." And I think the idea of Freedom Academy should be resurrected and explored (excerpt from a linked article below). I would note the Freedom Academy Concept could be the broad interagency organizations in which the Congressionally directed (NDAA 2021 Sec. 1299L) Functional Center for Irregular Warfare Security Studies of DOD could be nested.
Congress picked up on the effort and, with broad bipartisan support including sponsors Senators Paul H. Douglas, Thomas J. Dodd, Mundt (now in the Senate), and Representatives Judd and Herlong, a bill was introduced to establish the “Freedom Academy.” Students would fall into three general categories: U.S. government officials whose agencies were involved in the U.S. effort to resist communism abroad; leaders from civil society, ranging from management to labor to education to fraternal and professional groups; and, leaders and potential leaders in and out of government from foreign countries. The Freedom Academy was to be strictly a research and educational institution and would not engage in any operational activities.
Mundt explained the need for the academy:
[W]e train and prepare our military people for the war which we are not fighting and which we hope will never come, but we fail to train our own citizens and our representatives abroad to operate in the cold war — the only war which we are presently fighting.
But the Freedom Academy never came to be, though a Gallup poll showed that a remarkable 70 percent of the public knew of the bill to create it and supported it. The State Department strongly objected to the initiative primarily because it viewed the Freedom Academy as infringing on its primacy in foreign affairs. However, the State Department did not kill the Freedom Academy. No, the death blow came from a senator.
J. William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pulled the Freedom Academy bill out of the Judiciary Committee and into his committee to let it die. He then admonished his colleagues that we “must learn to overcome our emotional prejudices against Russia” so that in time the Communists will learn to trust us. “I refuse to admit that the Communist dogma per se is a threat to the United States.”
Gross Misinformation: we have no idea what we're doing or what we did
With apologies to the well-intentioned author of the article Let's Tweet, Grandma – Weaponizing the Social to Create Information Security, but this is a great example of the lack of knowledge of what we are doing, the responsibilities of our organizations, and our history. The writer apparently fished around for some info, lacked the experience to vet what was found, and placed the ill-considered, factually wrong, and woefully incomplete information as a centerpiece of their argument. Despite my heavy-handed criticism, I don’t blame the author. The article is really an indictment of the system. The demonstrable absence of basic awareness, knowledge, and understanding of our current organizations, along with an absence of basic comprehension of the relevant organizational history, is sad. That misinformation formed a cornerstone of their argument is deeply ironic.
Here’s the key problem paragraph:
The primary U.S. organization tasked with spreading American messages was the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), established in 1953. USIA’s mandate was to inform and influence foreign audiences by operating the Voice of America (VOA) radio stations, disseminating movies and books, and coordinating world speaker tours. USIA then became the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which operated under the original principles of the Voice of America until 2018. The BBG operated until the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) was created in 2018, “to help constituents better understand the work that the Agency and its networks do.” USAGM continued to adhere to the VOA principles and disseminate messages through VOA, and the Radio Free Broadcasting Networks. However, a pure governmental organization approach is not enough. How is that failing? The favorable view of individual Americans is in decline. This is presumably based on information and stories online showing that favorable views are down to 50% from over 60% a few years ago. These views plummeted even more during the Trump administration — especially due to views on how the U.S. handled the COVID-19 pandemic. The reality is that the U.S. is losing.
First, the use of “tasked” in the first sentence implies USIA was the first agency assigned the mission of “spreading American messages,” a phrase that itself is problematic by its implications. No, the first post-war agency tasked with this mission was the State Department, which gained this responsibility as the government’s lead agency in this field on August 31, 1945. USIA was created after a last-ditch effort to isolate the mission within the State Department – the International Information Administration – was rejected after a few years of the State Department trying to eject the mission. The result was USIA. Honestly, this is a minor point. I can understand the absence of knowledge here as the pre-USIA history is basically not recognized. I’ve been in meetings with senior public diplomacy academics, including USIA alumni, who can’t fathom any agency holding the USIA portfolio before USIA, except both IIA and State had greater authorities and mandates than USIA. The mythology around USIA is really strong, I'm glad the author linked to a seven-year-old article I wrote on the myths around USIA, though.
The bigger point is USIA did not become the Broadcasting Board of Governors. This is really some bad misinformation. The BBG was established in 1994. Five years later, USIA was abolished and BBG became an independent agency. The real point here though is the bulk of USIA went to the State Department. While BBG was a big piece of USIA by sheer dollars owing to the capital expenses of worldwide broadcasting, it was the parts that went to the State Department that really mattered, and matters to the author's argument. The public affairs sections at the department's posts abroad had reported to USIA (after 1999, they reported to the Chief of Mission with dotted lines to the regional bureaus and disappearing ink lines to the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs that was visible under certain angles and if Mercury was in the right place). More important was the new Bureau of International Information Programs which came out of the remains of USIA and had a far larger footprint and greater points of contact and flexibility than the BBG and was integrated into the State Department. This fact is and has been generally ignored – or not understood – by analysts and academics lamenting the demise of USIA and post-1999 organizations, which is reflected in this piece.
This takes us to the penultimate failure: BBG’s target audience is distinctly narrow and largely irrelevant to the author's basic argument and recommendation. Much of BBG's, now the US Agency for Global Media as of a few years ago, target audience was not and is not what we think of when considering addressing foreign misinformation and disinformation campaigns, including as highlighted by the author. The author’s subsequent discussion is not limited to nations under censorship or lacking a free press, which is where BBG targets. The author’s “online American information militia” and a “whole of nation” approach has hardly any overlap with USAGM or has much relevance to USAGM's use of news to inform its audiences. Does the author intend the “online American information militia” is going to engage in Russia with people in Moscow or Novosibirsk? Or Chinese in Beijing or Shanghai or Shaoxing? North Koreans? Iranians? Doubtful as the author refers to grandma and David Hasselhoff, who, perhaps I should remind the reader, was and is weirdly popular in Germany.
No offense to the author, but the lack of knowledge shown in this paper is a large part of the problem being (rightfully) complained about. The broad lack of leadership to encourage and empower gramps and grams is not USAGM’s fault or even remotely near their portfolio or mandate. The author seems to be unaware that they are really complaining about the State Department’s Bureau of Global Public Affairs, formerly the Bureau of Public Affairs that was recently renamed as it picked select bits of IIP to expand PA’s portfolio in what some, like me, joke is now the Bureau of Greater Public Affairs, and the absence of an Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. It is these offices that are perfectly placed and empowered to help grandma tweet. Or, we could resurrect the idea of the Freedom Academy.
3. China eyes 'armed unification' with Taiwan by 2027: key academic
Excerpts:
Xi has set Taiwan unification as a goal but has not indicated a timeline. Jin said: "Once the National Congress of the Communist Party of China is over in the fall of 2022, the scenario of armed unification will move toward becoming a reality. It is very likely that the leadership will move toward armed unification by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the PLA's founding."
This echoed a view expressed in March 2021 by Adm. Phil Davidson, the since-retired commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee with regard to Taiwan: "I think the threat is manifest during this decade -- in fact, in the next six years."
China eyes 'armed unification' with Taiwan by 2027: key academic
Mainland can bring the island under its control in a week, Jin Canrong says
BEIJING -- Chinese President Xi Jinping will employ force to unify Taiwan with China by 2027, an influential Chinese academic who advises Beijing on foreign policy told Nikkei.
Jin Canrong, a professor in Renmin University's School of International Studies, notes that the People's Liberation Army already has a posture superior to that of the U.S. to deal with a contingency involving Taiwan.
He is known as one of China's most vocal hawks, and his online comments are followed by many.
Xi has set Taiwan unification as a goal but has not indicated a timeline. Jin said: "Once the National Congress of the Communist Party of China is over in the fall of 2022, the scenario of armed unification will move toward becoming a reality. It is very likely that the leadership will move toward armed unification by 2027, the 100th anniversary of the PLA's founding."
This echoed a view expressed in March 2021 by Adm. Phil Davidson, the since-retired commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee with regard to Taiwan: "I think the threat is manifest during this decade -- in fact, in the next six years."
On whether the U.S. would have a military response to a Chinese move to take the island, Jin said that "China already has the capability to unify Taiwan by force within one week" and that "the PLA can defeat any U.S. force within 1,000 nautical miles of the coastline."
The PLA is believed to have a strategy of keeping U.S. naval vessels out of the waters around China -- and thus refining its ability to launch missile attacks against American forces there.
Jin Canrong is known for his hawkishness on the U.S. and advises the Chinese government on foreign policy. (Photo by Tsukasa Hadano)
Jin pushed back against the view in Japan that, in the words of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, "a Taiwan emergency is a Japan emergency."
"Japan should absolutely not intervene in a Taiwanese emergency," he said. "The U.S. already cannot win against China on this. If Japan intervenes, China will have no choice but to defeat Japan as well. [Japan] must realize that a new change is occurring."
Jin is skeptical that peaceful unification can be achieved, saying: "It will difficult with Democratic Progressive Party President Tsai Ing-wen in power. If [an opposition] Kuomintang candidate wins the presidential election in 2024, relations will improve, but the Kuomintang has no support."
As for what Taiwan should do, Jin said it should enter into discussions on unification: "The only choice they have is to talk to mainland China as soon as possible. The longer it takes, the more disadvantageous it becomes for Taiwan," he said.
On Sino-American relations this year, Jin was pessimistic.
"It will be a more difficult year than 2021," he said. "China will have its party congress in the fall, and the U.S. will have its midterm elections in November. With such a weighty political schedule, the rivalry between the countries is likely to be very clear."
In addition, Taiwan will hold local elections in November. "China could be a target of criticism during those elections," Jin said. "This will also affect China-U.S. relations."
The U.S., the U.K. and others have announced diplomatic boycotts of the Winter Olympics, which begin this week in Beijing. But Jin dismissed this as unimportant. "Every country, including the U.S., is sending players," he said. "Many foreign companies are sponsoring the event. The fact that some countries are not sending high-ranking officials is not an issue."
In 2022, China and Japan will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations. Jin criticized the Japanese side, saying: "The Chinese government hopes to stabilize relations on the 50th anniversary. However, Japan has become too conservative, including former Prime Minister Abe's comments on the Taiwan issue, and the situation has become difficult."
The economy will be the top issue at the National People's Congress in March, said Jin, who expects the government's annual growth target to remain at 6%.
"There is a very important party conference this year," he said. "It does not look good to have low goals."
4. How Russia conducts false flag operations
This is from the US embassy in Italy. I also found this on the US embassy website in Germany. I imagine this comes from State's Global Engagement Center(GEC) though I could not find it on its web site.
This is an example of an important information line of effort: attacking the adversary's strategy - recognize it, understand it, expose it, and attack it (as SunTzu tells us)
How Russia conducts false flag operations
Why would the Russian Federation send soldiers in disguise to lead protests in another country? Or order its troops to attack partners of Russia?
Russia has long conducted such “false flag” operations to portray itself or its partners as victims, evade responsibility, sow confusion and create a pretext for war.
In 2008, Russia sent unmarked soldiers to stir unrest in Georgia. When Georgia’s government responded, Russia invaded. And in 2014, Russian special forces entered Ukraine pretending to be local self-defense forces and seized government buildings, leading to Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
A masked pro-Russian militant guards city hall in Kostyantynivka in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, after militants seized the building. (© Sergei Grits/AP Images)
Now U.S. officials warn that the Kremlin may be turning to its old playbook.
“We have information that indicates Russia has already pre-positioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in Eastern Ukraine,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said January 14. “The operatives are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces.”
Concerns that Russia may conduct a false flag operation in Ukraine come as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has amassed more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s border and promoted false narratives that Ukraine is seeking to provoke a conflict.
The United States and its allies and partners have responded with calls for a peaceful resolution. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Kyiv, Berlin and Geneva January 18–21 to further a united approach to addressing Russia’s threat to Ukraine.
Russia’s false flag operations date back decades and take many forms. In 1939, the Soviet Union shelled its own troops outside the Soviet village of Mainila near Finland. It then blamed Finland for the attack and invaded its neighbor in violation of the two countries’ nonaggression pact.
A street in Helsinki, Finland, seen December 28, 1939, after a Soviet bombing (© Fox Photos/Getty Images)
More recently, Russian state hackers have disguised themselves as operatives of Iran’s regime or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to evade responsibility. In 2017, Russia’s military launched a ransomware attack against Ukrainian businesses. While the attack was disguised to look like the work of profiteers rather than state actors, a joint investigation by Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States found the Kremlin responsible, according to Wired magazine.
Ukrainian officials announced January 14 that hackers had targeted government websites, including the one for its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and that Russia is likely responsible.
During his trip to Europe, Blinken met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva to urge Russia to de-escalate and remove troops from Ukraine’s border.
A diplomatic path to de-escalate tensions is vital, Blinken told Lavrov on a call January 18. The United States has an unshakable commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, he said.
5. Over 100 ex-Afghan forces, officials killed since US pullout: UN
The UN Secretary General may be inadvertently supporting Taliban propaganda by blaming some of the violence on the resistance. I expect the narrative will be constructed over time to blame Afghan resistance on Taliban problems.
Despite the reduction in violence, Guterres said the Taliban face several challenges, including rising attacks against their members.
“Some are attributed to the National Resistance Front comprising some Afghan opposition figures, and those associated with the former government,” he said. “These groups have been primarily operating in Panjshir Province and Baghlan’s Andarab District but have not made significant territorial inroads” though “armed clashes are regularly documented, along with forced displacement and communication outages.” Guterres said intra-Taliban tensions along ethnic lines and competition over jobs have also resulted in violence, pointing to armed clashes on Nov. 4 between between Taliban forces in Bamyan city.
In the report, the secretary-general proposed priorities for the U.N. political mission in the current environment, urged international support to prevent widespread hunger and the country’s economic collapse, and urged the Taliban to guarantee women’s rights and human rights.
Over 100 ex-Afghan forces, officials killed since US pullout: UN
The United Nations has received “credible allegations” that more than 100 former members of the Afghan government, its security forces and those who worked with international troops have been killed since the Taliban took over the country Aug. 15, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says.
The U.N. political mission in Afghanistan also received “credible allegations of extrajudicial killings of at least 50 individuals suspected of affiliation with ISIL-KP,” the Islamic State extremist group operating in Afghanistan, Guterres said in the report to U.N. Security Council.
He added that despite Taliban assurances, the U.N. political mission has also received credible allegations “of enforced disappearances and other violations impacting the right to life and physical integrity” of former government and coalition members.
Guterres said human rights defenders and media workers also continue “to come under attack, intimidation, harassment, arbitrary arrest, ill-treatment and killings.”
Eight civil society activists were killed, including three by the Taliban and three by Islamic State extremists, and 10 were subjected to temporary arrests, beatings and threats by the Taliban, he said. Two journalists were killed — one by IS — and two were injured by unknown armed men.
The secretary-general said the U.N. missions documented 44 cases of temporary arrests, beatings and threats of intimidation, 42 of them by the Taliban.
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By Travis Peterson
The Taliban overran most of Afghanistan as U.S. and NATO forces were in the final stages of their chaotic withdrawal from the country after 20 years. They entered Kabul on Aug. 15 without any resistance from the Afghan army or the country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, who fled.
The Taliban initially promised a general amnesty for those linked to the former government and international forces, and tolerance and inclusiveness toward women and ethnic minorities. However, the Taliban have renewed restrictions on women and appointed an all-male government, which have met with dismay by the international community.
Afghanistan’s aid-dependent economy was already stumbling when the Taliban seized power, and the international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted economic support, recalling the Taliban’s reputation for brutality during its 1996-2001 rule and refusal to educate girls and allow women to work.
Guterres said: “The situation in Afghanistan remains precarious and uncertain six months after the Taliban takeover as the multiple political, socio-economic and humanitarian shocks reverberate across the country.”
He said Afghanistan today faces multiple crises: a growing humanitarian emergency, a massive economic contraction, the crippling of its banking and financial systems, the worst drought in 27 years, and the Taliban’s failure to form an inclusive government and restore the rights of girls to education and women to work.
“An estimated 22.8 million people are projected to be in `crisis’ and `emergency’ levels of food insecurity until March 2022,” the U.N. chief said. “Almost 9 million of these will be at `emergency’ levels of food insecurity -– the highest number in the world. Half of all children under five are facing acute malnutrition.”
On a positive note, Guterres reported “a significant decline” in the overall number of conflict-related security incidents as well as civilian casualties since the Taliban takeover. The U.N. recorded 985 security-related incidents between Aug. 19 and Dec. 31, a 91% decrease compared to the same period in 2020, he said.
The eastern, central, southern and western regions accounted for 75% of all recorded incidents, he said, with Nangarhar, Kabul, Kunar and Kandahar ranking as the most conflict-affected provinces.
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Despite the reduction in violence, Guterres said the Taliban face several challenges, including rising attacks against their members.
“Some are attributed to the National Resistance Front comprising some Afghan opposition figures, and those associated with the former government,” he said. “These groups have been primarily operating in Panjshir Province and Baghlan’s Andarab District but have not made significant territorial inroads” though “armed clashes are regularly documented, along with forced displacement and communication outages.”
Guterres said intra-Taliban tensions along ethnic lines and competition over jobs have also resulted in violence, pointing to armed clashes on Nov. 4 between between Taliban forces in Bamyan city.
In the report, the secretary-general proposed priorities for the U.N. political mission in the current environment, urged international support to prevent widespread hunger and the country’s economic collapse, and urged the Taliban to guarantee women’s rights and human rights.
6. Russia's one-sided reporting and blatant disinformation
Note this is from the Share America website from State. Here is what this website is all about:
About Us
ShareAmerica is the U.S. Department of State’s platform for communicating American foreign policy worldwide. We share compelling stories and images that spark discussion and debate on important topics like religious freedom, rule of law, economic prosperity, human dignity and sovereignty.
Russia's one-sided reporting and blatant disinformation
(State Dept.)
In democracies, independent media are free to publish accurate stories that inform the public — without editorial control by the government.
That’s not how Russia’s state-run media operate. Instead, the Kremlin directs media outlets to publish and amplify information and stories that support the government’s policies.
RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik are Russia’s primary media outlets that produce pro-Kremlin content for non-Russian speakers abroad.
Here are just three examples of debunked false reporting published in Kremlin-funded media:
- Ukraine’s government banned the use of the Russian language.
- The United States promised to never expand NATO.
- Russia has no troops in Ukraine.
None of these statements are true.
Russia’s state media also distort tragedies to suit the government’s purpose. In April 2021, one Russian media outlet reported that a young boy was killed in the eastern Donbas region by a Ukrainian armed forces drone. That story was fact-checked and found to be false. Russian state media kept repeating it as a way to portray Ukraine’s government as an instigator of violence.
For other examples and more details on Kremlin-funded disinformation, see:
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A new report (PDF, 4.1 MB) from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center on RT and Sputnik‘s role in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda.
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This 2020 report on the pillars of Russia’s disinformation.
7. How Irish Fishermen Took on the Russian Fleet and Won
An example of a whole of society effort in the gray zone?
Excerpts:
Indeed, the Irish fishermen’s success should teach Western governments that clever strategy is not a government monopoly. Businesses and business associations in lots of Western countries would, I venture to suggest, put forward excellent ideas for how threatening behavior by Russia, China, and other countries can be deterred without targeted countries having to resort to the threat of military force—if governments only asked them. Governments may in fact be discovering this untapped resource: one NATO member state is, for example, in the process of setting up pioneering national-security consultation with its private sector.
In the White House, there’s a man with special fondness for Ireland: the president himself. May I humbly suggest that the Biden administration would be well-advised to issue an invitation to Patrick Murphy and his men—an invitation to thank them for preventing another standoff with Russia, and perhaps also to ask them for advice about asymmetric deterrence in other parts of the world. A reminder, and only half in jest: they’ve got a better track record than most of us.
How Irish Fishermen Took on the Russian Fleet and Won
The action illustrates how the private sector can help governments respond to Russian gray-zone aggression.
For months—years, in fact—the learned men and women in the corridors of Western powers have been putting their heads together to stop Russia from acting provocatively. Think-tankers such as me have written endless op-eds, reports, and books for the same purpose. We have, alas, been depressingly unsuccessful. A few days ago, another group altogether showed how it’s done.
When Russia announced its intention to conduct a naval exercise off the coast of Ireland, Irish fishermen came up with a deterrent so surprising and so powerful that the Russian navy moved the exercise. We should learn from them.
Last Sunday, the government of Ireland passed the word that starting on Feb. 3, Russia would hold a naval exercise in Ireland’s exclusive economic zone. Irish officials declared the exercise “not welcome and not wanted,” but had clearly been unable to convince their Russian counterparts to hold it elsewhere. Indeed, despite continuing to plead with Russia to move the exercise – noting, for example, the area’s unique marine wildlife – the Irish government got nowhere. As Russia’s ambassador to Ireland, Yuri Filatov, said last week, “There is nothing to be disturbed, concerned, or anguished about and I have extensively explained that to our Irish colleagues.”
The exercise was terrible news for Ireland’s fishermen, who stood to lose one million tons of fishery, said Patrick Murphy, the chief executive of the Irish South and West Fish Producers Organisation. “This is the livelihoods of fishermen and fishing families all around the coastline here,” Murphy told RTE radio. “It’s our waters. Can you imagine if the Russians were applying to go onto the mainland of Ireland to go launching rockets, how far would they get with that?”
Murphy said the fishermen would be making a coordinated effort to head off the Russian fleet. “Our boats will be going out to that area on the first of February to go fishing,” he told Politico on Jan. 25. “When one boat needs to return to port, another will head out so there is a continuous presence on the water. If that is in proximity to where the [military] exercise is going, we are expecting that the Russian naval services abide by the anti-collision regulations.” By constantly having their boats in the exercise waters, the fishermen would—peacefully—prevent the Russians from conducting the exercise.
Their action worked. On Jan. 29, Filatov issued a statement announcing that Russia’s defense minister, Sergey Shoigu, had decided, “as a gesture of goodwill, to relocate the exercises by the Russian Navy, planned for February 3-8, outside the Irish exclusive economic zone (EEZ), with the aim not to hinder fishing activities by the Irish vessels in the traditional fishing areas.”
The Irish fishermen didn’t just humiliate Moscow: they also put Western capitals’ deterrence efforts to shame. And they did so by announcing asymmetric deterrence. The Irishmen would clearly not been able to sail to key Russian fishing waters to take revenge by harming fish there, and doing so would have at any rate been provocative. But they could go about their peaceful business in the Irish EEZ in such large numbers that the Russians would struggle to carry out their exercise. It was an action more creative than the threats Western governments typically think up – and that creativity created such a surprise factor that the Russians had to back down. Yes, it is possible that the Irish government made concessions to Moscow that the Ambassador’s statement didn’t mention, but it stands to reason that if there were any concessions he would have mentioned them so as to minimize Russia’s humiliation.
In deploying this asymmetric deterrence, the fishermen unwittingly created a template Western governments could study, adapt, and adopt. In The Defender’s Dilemma and elsewhere, I’ve proposed that Western governments should team up with their private sectors to create powerful deterrents. If, say, China continues to coerce Western companies, Western governments could collectively team up with their countries’ luxury brands to threaten a luxury embargo against China. Why would Western companies want to cooperate? Because they suffer when other countries engage in coercion, IP theft, and similar practices.
Indeed, the Irish fishermen’s success should teach Western governments that clever strategy is not a government monopoly. Businesses and business associations in lots of Western countries would, I venture to suggest, put forward excellent ideas for how threatening behavior by Russia, China, and other countries can be deterred without targeted countries having to resort to the threat of military force—if governments only asked them. Governments may in fact be discovering this untapped resource: one NATO member state is, for example, in the process of setting up pioneering national-security consultation with its private sector.
In the White House, there’s a man with special fondness for Ireland: the president himself. May I humbly suggest that the Biden administration would be well-advised to issue an invitation to Patrick Murphy and his men—an invitation to thank them for preventing another standoff with Russia, and perhaps also to ask them for advice about asymmetric deterrence in other parts of the world. A reminder, and only half in jest: they’ve got a better track record than most of us.
8. Much Ado About Competition: The Logic and Utility of Competitive Strategy
Key point:
Notably, the United States is not equipped for strategic competition, or any competition. Historically, the record of countries engaging in great power competition while divided at home is abysmal. Consider France’s experience between the world wars, when it made a strategic blunder in terms of military doctrine and procurement with the adoption of a largely defensive and static posture in an era when technology was beginning to favor offensive action and mobility. The French feared that moving toward a more professional and capable military, separated from the rest of society, might be used as an instrument of reaction. This fear was not wholly misguided—after all, the French military was a deeply conservative institution that could have sought to undermine French electoral politics, most notably with the election of Leon Blum and his Popular Front. But the effect of France’s decision to limit military development and focus on defense instead of focusing on the military competition with Germany was devastating. Similarly, a United States that cannot pass a budget on schedule without a fight, that faces threats of political violence surrounding elections, and that is unable to make reliable international commitments because partisanship requires each new administration to disavow the actions of its predecessor, is ill suited to make thoughtful, durable strategic plans.
Competitive strategy requires a systematic assessment of our adversaries’ strengths and weaknesses and an objective assessment of our own. If we are honest in our assessment, what we learn about American power and capabilities may be frightening. Domestic challenges are preventing us from engaging with the international community and taking on international challenges. Instead of stressing competition as the framework for US-Chinese relations, the United States must first conduct an accurate assessment of itself and look to defuse domestic tensions before looking for ways to enter into great power competition with its adversaries.
Much Ado About Competition: The Logic and Utility of Competitive Strategy - Modern War Institute
This article is part of the National War College’s contribution to the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
Attend any wonky discussion on the challenges posed by China’s rise, and someone will insist that the United States must compete with China. But ask those same pundits to define what competition with China looks like, and instead of getting a straight answer, you’ll be met with incredulity, as if competing with China is really a set of self-evident and indisputable foreign policy options. Most often, competition with China gets reduced to mirroring Chinese actions—if China is going to invest in infrastructure for the developing world, so should the United States. The same, mirror-image thinking is also applied to increases in China’s military, advancements in artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and so on. Contemporary discussions on great power competition are devoid of proactive, self-justified foreign policy options. A US reactive posture cedes the initiative to China, allowing Chinese interests to dictate the time, place, and modality of competition. To escape its reactive rut, the United States should apply the logic of what in business contexts is called competitive strategy, develop a coherent response to China’s rise, and shape the arena of competition to favor America’s strengths and exploit China’s weaknesses.
The presumption that actors or states have a say in how competition plays out is in some ways at odds with many strategic approaches grounded in various schools of international relations that take an essentialist approach to international competition. For example, realists consider international competition to be fundamentally about power, and more specifically, military power. Competition is viewed as a balancing strategy—either via alliances (external balancing) or arms buildups (internal balancing). Liberal institutionalists, by contrast, conceive of competition in terms of the development, shaping, and control of norms and organizations. Both realists and institutionalists think that competitors have little choice about how they compete because competition is structured and largely fixed. Actors can choose how to compete, but not what to compete over. Competitive strategy rejects that, and instead sees the nature of competition as malleable. Consider the Cold War. Space was not an inevitable arena for competition, yet the space race made it one. Likewise, the United States and the Soviet Union did not have to engage in an arms race; once both sides deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles, they effectively possessed a secure second-strike capability, and thus reliable deterrence. But both sides remained obsessed with preventing the other from gaining a clear numerical advantage in warheads, even if those additional warheads brought little tangible benefit.
The mechanisms of shaping competition are complicated and not fully malleable. First, competition operates within certain constraints—geography is real and military capabilities matter. Relationships of economic dependence and interdependence are tangible and have durable effects. Second, all actors have some say in the nature of the competition. For instance, the United States cannot simply assert that from here on out, competition with China will be over “freedom.” The process is therefore interactive and mutually constitutive. Actors make choices in which arenas to compete, and so competitive strategy must be seen as a process of issuing challenges that can be accepted or rejected—not always without cost.
Within these constraints, however, competition can be shaped. Since actors will prefer to compete in arenas in which they have a comparative advantage, we might expect this process to be indeterminate, or to be resolved according to some hierarchy of advantages. This is indeed the traditional realist position. According to realists, military power is the ultima ratio of any political interaction, and therefore, in the final analysis, realists usually tend to see competition in military terms. It is only when the military balance is stable that other forms of competition can emerge. The core claim of competitive strategy, however, is that actors’ choices do matter, and that there can be significant advantages in exploiting informational asymmetries or durable strategic propensities.
Competitive Strategy Logic in Action
A famous applications of the logic of competitive strategy is the Reagan-era arms buildup and its effect on the Soviet Union. By the late 1970s, in part in response to the US military drawdowns after Vietnam and in part due to exogenous changes in the American economy, the United States moved toward a more technologically dependent form of warfare. The combination of stealth, improved sensors and systems integration, increased computing power, and higher precision created what the Soviets termed a “military-technical revolution” and what US analysts later dubbed the “revolution in military affairs.” It was institutionalized in both American defense procurement and doctrine (notably via the concept of AirLand Battle).
The concept was not inherently dominant. It provided the United States with a potential “offset” against superior Soviet numbers, especially in areas where distance made US force projection a challenge, but there were potential Soviet counters, most notably the possibility of increasing the size of Soviet forces or increasing the role of nuclear weapons in Soviet war planning. But the Soviets did not look for counters and instead became increasingly committed to matching American technology. The Soviets chose to compete with the United States in an area in which they were operating at a competitive disadvantage. The logic of competitive strategy is central to explaining Soviet actions.
The Soviet Union trapped itself for two reasons: first, Soviet leaders overestimated the innovative potential of their economy, and second, the Soviet Union was trapped by its own rhetoric of “scientific materialism.” The Soviet economy hit a wall by the mid-1970s, but in part because the wall was disguised by a decade of rising energy prices, the Soviet economy was systematically overestimated by Western and Soviet analysts alike. Soviet leaders maintained unwarranted confidence in the ability of their economic system to match Western, technology-driven productivity gains. Next, the Soviet concept of scientific materialism trapped its leaders into emphasizing technology superiority—instead of conceding the technology race, they tried to keep up, and their difficulties in doing so led to the process of reforms that ultimately brought the entire Soviet system down.
A Contemporary Assessment: Today’s Traps and Opportunities for Great Power Competition
Competitive strategy is about seeking to take advantage of a competitor’s poor self-assessment and durable propensities to shape a competition in beneficial ways. Even though the sort of “net assessment” required to fully assess the US-China competition is beyond the scope of this essay, it is possible to apply some competitive strategy concepts to a few concrete debates associated with great power competition. The following sections consider some possible traps and opportunities illuminated by competitive strategy methods.
Traps
Just as the Soviet Union stepped into a trap when it tried to compete with the United States in the technology race of the 1970s, there are several problematic dynamics inherent in the current US approach toward competition with China.
Militarily, the United States is increasingly concerned with growing Chinese military power, but some of these concerns are questionable. China’s doubling of its strategic nuclear forces, for instance, has little impact on nuclear balance or strategic stability and does not provide the Chinese with a first-strike capability. The Chinese should already be confident in their nuclear deterrence capabilities, making the addition of a few thousand nuclear warheads to their arsenal relevant only if the United States chooses to make them so. Similarly, it is not clear how hypersonic glide vehicles alter the strategic balance or how their accrual will benefit China, but US protestations are making these developments seem significant when they are not.
By contrast, the growth of Chinese conventional capabilities, particularly the ability to contest and potentially dominate the battlespace within the so-called first island chain, is significant. It dramatically reduces American extended deterrence options and places many neighbors of China in an unenviable position. But despite being a negative development for the United States and its friends and allies in the region, there is little strategic benefit to a US military response. Simply put, the United States is at a competitive disadvantage. Distance is the challenge, but the United States is also largely reliant on fixed, forward bases to project power, advantages that would be neutralized early in a military conflict with China. The issue is not that Chinese gains in this arena are not important, but that competing with China on the ability to project power within one hundred miles of the Chinese coast is a strategic trap for the United States.
The Belt and Road Initiative is another trap. The United States is richer and has a more advanced economy than China, which creates a temptation to compete economically. However, China has more cash on hand, whereas the US government persistently turns to deficit spending to fund its operations. In addition, the United States has a massive public debt problem whereas China’s debt problems are largely in private debt (e.g., real estate, shadow banking, and zombie state-owned enterprises). And lastly, the Chinese state maintains control over the private sector, allowing China to direct foreign direct investment in support of government policies—something the United States can only affect indirectly. Ultimately, while China’s infrastructure investment abroad carries risks for the United States, there is little the United States can productively do to compete. China has more money to expend, and China’s willingness to extend loans and provide grants with minimal conditions makes its aid more attractive to many countries.
In both scenarios, the Chinese benefit from a lack of self-reflection by American analysts and the effects of inertia. American decision makers are used to being militarily dominant and have trouble imagining military competitions that cannot be won by the United States. Similarly, the United States prides itself on the creation and sustainment of a global economic regime that has been robust and successful since 1945. Seeking military dominance and control over economic regimes and institutions reflects unexamined biases—durable propensities, in the language of competitive strategy—that the Chinese may be seeking to exploit. Alternatively, the traps identified above could exist purely by luck, but their effect is the same. The military balance off the Chinese coast and the dominance of China’s Belt and Road Initiative are not promising arenas for the United States to engage in competition.
Opportunities
If competitive strategy notes traps, it also notes opportunities—the United States has many areas of strength, and the Chinese several notable weaknesses, that can form the basis for a more productive competitive strategy–based approach to competing with China. Embracing these opportunities, however, will require American leaders to willingly reexamine American core competencies as they’ve emerged and changed over the past few decades.
First, the United States retains a significant advantage in both the number and the quality of its international partners. China has tried to increase its international position, its most visible success being the nearly complete marginalization of Taiwan as a diplomatic actor. Additionally, more states are cooperating with Chinese economic activities (the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, most notably) and there is a growing unwillingness to hold China accountable for illegal and counter-normative actions in international institutions. But despite these visible gains, the Chinese position remains weak. Namely, the states that have refused to condemn Chinese mistreatment of the Uighur minority comprise a rogue’s gallery of states like Belarus, Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Myanmar, North Korea, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe remaining silent. Russia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, all countries with their own human rights problems, are the closest things China has to “respectable” supporters on this front. China’s quest for global respect presents an opportunity for the United States, which should exploit China’s yearning for respect and recognition and highlight how China’s human rights violations align Beijing with international rogues, scofflaws, and delinquents. It should be a point of emphasis for the United States to speak of China as part of a cohort of problematic actors.
Second, the Chinese are pathologically defensive, self-conscious, and addicted to secrecy. There is little evidence, for instance, that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese lab, but because the Chinese refuse access to the data necessary to disprove the allegations, no one can really be sure. An unwillingness to allow international access to the data is, at its core, self-doubting behavior. The United States should push China on the issue—and others like it—to keep the spotlight on China’s secrecy and censorship, its population’s lack of access to the global internet, and its social constraints on individual travel and self-expression. To be effective, the US tone should range from sadness to bemusement, but not condemnation. American pity is more likely to provoke ill-considered Chinese responses than harsh criticism. A campaign that says, “If you’re so successful, then why are you so scared?” uses Chinese weaknesses and needs against Beijing. It may not pay any immediate benefits in restraining Chinese behavior, but it shapes the competition in a direction that is more in line with American strengths, especially if it successfully appeals to broader international audiences.
American Domestic Politics Are Our Biggest Vulnerability
Despite the current administration’s claim that “America is back,” the reality is very different. American strengths, in terms of international partnerships and self-confidence, are dramatically eroded and domestic social divisions are the biggest vulnerability and limitation on American power.
Notably, the United States is not equipped for strategic competition, or any competition. Historically, the record of countries engaging in great power competition while divided at home is abysmal. Consider France’s experience between the world wars, when it made a strategic blunder in terms of military doctrine and procurement with the adoption of a largely defensive and static posture in an era when technology was beginning to favor offensive action and mobility. The French feared that moving toward a more professional and capable military, separated from the rest of society, might be used as an instrument of reaction. This fear was not wholly misguided—after all, the French military was a deeply conservative institution that could have sought to undermine French electoral politics, most notably with the election of Leon Blum and his Popular Front. But the effect of France’s decision to limit military development and focus on defense instead of focusing on the military competition with Germany was devastating. Similarly, a United States that cannot pass a budget on schedule without a fight, that faces threats of political violence surrounding elections, and that is unable to make reliable international commitments because partisanship requires each new administration to disavow the actions of its predecessor, is ill suited to make thoughtful, durable strategic plans.
Competitive strategy requires a systematic assessment of our adversaries’ strengths and weaknesses and an objective assessment of our own. If we are honest in our assessment, what we learn about American power and capabilities may be frightening. Domestic challenges are preventing us from engaging with the international community and taking on international challenges. Instead of stressing competition as the framework for US-Chinese relations, the United States must first conduct an accurate assessment of itself and look to defuse domestic tensions before looking for ways to enter into great power competition with its adversaries.
Dr. Bernard I. Finel is a professor at national security strategy at the National War College, where he has been a faculty member since 2010. While at NWC, Dr. Finel has served as a core course director, department chair, and from 2017 to 2020 as associate dean of academic programs.
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.
9. Navy prepares F-35C recovery op in South China Sea as Japan issues salvage notice
Navy prepares F-35C recovery op in South China Sea as Japan issues salvage notice
The U.S. Navy has largely kept mum about how it will raise the wreckage of a high-tech F-35C Lightning II jet that crashed onto an aircraft carrier and fell into the South China Sea last week, but a maritime navigation alert released by the Japanese government suggests where the salvage operation may take place.
On Saturday, the Japanese Coast Guard issued a navigation warning indicating that a salvage operation was going on in a northern portion of the South China Sea, roughly 185 miles west of the Philippines and 350 miles east of Woody Island in the Paracels, a group of man-made islands on which Beijing has built an airbase and other military infrastructure.
A map shows the location for which the Japanese government issued a navigational warning due to a salvage operation in the South China Sea.
Officials for U.S. 7th Fleet declined to comment Monday or confirm whether the alert was connected to salvaging the jet.
The command said the Navy is “making recovery operations arrangements” to recover the jet, which crashed into the deck of the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson on Jan. 24 and then fell into the water, injuring the pilot and six sailors in the process.
The pilot ejected before the jet fell into the sea, but the pilot and two other sailors were evacuated to the Philippines for medical care.
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The carrier has verified that the video of the F-35C as it approached and the photos of it after it fell in the sea were taken aboard the ship.
Officials said last week that all seven sailors were stable.
The Japan Coast Guard’s Hydrological and Oceanographic Department, or JHOD, is the area coordinator for “NAVAREA XI,” a maritime geographic area demarcated by the International Maritime Organization.
Saturday’s warning notes that salvage operations will be going on there “until further notice.”
JHOD told Defense News that the water depth at the location is about 11,800 feet, according to surveys.
Such a navigational warning contains information for boaters about changes to navigational aids and current marine activities or hazards such as defects, dredging, or fishing zones.
The F-35 mishap was the fifth major aviation mishap to the Vinson’s carrier strike group in the past two months.
Losing the Navy’s newest and most high-tech fighter jet in the contentious waters of the South China Sea is considered a non-starter given the Chinese government’s interest in its American adversary’s military technology.
A video and photos of the jet just before its crash and as it bobbed in the water leaked online late last week, and 7th Fleet confirmed their authenticity.
Mike Yeo is the Asia correspondent for Defense News. He wrote his first defense-related magazine article in 1998 before pursuing an aerospace engineering degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. Following a stint in engineering, he became a freelance defense reporter in 2013 and has written for several media outlets.
Geoff is a senior staff reporter for Military Times, focusing on the Navy. He covered Iraq and Afghanistan extensively and was most recently a reporter at the Chicago Tribune. He welcomes any and all kinds of tips at geoffz@militarytimes.com.
10. If Red Hill Crisis Drags On, Hawaii May Not Renew Military Base Leases
Imagine losing our bases in Hawaii?
If Red Hill Crisis Drags On, Hawaii May Not Renew Military Base Leases
Forbes · by Craig Hooper · January 31, 2022
The critical Kaena Point Satellite Tracking Station may lose its lease.
U.S. Department of Defense
The U.S. government fails to understand that the Navy’s shambolic, halting approach to Hawaii’s Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility crisis is not just a Navy affair, easily isolated in the hinterlands of the Navy’s facility management bureaucracy. The Navy’s unforced errors in responding to the Red Hill crisis complicates lease renewal talks at many key Hawaiian military bases.
Few realize that on the Hawaiian Islands, much of the Pentagon’s vast base network is backed by cheap, long-term leases. Most of the leases expire in seven years. If those leases are not renewed, the military may need to abruptly vacate some 73 square miles of Hawaiian territory, abandoning several key training areas, military reserves, satellite tracking stations and other facilities on the islands of Hawai’i, O’ahu, Kaua’i, Ni’ihau, and Maui.
Lacking new lease agreements, the military Hawaii footprint will shrink by about 20 percent just as new forces are set to arrive.
The leases house prized and irreplaceable military assets.
The Army leases the Pohokauloa Training area, the largest land military training area in the Pacific. Three other leased Army sites support tactical maneuver training, helicopter training, air assault and unmanned vehicle training.
The Navy uses leased land to support the Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands, the world’s largest instrumented range, “capable of simultaneously supporting surface, subsurface, air, and space operations.” Various leased tracts support tracking stations that cannot be relocated, while another site serves for munitions storage.
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The Air Force and Space Force uses leased land for tracking stations, supporting the Air Force Satellite Control Facility, Pacific Air Defense Sector missions, and other critical activities.
Up until now, the looming lease issue had not been linked to the Red Hill crisis, but, on January 27, the Honolulu City Council sent a stern letter to President Joe Biden, saying that “There is no question that the trust between the Navy and the State and the people of Hawai’i has been broken,” and that “we are at a fork in the road.”
In the letter, the City Council warned that “the current lack of trust will undoubtedly impact community support for extending the plethora of leases of State land for DOD purposes,” listing 14 at risk military properties. The warning, coming from powerful local politicians, must be taken seriously.
Complicating matters, the leases are only a small portion of the military’s long-term land-use challenges on Hawaii. An enormous amount of military property is on “ceded land,” or land that can be traced back to the Kingdom of Hawaii. These properties encompass 175 square miles, and if civil-military relations continue to sour, the State may face real pressure to try and reclaim those “lost” lands, kicking the U.S. military to the curb.
What Can The Biden Administration Do Now?
While the Department of Defense is working hard to solve the Red Hill water crisis, the somnolent Biden Administration must awaken and get engaged in the nitty-gritty of Pentagon management. It’s not what the White House may want to do, but, at this point, “swift and definitive” action is the only path to better civil-military relations on Hawaii.
Failure to act will cause irreparable damage to America’s security in the Pacific. But the Administration is not helpless. Outside of forcing Red Hill to close, they have several options to demonstrate commitment and accountability.
First, the Administration should immediately appoint someone outside of the Navy and Department of Defense to oversee or monitor the Navy’s investigation into Red Hill. The Secretary of Interior, Deb Haaland, might be particularly appropriate for this role. As a Native American and an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, native Hawaiians may find Secretary Haaland to be a more credible representative than anybody the Department of Defense might nominate. The Department of Defense might object, but, at this point, outside monitoring is important. While there is no indication that the Navy’s investigation into the cause of the latest Red Hill leak is compromised, the investigation and report will controversial. Any hint that the Navy is trying to wriggle out of accountability will be met with howls of public outrage.
That’s not to slight the Navy, but, to be frank, the Navy’s management record on Red Hill is pretty poor. Adding some high-level “out of agency” oversight adds public credibility and might also help convince Hawaii that the Federal Government is doing the right thing. Outside oversight also forces both the Navy and the Department of Defense to realize the seriousness of the problem they have at Red Hill.
Outside of the investigation, the Navy’s public relations efforts have been a disaster. They cry out for accountability. Certainly, after trying everything else, the Navy eventually gets things right, but, given the enormous stakes on Hawaii, the constant process of taking three steps forward and two steps back is tremendously damaging. Those directly responsible for poor Navy messaging and a constant stream of public relations mistakes must be quickly and publicly cashiered.
James Balocki, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Installations, Energy and Facilities is a particularly good example of someone who should be called to demonstrate his skills elsewhere. In December, he caused an uproar by claiming the petroleum contamination in the Navy’s drinking water system didn’t constitute a crisis, and then testified that he was not aware of anyone who had gotten sick from the water contamination. To borrow sentiment from the James Bond movie Casino Royale, “in the old days,” if a bureaucrat did “something that embarrassing, he’d have the good sense to defect.”
And then, finally, there’s Admiral John C. Aquilino, Commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command and the top leader in town. While Aquilino was not responsible for the leak, he sets the overall tone, and, frankly, the buck has to stop somewhere. As such, he should either step down or be relieved. Such a drastic step may not be fair, but sometimes, leaders need to sacrifice themselves for the good of the team. But there is plenty of cause. With regards to Red Hill, Admiral Aquilino is AWOL, and has completely failed to step up and actively address this dire threat to his command. But accountability likely won’t come from the Navy. As a 1984 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Aquilino’s former Naval Academy classmates Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro (Class of 1983) and Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Mike Gilday (Class of 1985) are probably reluctant to force the Admiral out. Only pressure from the Administration can make it happen.
It is clear that the Red Hill crisis is metastasizing. If the Administration is, at this point, unprepared to force the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility to close, then it must demonstrate accountability by other means. It is time for action. Dithering and further delay puts the military’s position on Hawaii at real risk, jeopardizing Hawaii’s utility as a linchpin of American security.
Forbes · by Craig Hooper · January 31, 2022
11. Powell’s Fed has Asia bracing for a crash
Excerpts:
In recent comments, “Powell effectively admitted the Fed has been behind the curve and now must get its act together to get inflation to more acceptable levels,” says Fawad Razaqzada, an analyst at ThinkMarkets. “If that means upsetting financial markets, then so be it.”
Fair enough. But why, Razaqzada and peers ask, is Powell holding off on making up for lost time until March, the next time Fed policymakers meet? If even Powell seems to be suggesting the Fed should have tightened in the second half of 2021, Asia is at a loss to figure out the logic of US policy.
Long-time Fed watchers like Wall Street strategist Ed Yardeni are perplexed, too, by the mixed signals coming from Powell from day to day. As Yardeni put it: “The labor market is strong. Inflation is a problem. Can we just get on with what needs to be done, please?”
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There’s a risk, too, that having delayed action against inflation, the Powell Fed could easily bumble into a policy error that upends Asia’s 2022.
“The first policy mistake was completely misunderstanding inflation,” says Mohamed El-Erian, economic adviser at Allianz. The Fed, he adds, has “maintained its transitory inflation narrative for 2021 way too long, missing window after window to slowly ease its foot off the stimulus accelerator.”
The longer the Fed leaves its foot on the gas, the greater the risk Asia might go off the road with Team Powell if the most powerful central bank loses control.
Powell’s Fed has Asia bracing for a crash
The longer the US Fed leaves its foot on the gas, the greater the risk Asian markets might swerve off the road
TOKYO – About the only thing US Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the Federal Reserve is behind the inflation curve.
On the left, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and ex-White House economist Jason Furman worry that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell continues to miss the plot. On the right, former Council of Economic Advisers head Glenn Hubbard and monetary guru John Taylor seethe over the Fed slow-walking a tightening cycle that should have begun months ago.
Yet the real confusion is here in Asia, where central banks are doing their jobs in ways Powell won’t. From Seoul to Singapore to Wellington, officials are actively hitting the brakes as inflation risks intensify. They are getting ahead of the inflation curve.
Even Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is taking clear steps toward tapering a US$5 trillion-plus balance sheet. The Fed, meantime, continues to talk about a rate hike. This uncertainty is making for some choppy trading in Asian asset markets.
In recent comments, “Powell effectively admitted the Fed has been behind the curve and now must get its act together to get inflation to more acceptable levels,” says Fawad Razaqzada, an analyst at ThinkMarkets. “If that means upsetting financial markets, then so be it.”
Fair enough. But why, Razaqzada and peers ask, is Powell holding off on making up for lost time until March, the next time Fed policymakers meet? If even Powell seems to be suggesting the Fed should have tightened in the second half of 2021, Asia is at a loss to figure out the logic of US policy.
Long-time Fed watchers like Wall Street strategist Ed Yardeni are perplexed, too, by the mixed signals coming from Powell from day to day. As Yardeni put it: “The labor market is strong. Inflation is a problem. Can we just get on with what needs to be done, please?”
US inflation is spiraling up and up. Photo: AFP
Fear of the fallout
The problem, of course, is that Powell fears the fallout from a rate hike. And he’s hardly alone.
Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who was Democratic president Bill Clinton’s top economist, worries a tightening now would do far-reaching damage. Nor would it fix the supply-chain disruptions partly behind rising inflation, Stiglitz argues.
Powell, though, may be risking something else: the loss of trust in the Fed necessary to support the dollar, manage interest rates and maintain calm in stock markets.
That has hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman at Pershing Square Capital Management arguing that a half-point hike by the Fed could be needed just to “restore its credibility.” He favors a “surprise move to shock and awe the market, which would demonstrate its resolve on inflation.”
But the odds still favor the Fed moving slowly and modestly, 25 basis points at a time. “We think it is unlikely the central bank will open the possibility of a [half-point] hike in March,” says economist Luigi Speranza at BNP Paribas. “We would regard more frequent hikes as the most likely risk.”
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon thinks the truth lies somewhere in between. He says there is “a pretty good chance there will be more than four” rate hikes this year. “This whole notion that somehow it’s going to be sweet and gentle and no one is ever going to be surprised, I think it’s a mistake.”
Asia is not so sure, though. There’s a certain disconnect in how Powell appears to view economic risks, says Hong Kong-based analyst Will Denyer.
“Why the haste if policymakers expect inflation to moderate?” says Denyer of Gavekal Research. “First, they see inflation risks skewed to the upside, as it is not apparent how quickly supply disruptions will clear and wage pressure will ease. Second, the starting point is extremely accommodative monetary policy and high inflation and inflation expectations.”
The trouble for Asia is that all this leaves markets in suspended animation. It might have been less disruptive for the Fed to have tightened in, say, December than the constant drip, drip, drip of news and intrigue between now and March’s policy meeting.
A shopper at a supermarket in Hangzhou city in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, October 15, 2020. Photo: AFP
‘Do I feel lucky?’
As Ian Harnett at Absolute Strategy Research told Bloomberg: “You’ve got to ask yourself just one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ This isn’t just the question that Clint Eastwood famously asks in the film Dirty Harry, it’s also the question facing investors as they look to forecast the number, and timing, of Fed rate moves in 2022, in the light of the uncertainty generated by the recent dramatic Fed pivot.
“Add in uncertainty about when inflation will peak, Omicron, together with whether Russia might invade Ukraine, and successfully forecasting markets looks increasingly like buying a lottery ticket.”
It’s not clear if there will be any winners in Asia. Least of all China, whose leaders have more than enough worries for 2022. From weak global demand to Covid-19 risks as the Winter Olympics begin to rising inflation to domestic challenges facing highly-indebted property developers.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has been easing to safeguard gross domestic product (GDP) and calm credit markets roiled by defaults. Yet a sliding yuan is not necessarily in Beijing’s best interest as the dollar rallies.
“If Powell confirms that rate hikes will begin in March and suggests that they need to aggressively control inflation with more than four rounds of tightening, the US dollar should soar against all of the major currencies,” says analyst Kathy Lien of 60 Second Investor.
A weaker yuan both increases the risks of importing inflation and makes it harder for indebted property developers to make payments on their dollar-denominated debt. It also reduces the purchasing power of China’s fast-growing middle class.
The rest of Asia can’t help but recall the shocks from past Fed tightening campaigns – from 1994 to 2015. This time, that includes risks associated with the end of quantitative easing and formal rate boosts that send US yields skyward.
Jerome Powell will be studying the figures closely before making any move. Photo: WikiCommons
Clear and present danger?
“Powell’s indication that rate hikes and QT might be faster than the market expects certainly raised concerns in Asian equities,” says strategist John Vail at Nikko Asset Management. “Globally, stocks with very high valuations will need to prove that their outlooks are even better than expected in order to avoid even further de-rating.”
International Monetary Fund Asia head Changyong Rhee warns that potential Fed mistakes could be a clear and present danger. “We are not expecting a US monetary normalization to cause big shocks or large capital outflows in Asia.” But, he adds, “emerging Asia’s recovery may be retarded by the higher global interest rates and leverages.”
There’s a risk, too, that having delayed action against inflation, the Powell Fed could easily bumble into a policy error that upends Asia’s 2022.
“The first policy mistake was completely misunderstanding inflation,” says Mohamed El-Erian, economic adviser at Allianz. The Fed, he adds, has “maintained its transitory inflation narrative for 2021 way too long, missing window after window to slowly ease its foot off the stimulus accelerator.”
The longer the Fed leaves its foot on the gas, the greater the risk Asia might go off the road with Team Powell if the most powerful central bank loses control.
12. US military drills with Pacific allies send a message to China, expert says
US military drills with Pacific allies send a message to China, expert says
An F-16 Fighting Falcon from Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, flies over the Philippine Sea for aerial refueling during the Cope North exercise, Feb. 16, 2021. (Rebeckah Medeiros/U.S. Air Force)
TOKYO – Military exercises between the United States and its allies in the Western Pacific, both ongoing and upcoming, send a message to China not to pull a “stunt” to distract people at home, according to a New Zealand-based American security expert.
The U.S. Air Force is about to launch Cope North, a large-scale aerial combat, force employment and disaster relief exercise with Japan and Australia, that will involve more than 2,000 sorties on and around Guam, Pacific Air Forces announced in a statement Saturday.
Fighter aircraft from all three nations will take part in counter-air and close-air support missions, according to the statement. They’ll also practice aerial refueling. Counter air means attacking enemy air bases while close air support involves aircraft attacking enemy targets near friendly ground forces.
“These training missions will conclude with a large force employment exercise designed to enhance readiness and interoperability among the three countries,” the statement said.
Interoperability describes the ability of one country’s armed forces to use another country’s training methods and military equipment.
The drills follow last week’s Keen Edge command post exercise involving U.S. and Japanese forces in Japan and the ongoing Marine Exercise 2022 amphibious-assault training involving U.S. sailors and Marines and local forces in the Philippines.
The exercises send a message to China, New Zealand-based security expert Paul Buchanan said Monday.
Internal troubles such as economic and supply disruptions and coronavirus outbreaks could turn powerful Chinese factions against President Xi Jinping, Buchanan predicted.
The Chinese leader hasn’t left Beijing for 700 days, Foreign Policy reported Friday.
“What do authoritarian leaders do when they are concerned about internal challenges?” Buchanan asked. “They do something outside to distract attention.”
The U.S. and its allies are eager to deter China from “pulling a stunt” in the South China Sea or beyond, he said.
“The possibility of Xi intentionally … using conflict to divert attention from his internal woes have increased dramatically,” he said. “These exercises increase deterrence.”
The Cope North exercise, which runs from Wednesday to Feb. 18, begins with humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief training, according to a Pacific Air Forces statement.
Training will take place at Andersen Air Force Base and Northwest Field on Guam; the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, including Rota, Saipan and Tinian; Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, the statement said.
Over 2,000 sorties are planned across seven islands and 10 airfields. More than 2,500 U.S. airmen, Marines, and sailors will train alongside about 1,000 from Japan and Australia. Approximately 130 aircraft from over 30 units will fly in the exercise, the statement said.
The training begins as drills in Japan and the Philippines end.
U.S. sailors and Marines and Philippine troops will wrap up Marine Exercise 2022 in the Philippines on Wednesday.
The forces, which began training Thursday, have involved warships training at sea, the U.S. Embassy in the Philippines said on its website Friday.
The training includes beach landings, search and seizure of enemy craft and moving troops and equipment, the statement said.
U.S. warships participating include the USS Essex, USS Portland and USS Pearl Harbor carrying troops from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Keen Edge, which began Jan. 23 and wraps up Thursday, involves 500 U.S. personnel and 1,380 Japanese troops at Yokota Air Base and other locations in Japan, along with Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. It aims to increase combat readiness and the ability of U.S. and Japanese Forces to work together, USFJ said in a Jan. 23 statement.
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Seth Robson
13. The United States must put the Navy first
The United States must put the Navy first
As war in Ukraine looms, land warfare is suddenly front and center again in discussions of U.S. national security.
But whatever happens in Ukraine, America’s strategic imperative is at sea. A look at the U.S. Navy — or at a map — makes clear the United States must keep its focus squarely on maritime competition and conflict.
President Joe Biden’s first defense budget, seeking $740 billion for the Department of Defense, was business as usual. The department initially requested $207 billion for the Navy (the Marine Corps included), $204 billion for the Air Force, and $174 billion for the Army — not quite the “rule of thirds,” but close enough. But it’s no longer time for business as usual.
There is no easy way out. Some propose the Department of Defense “divest to invest”— phasing out older programs and weapon systems immediately to free up funds for modernization. Such a strategy, however, reduces current U.S. operational and deterrence capabilities. As Beijing is confronted with its own growing domestic problems — a rapidly aging population, slowing economic growth, and the consequences of the pandemic — it may determine its window of opportunity to achieve its geopolitical goals is closing. Divest to invest may invite unacceptable short-to-medium term risk.
Luckily, America is physically secure thanks to its geography, with friendly and weak neighbors to the north and south and immense oceans to the east and west. A large active-duty army is not needed to protect the United States.
America’s security interests are far better served through deterrence and the projection of power by sea and air. Given the geography of the Indo-Pacific and the reality of future spending constraints, ensuring U.S. naval supremacy over China will require prudent increases to the Navy’s budget at the expense of the Army.
Unfortunately, the United States Navy has, to put it starkly, squandered 40 years of peace. Faced with no major peer competitor for most of that period, a generation of civilian and uniformed Navy leadership indulged in transformational fantasies that yielded neither game-changing technologies nor affordable ships that could fight. The bill has now come due. The failures of the Littoral Combat Ship and DDG-1000 programs, and the serial overwork of an aircraft carrier fleet that may be en route to obsolescence, have yielded a shrinking and increasingly worn out fleet.
Though the U.S. Navy still possesses the world’s most capable fleet, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy is closing the gap. China’s navy has already surpassed America’s in size.
But a strict comparison of navies is misleading. Any conceivable major war with China would be fought in the Western Pacific, where Chinese aircraft, drones, and the roughly 2,000 ballistic missiles of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force would be major factors. America’s Pacific allies would likely be a factor in any fight, but the volume and accuracy of Chinese missiles threatens to change the balance of power in Asia.
The United States Navy is also confronting a second foe every bit as dangerous as China: the defense budget. The Navy has now entered what one retired officer has termed “the Terrible Twenties:” a wholly foreseeable period of declining U.S. naval strength, due to a perfect storm of an aging population, legacy platform retirements and the recapitalization of the Navy’s strategic deterrent force.
There is another major factor to consider: a navy, moreso than any other instrument of military power, cannot be built overnight. It takes time to cut steel and lay keels, never mind build nuclear reactors and train the men to safely run them. Even in World War II, when American industrial capacity was unmatched, the majority of the fleet carriers that won the war in the Pacific had been ordered, and many laid down, before the attack on Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into the war.
The time for temporizing is over. America’s national interests, geography, and fiscal situation point to the urgent necessity for a new maritime strategy. War in Ukraine, should it come, must not disrupt this critical shift. If the Biden administration is committed to checking China’s ambitions and preventing the rise of a hostile Pacific hegemon, it is running out of time to put the Navy first.
Gil Barndollar is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, a think tank. Sascha Glaeser is a research associate at Defense Priorities.
14. The Problem with Permitting Putin’s “Sphere of Influence”
Excerpts:
The progressive-realist preference for granting a revisionist power its desired regional hegemony, explicitly or implicitly, would mean nothing less than the end of the security order that has kept Europe at peace for so long. To claim that Moscow is entitled to a dominant position in its region is therefore not merely to endanger Ukraine. It is to put Europe itself—America’s single most important strategic triumph and asset—at grave risk of returning to its dark past of unrestrained military competition between rival powers.
So far from being a mere border dispute, Russia’s encroachment in Ukraine is a strategic maneuver to snatch a sovereign neighbor’s territory and permanently close NATO’s “open door.” More important still, it’s a dress rehearsal for an era of prolonged Russian belligerence that seeks to vitiate America’s security guarantee. Although Ukraine is not a member of NATO, its status as a sovereign democracy on European soil makes its freedom from Russian domination a baseline test of the enduring stability and coherence of the regional security order. If Russia is permitted to build an undisguised sphere of influence, Putin’s despotism will invariably be bolstered at home and emboldened in its quest to wreck the Western alliance. This example of America’s waning power and purpose will be noticed by other revisionist regimes keen to fashion geopolitical domains of their own.
None of this is to say that war in Ukraine can be deterred with certainty. Too much depends on the interests, desires, and insecurities of one aging autocrat, and the grisly gang that keeps him on the throne. But neither will capitulation guarantee peace, and further war can be averted by the sort of resolve that America has demonstrated abundantly in the past.
The Problem with Permitting Putin’s “Sphere of Influence” - The Bulwark
In the face of aggressive, acquisitive war, will the free world stand together or stand aside?
Shrewd observers of U.S. foreign policy have recently claimed that the country is a superpower without a plan, but the truth is much worse: It’s increasingly apparent that America is a superpower without a coherent purpose.
By all appearances, the United States has lost faith in the global vocation it has shouldered since World War II. In the political establishment and among the general public, Americans have come to doubt the necessity of global engagement in defense of the liberal order—or, more astonishingly, even the desirability of a decent world order in the first place. This is a particular shame as well as a grave danger because the present order is very much an American creation, and it serves the national interest better than any alternative order (or disorder) that may follow the Pax Americana.
This loss of national confidence and purpose begins with the collapse of Soviet communism. At the dawn of the unipolar world, Americans openly began to question the value of global leadership. It came as little surprise that so many Americans yearned for a return to normality at the end of the long twilight struggle, believing that the now-vanished evil empire had provided the only reason (or excuse) for an active role in world affairs. Americans were in no mood to be reminded of the inconvenient fact that the postwar architects of U.S. hegemony originally conceived of this unique international role and responsibility not primarily as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism but rather as a general defense against disorder.
The American elite has also come to doubt the capacity of their nation to remain the preeminent world power after the Cold War—a doubt observers from Robert Taft to George Kennan, lest it be forgotten, harbored at its inception. Three-quarters of a century later, having proved the Cassandras wrong, the United States may at last be on the verge of jettisoning the grand strategy and global responsibilities that have created the greatest period of peace and prosperity in world history.
Podcast · January 31 2022
Don't only talk to people you agree with politically. Break free from the echo chamber, and help cure our tribalism. Wil...
The new (or at least newly ascendant) American aversion to maintaining world order has been disclosed yet again by the tacit acknowledgement on both left and right of Russia’s “sphere of influence.” An emerging coalition of progressives and obdurate paleoconservatives has advocated that Russia be given a veto over Ukraine’s political system and military alliances—to the point of granting Moscow the right to dismember its neighbor. According to the advocates of retrenchment, the alternative to this accommodation is to embroil or risk embroiling the United States and NATO in a shooting war with the world’s largest nuclear power.
According to this view, the unfolding crisis in Ukraine is little more than a border dispute on Europe’s periphery, a quarrel in a far-away country, one might say, “between people of whom we know nothing.” From the self-styled “realist” perspective, the coincidence of Russian might and Russian ambition today furnishes a good opportunity for a declining American hegemon to return to a more modest role in a multipolar world where a “concert” of nations maintain a balance of power. (Traditionally, “realists” are attached to a decidedly elastic definition of “order” that includes the accommodation of hostile powers and the outbreak of civilization-destroying wars.) From the self-consciously progressive perspective, the imperial republic that once proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine can scarcely deign to lecture the Kremlin about the desire for greater strategic depth. Following the logic, it is not only strategically sound but morally right for the Western powers to accede to Russia’s demands and cut Ukraine loose—the Ukrainians will simply have to pay the price for this act of Western righteousness.
This line of thinking is both morally and analytically wrong. A sphere of influence around an imperial republic, whatever its flaws, is not the same as a sphere of influence around an empire of despotism. On this score, the progressive charge of hypocrisy against the United States falls flat. This prejudice leads to a completely amoral view of international politics in which the structures matter for everything and the substance for nothing. The most that can be said for the “realists” is that they do not pretend that moral disapproval of Russian bullying would be effective in itself.
The alleged prudence of catering to Putin’s designs in Ukraine is not evident to those who recall that Russia’s historical sphere of influence does not end with Ukraine, but begins there. Since the Russian empire has penetrated deep into the heart of Central Europe, it’s worth asking what possible concessions the West could offer that would quell Russians’ sense of grievance or satisfy Putin’s ambitions. When an American general at the Potsdam Conference tried to flatter Stalin by observing how agreeable it was to see the Red Army in Berlin, the Stalin replied bitterly, “Tsar Alexander I reached Paris.”
Nor are the “bloodlands” on the eastern reaches of Europe, to purloin historian Timothy Snyder’s apt description, the only possible theater of irredentism: Russia has historically made claims to the entire South Caucasus, Moldova, Finland, enormous swaths of Central Asia, and chunks of Northeast Asia. A predictable consequence of granting Moscow a “sphere of influence” is that the Kremlin will endeavor to make it as voluminous as possible. By undermining the security of Russia’s neighbors, and driving them to reinforce their own defense, this policy would stimulate the very insecurity that it seeks to stifle.
Much confusion has surrounded the separate but linked issues in the current crisis. Ukraine is under threat of invasion and domination—exactly the kind of destabilizing and aggressive war the United States and its European allies are determined to prevent. Ukraine is a hostage; NATO is both the interlocutor and the ransom. Putin has asked NATO to violate its core principles and the defense of its member states in exchange for a promise (of dubious value) not to invade Ukraine.
Even if Ukraine were sacrificed to soothe Russian fears and sate its ambitions, what will stop the next ransom from doubling in price? If NATO has withdrawn all military presence from Poland in exchange for guaranteeing, at least for a time, Ukraine’s independence, how much will NATO be forced to give up for Poland’s sovereignty? The borderlands between the Black and Baltic Seas are dense with potential hostages.
Experience seems to teach us that there is no stable balance of power in Europe without the United States. Europe’s postwar paradise has only been made possible by the extravagant American commitment—backed by force and the threat of force—to a continent “whole, free, and at peace.” Ukraine isn’t part of NATO, as the Kremlin apologists on the Greenwald left and the Carlson right never tire of reminding us, but no credible voice has called for dispatching U.S. forces to Ukraine outside of its potential future admission to NATO.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States pressed the cause of inviolable sovereignty for the formerly captive nations behind the Iron Curtain. This project, along with spreading democracy and economic liberalism, was intended to suppress incipient threats in a region that generated major security challenges in the past. To allow Putin’s grasping dictatorship to undo that progress in service of a new balance of power would be an invitation to ceaseless conflict.
It’s worth remembering that this project to thwart the re-emergence of spheres of influence was not limited to the frontiers of NATO. Kuwait was not a member of the Atlantic alliance when the United States sent a vast expeditionary force to roll back Saddam Hussein’s aggression in the Persian Gulf. In 1996, China was deterred from coercing Taiwan not merely by the fact of U.S. military primacy but by Washington’s explicit threat of force. Today, it would be a colossal disaster for a European democracy to be destroyed simply because the “free world”—if that quaint expression still applies—lacked the will to maintain the peace.
The progressive-realist preference for granting a revisionist power its desired regional hegemony, explicitly or implicitly, would mean nothing less than the end of the security order that has kept Europe at peace for so long. To claim that Moscow is entitled to a dominant position in its region is therefore not merely to endanger Ukraine. It is to put Europe itself—America’s single most important strategic triumph and asset—at grave risk of returning to its dark past of unrestrained military competition between rival powers.
So far from being a mere border dispute, Russia’s encroachment in Ukraine is a strategic maneuver to snatch a sovereign neighbor’s territory and permanently close NATO’s “open door.” More important still, it’s a dress rehearsal for an era of prolonged Russian belligerence that seeks to vitiate America’s security guarantee. Although Ukraine is not a member of NATO, its status as a sovereign democracy on European soil makes its freedom from Russian domination a baseline test of the enduring stability and coherence of the regional security order. If Russia is permitted to build an undisguised sphere of influence, Putin’s despotism will invariably be bolstered at home and emboldened in its quest to wreck the Western alliance. This example of America’s waning power and purpose will be noticed by other revisionist regimes keen to fashion geopolitical domains of their own.
None of this is to say that war in Ukraine can be deterred with certainty. Too much depends on the interests, desires, and insecurities of one aging autocrat, and the grisly gang that keeps him on the throne. But neither will capitulation guarantee peace, and further war can be averted by the sort of resolve that America has demonstrated abundantly in the past.
15. The Betrayal (Afghanistan) by George Packer
A very long read.
Conclusion:
The U.S. government is not making it easy. It is chartering flights out of Kabul for SIV holders and others of high priority, but the effort is so sluggish, and the rules for authorizing passengers so onerous, that State Department officials have turned to private groups for help evacuating Afghans they know. At the same time, the department is reluctant to negotiate landing rights in other countries for private charters. Before Afghans can apply for the priority refugee program they must somehow get out of Afghanistan, but the U.S. government won’t help them leave. The most direct way to bring at-risk Afghans to the U.S. is through a program called humanitarian parole; at least 35,000 Afghans have applied, for a fee of $575 each, but the Department of Homeland Security is processing the backlog neither quickly nor generously.
“The State Department always insists that we have to play by the rules,” Representative Malinowski, who once served in it, told me. The department celebrates Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who forged passports to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. “But if any State Department employee tried to pull what Raoul Wallenberg did, he’d be fired in three seconds.” This was the thinking of the period before the August evacuation. “And then, for two glorious weeks, we threw out the rules.” Now the department is back to its risk-averse, pre-August thinking, with an obstacle for every human need. “Bureaucracy is killing more people than the Taliban,” Mary Beth Goodman, the State Department official, told me.
To Spence it seems as if the U.S. government has moved on. “Afghanistan keeps descending into hell, and what are people like us supposed to do?” she asked. “Are we supposed to leave these people who helped Americans, including people we served with personally, behind? I’m a very idealistic person in some ways, and I understand we can’t save everyone, and there are crises everywhere. But there was a 20-year war, and that changed a lot of people here. A lot of people served and went there. Our policy, our money, went there. Do we just abandon the people? I don’t think that’s who we are as a country. I don’t think that’s who we should be as a country.”
The Betrayal
America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan added moral injury to military failure. But a group of soldiers, veterans, and ordinary citizens came together to try to save Afghan lives and salvage some American honor.
I.
The End
It took four presidencies for America to finish abandoning Afghanistan. George W. Bush’s attention wandered off soon after American Special Forces rode horseback through the northern mountains and the first schoolgirls gathered in freezing classrooms. Barack Obama, after studying the problem for months, poured in troops and pulled them out in a single ambivalent gesture whose goal was to keep the war on page A13. Donald Trump cut a deal with the Taliban that left the future of the Afghan government, Afghan women, and al‑Qaeda to fate. By then most Americans were barely aware that the war was still going on. It fell to Joe Biden to complete the task.
On April 13, 2021, the day before Biden was to address the country about Afghanistan, a 33-year-old Marine Corps veteran named Alex McCoy received a call from a White House speechwriter named Carlyn Reichel. McCoy led an organization of progressive veterans called Common Defense, which had been waging a lobbying campaign with the slogan “End the forever war.” McCoy and his colleagues believed that more American bloodshed in a conflict without a definable end could no longer be justified. “The president has made his decision,” Reichel told McCoy, “and you’ll be very happy with it.” She explained that it was now too late to withdraw all troops by May 1, the deadline in the agreement signed in early 2020 by the Trump administration and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar. But the withdrawal of the last several thousand American troops would begin on that date, in the hope that the Taliban would not resume attacks, and it would end by September 11, the 20th anniversary of the day the war began.
On April 14, Biden, speaking from the White House, raised his hands and declared, “It’s time to end the forever war.” The withdrawal, he said, would not be “a hasty rush to the exit. We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” The president ended his speech, as he often does, with the invocation “May God protect our troops.” Then he went to pay his respects at Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, where many of the dead from the 9/11 wars are buried.
Afterward, Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, said, “When someone writes a book about this war, it’s going to begin on September 11, 2001, and it’s going to end on the day Joe Biden said, ‘We’re coming home.’ ” With firm resolve, Biden had done the hard thing. The rest would be logistics, while the administration turned its attention to domestic infrastructure. Alex McCoy framed the front page of the next day’s New York Times and hung it on the wall of his Harlem apartment.
But the war wasn’t over—not for Afghans, not even for some Americans.
A week after Biden’s speech, a group of refugee advocates—many of them veterans of the 9/11 wars—released a report on the dire situation of the thousands of Afghans who’d worked at great risk for the United States during its two decades in their country. In 2009, Congress had created the Special Immigrant Visa to honor the service of qualified Afghans by bringing them to safety in the U.S. But the SIV program set up so many procedural hurdles—Form DS-230, Form I-360, a recommendation from a supervisor with an unknown email address, a letter of employment verification from a long-defunct military contractor, a statement describing threats—that combat interpreters and office assistants in a poor and chaotic war zone couldn’t possibly hope to clear them all without the expert help of immigration lawyers, who themselves had trouble getting answers. The program, chronically understaffed and clogged with bureaucratic choke points across multiple agencies, seemed designed to reject people. Year after year, administrations of both parties failed to grant even half the number of visas allowed by Congress—and sometimes granted far less—or to meet its requirement that cases be decided within nine months. By 2019, the average wait time for an applicant was at least four years.
Toward the end of 2019, Representative Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat, visited the U.S. embassy in Kabul and found a skeletal staff working on visas only part-time. “This was no accident, by the way,” Crow told me. “This was a long-term Stephen Miller project to destroy the SIV program and basically shut it off.” Miller, the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim Trump adviser, along with allies throughout the executive branch, added so many new requirements that amid the pandemic the program nearly came to a halt. By the time Biden gave his speech, at least 18,000 desperate Afghans and tens of thousands of family members stood in a line that was barely moving. Many feared that the Americans would now leave without them.
Najeeb Monawari had been waiting for his visa for more than a decade. He was born in 1985, the oldest son among 10 children of a bus-mechanic father and a mother who devoted herself to keeping them alive amid the lethal hazards of Kabul. He grew up in a neighborhood turned to apocalyptic rubble by the civil war of the early 1990s. He and his friends took turns walking point along mined streets on their way to swim in the Kabul River. During the Taliban’s rule, his family was under constant threat because of their origins in the Panjshir Valley, the last base of the Northern Alliance resistance.
With the arrival of the Americans in 2001, power flipped and Panjshiris became the top dogs. “We were the winners, and Panjshir Valley people were misusing their power,” Monawari told me, “driving cars wildly in the road, beating people. We were the king of the city.” In 2006, barely 20, Monawari lied to his parents about his destination and traveled to Kandahar, the Pashtun heartland of the Taliban, where he signed on with a military contractor as an interpreter for Canadian forces. “I spoke three English words and no Pashto,” he said. But his work ethic made him so popular that, after a year with the Canadians, Monawari was snatched away by U.S. Army Green Berets. He spent much of the next four years as a member of 12-man teams going out on nonstop combat missions in Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces.
In the Special Forces, Monawari found his identity. The Green Berets were so demanding that most interpreters soon washed out, but the Americans loved him and he loved them. On missions he carried a gun and used it, came under fire—he was wounded twice—and rescued other team members, just like the Americans. He wore his beard full and his hair shaved close like them; he tried to walk like them, bulk up like them, even think like them. In pictures he is indistinguishable from the Green Berets. The violence of the missions—and the fear and hatred he saw in the eyes of local elders—sometimes troubled him, and as a Panjshiri and a combat interpreter, he carried an automatic death sentence if he ever fell into the hands of the Taliban. But he was proud to help give Pashtun girls the right to attend school.
In 2009, when a team leader told Monawari about the SIV program, he applied and collected glowing letters of recommendation from commanding officers. He wanted to become an American citizen, join the U.S. military, and come back to Afghanistan as a Green Beret. “This was totally the plan,” he told me. “I was dreaming to go to America, to hold the flag in a picture.”
Monawari’s application disappeared into the netherworld of the Departments of State and Homeland Security, where it languished for the next decade. He checked the embassy website five times a day. He sent dozens of documents by military air to the immigration service center in Nebraska, but never received clear answers. His medical exam kept expiring as his case stalled, so he had to borrow money to take it again and again. “We have reviewed the State Department records and confirm that your SIV case is still pending administrative processing in order to verify your qualifications for this visa,” he was told in 2016.
In January 2019, Monawari was summoned for an interview—his third—at the embassy in Kabul. By then he had gone to work for Doctors Without Borders as a logistician, managing warehouses and supply chains. The carnage of fighting had traumatized him—he found it impossible to be alone—and he liked the gentle, unselfish spirit of the humanitarians. He rose through the organization to overseas positions in Sierra Leone, Lebanon, and finally a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh. He flew back to Afghanistan for the interview at the embassy and found himself faced with a consular officer who had been angered by the previous applicant. When it was Monawari’s turn, she almost shouted her questions, and other Afghans in the room could hear the details of his case. “Can you calm down?” he asked her.
“Oh, am I too loud?” The interview was brief and unfriendly.
In April, Monawari received a notice from the Department of Homeland Security, headed “Intent to Revoke”: “It was confirmed by Mission Essential Personnel that you failed multiple polygraphs and background investigations.” Monawari had taken regular polygraphs with the Green Berets, and a few times they had come back inconclusive before he ultimately passed. He wrote to explain this to DHS, though he didn’t know what long-lost evidence he could submit to prove it. “It is very sad, I have been waiting more than 8 years to move to a safe place (USA),” Monawari wrote. “Please be fair with me I was wounded twice in the mission and I worked very hard for US special force to save their life please check all my recommendation letters (attached) don’t leave me behind :(”
A month later, a second notice arrived: “The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has determined that you worked as a procurement manager and not as a translator/interpreter.” To limit immigration, the Trump administration had restricted SIVs mostly to interpreters. Monawari had served for three years as a combat interpreter with the Green Berets, but his final year as a procurement manager was used to disqualify him. To deny him a visa, the U.S. government erased all his shared sacrifice with Americans who might not have survived in Afghanistan without him. He would have to try again from zero.
The subject is almost too unbearable for Monawari to discuss. “When I received the revocation—denied for nine years, 10 years—it’s so painful,” he said. “SIV is like a giant, a monster, something scary. There is no justice in this world. There is no justice, and I have to accept that.” By 2019 his beard was going white, though he was only 34. He attributes every aged hair to the Special Immigrant Visa.
In October 2020, Kim Staffieri, an SIV advocate with the Association of Wartime Allies, phoned her friend Matt Zeller, a former CIA officer and Army major. Zeller had made the cause of America’s Afghan allies his full-time passion as a means to atone for an air strike in Afghanistan in 2008 that had killed 30 women and children, for which he felt some responsibility. His frenetic work on the issue had made him so sick with ulcers that he’d had to step away in 2019. Staffieri was calling to get him back on the field.
“Matt, it doesn’t matter who wins the election; we’re leaving next year,” she said. “The SIV program is broken, and we don’t have enough time to get them all out. We’re going to need to evacuate.”
Zeller proposed that they draft a white paper with ideas for the next administration. They wrote it over the holidays. Their recommendations included the mass evacuation of SIV applicants to safety in a U.S. territory, such as Guam, while their cases were processed. The “Guam option” had two successful precedents: Operation New Life, in 1975, which evacuated 130,000 South Vietnamese to Guam when their country fell to North Vietnam; and Operation Pacific Haven, in 1996, when the U.S. brought 6,600 Kurds facing extermination by the army of Saddam Hussein out of northern Iraq.
Staffieri and Zeller were finishing their white paper as President Biden took office. Three of Zeller’s friends occupied key positions in the administration, and on February 9 he sent them copies. Two of them—one a good friend of Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser—never replied. The third promised to bring the proposals to a top aide of the newly confirmed secretary of state, Antony Blinken. But nothing came of it.
The report was published on April 21 by the Truman Center for National Policy, Human Rights First, and Veterans for American Ideals. The ties between these organizations and the new administration were nearly incestuous. Blinken, a longtime supporter of refugees, had been vice chair of the board of Human Rights First; Sullivan had served on the Truman board, as had his top deputy, Jon Finer. A former correspondent with The Washington Post, Finer had helped start an organization called the Iraqi (later International) Refugee Assistance Project in 2008, while he was in law school. IRAP had become the leading legal-assistance group for SIV applicants. Samantha Power, the author of , had sat on IRAP’s board; she was the new head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The highest level of the Biden administration was staffed with a humanitarian dream team—the best people to make Afghan allies a top priority.
The outside advocates drew on their personal relationships with insiders to lobby for urgent action. “By every back channel available, we let people know,” Mike Breen, the chief executive of Human Rights First, and an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, told me. Breen was a co-founder of IRAP in law school with Finer. “The Guam option has been in the ether for a long time. It’s something that we talked about a lot.”
Many of the advocates were in favor of ending the war. With the sand now running out, they made their case for early evacuations on moral and strategic grounds. If, on the way out of Afghanistan, America broke its promises to people at great risk of revenge killings, its already battered international reputation would be further damaged. Such a failure would also injure the morale of American troops, who were now staring at a lost war, and whose code of honor depended on leaving no one behind.
The advocates omitted one person from their calculations: the president. But Biden’s history in this area should have troubled them.
On April 14, 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions raced toward Saigon, the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware was summoned to the White House. President Gerald Ford pleaded with him and other senators for funding to evacuate Vietnamese allies. Biden refused. “I feel put-upon,” he said. He would vote for money to bring out the remaining Americans, but not one dollar for the locals. On April 23, as South Vietnam’s collapse accelerated, Biden repeated the point on the Senate floor. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats, he said. That was the job of private organizations. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”
This episode did not define Biden’s career in foreign affairs—he went on to build a long record of internationalism. In the 1990s he pressed for U.S. military intervention in Bosnia during its genocidal civil war. In the winter of 2002, after the fall of the Taliban, he went to Kabul and found himself confronted by a young girl who stood straight up at her desk in an unfinished schoolroom with a single light bulb and no heat. “You cannot leave,” she told the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“I promise I’ll come back,” Biden said.
“You cannot leave,” the girl repeated. “They will not deny me learning to read. I will read, and I will be a doctor like my mother. I will. America must stay.”
Biden recalled the encounter for me in an interview the following year. He interpreted the girl’s words to mean: “Don’t fuck with me, Jack. You got me in here. You said you were going to help me. You better not leave me now.” It was, he said, a “catalytic event for me,” and upon his return to Washington he proposed spending $20 million on 1,000 new Afghan schools—modest nation-building. But there was little interest from either the White House or Congress.
When I interviewed Biden again in 2006, the disaster of the Iraq War and the persistence of corruption and violence in Afghanistan were turning him against armed humanitarianism. At a dinner in Kabul in 2008, when President Hamid Karzai refused to admit to any corruption, Biden threw down his napkin and walked out. He was finished with Afghanistan.
In late 2010, Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, came into Vice President Biden’s office to talk about the situation of Afghan women. According to an audio diary Holbrooke kept, Biden insisted, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights.” (Biden’s son Beau, a member of the Delaware National Guard, had recently been deployed to Iraq for a year.) He wanted every American troop out of Afghanistan, regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else. When Holbrooke asked about the obligation to people who had trusted the U.S. government, Biden said, “Fuck that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam; Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.” During the 2020 campaign, an interviewer repeated some of these quotes to Biden and asked if he believed he would bear responsibility for harm to Afghan women after a troop withdrawal and the return of the Taliban. Biden bristled and his eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t!” he snapped, and put his thumb and index finger together. “Zero responsibility.”
Human rights alone were not grounds for committing American troops—it was a solid argument, based on national interest. But it didn’t explain the hardness, the combativeness. Questions about Afghanistan and its people made Biden rear up and dig in. During the 2020 campaign he was seen as deeply empathetic, but the fierce attachments of “Middle-Class Joe” are parochial. They come from personal ties, not universal concerns: his family, his hometown, his longtime advisers, his country, its troops. The Green Beret interpreter and the girl in the unfinished schoolroom now stood outside the circle of empathy.
II.
“Traitors”
On January 20, 2021, an Afghan named Khan was waiting to celebrate the inauguration of President Biden when he received news he’d been awaiting for three years: His SIV application had cleared an important step, approval from the U.S. embassy. (For his family’s safety, I’m not using his full name.) Khan, a 30-year-old employee of a U.S. military contractor, lived in a village in southeastern Afghanistan with his wife, their 2-year-old son, a dog, two cats, and extended family in a house next to an orchard of almond and apple trees. He had received three death threats from the Taliban and survived three suicide bombings and four armed assaults that had killed scores of people. The Trump years had been disastrous for SIV applicants like Khan. Ten minutes after receiving the longed-for email, he was thrilled to watch the swearing-in of the new American president.
Mina, Khan’s 22-year-old wife, who was pregnant with their second child, had 10 family members working for the Americans. This was unusual for a family of Pashtuns, and dangerous in a region where the Taliban controlled much of the countryside. Her sister’s husband, Mohammad, had worked for several years at the U.S. embassy and was now employed in the same military office as Khan. Mohammad had been waiting on his SIV application for 10 years. The previous October, Taliban insurgents had killed his uncle, nephew, and cousin at a wedding ceremony where they had intended to kill him. On January 27, Mohammad was driving to the office with his 10-year-old son when a Toyota Corolla blocked his way. From behind a low concrete wall two gunmen opened fire. Mohammad managed to drive 50 feet before a stream of bullets cut him down. When his wife heard the news, she ran a mile barefoot to the hospital, but by the time she got there Mohammad was dead.
Their son stopped speaking for a week. When he was finally able to describe the attack, he repeated the words that the Talibs had yelled: “Where are the American forces to save you? Where are their helicopters? Where are their airplanes? You’re an infidel, a traitor! You helped them for a decade! Where are they now?”
If not for an errand in Kabul, Khan would have been in the car with his brother-in-law. He started working from home, and he and Mina left his village and moved between rented houses in the provincial capital. They took shifts on the roof day and night to keep watch for strangers who might try to plant an explosive in the yard. In the spring, the Taliban closed in on the city. One night in May, Khan’s dog barked incessantly, and the next morning Khan found a note at his back gate. It said: “You have been helping U.S. occupier forces, and you have been providing them with intelligence information. You are an ally and spy of infidels. We will never leave you alive and will not have mercy on your family, because they are supporting you. Your destiny will be like your brother-in-law’s.” He went around to check the front gate. A grenade was wired to the bolt, set to explode when the gate was opened.
Khan and Mina moved to another rented house. In June, Talibs raided his family home in the village. They expelled Khan’s parents and siblings, smashed windows, destroyed furniture, stole Mina’s jewelry and Khan’s car, and burned all of his books.
SIV applicants and their families numbered about 80,000 people. But after 20 years, far more Afghans than these had put themselves in danger by joining the American project in their country: rights activists, humanitarian workers, journalists, judges, students and teachers at American-backed universities, special-forces commandos. A full accounting would reach the hundreds of thousands. Many of them were women, and most were under 40—the generation of Afghans who came of age in the time of the Americans.
The U.S. and its international partners had failed to achieve most of their goals in Afghanistan. The Afghan government and armed forces remained criminally weak, hollowed out by corruption and tribalism; violence kept increasing; the Taliban were taking district after district. But something of value—always fragile and dependent on foreigners—had been accomplished. “We created a situation that enabled the Afghans to change their own society,” Mark Jacobson, an Army veteran and former civilian adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, told me. “We created a situation that enabled the Afghans to nation-build.”
After the U.S. and the Taliban signed their agreement in Doha in February 2020, attacks against American troops stopped—but hundreds of Afghans in civil society, especially women, were targeted in a terrifying campaign of assassinations that shattered what was left of public trust in the Afghan government and seemed to show what lay in store after the Americans left. Carter Malkasian, the author of The American War in Afghanistan, who worked for years as a civilian adviser to the U.S. military and later spoke with Taliban negotiators during the peace talks, told me they never expressed any mercy toward Afghans who’d worked with the Americans: “The Taliban have always been very lenient toward the killing and execution of people they consider spies.”
In a restored Islamic Emirate, everyone’s fate would be up to the Taliban. Not just to the political leaders in Doha and Kabul, but to local gunmen in remote provinces with no media around, carrying out the will of God, settling scores, or just enjoying themselves. Some Afghans would be marked for certain death. Many others would face the destruction of their hopes and dreams. No law required the U.S. government to save a single one—only a moral debt did. But just as ordinary Talibs could act on their own to punish “traitors,” so could ordinary Americans try on their own to help their friends.
In July, the Taliban conquered the home district of Wazir Nazary, a 40-year-old Afghan woman. Taliban assailants broke into her home and shot her in the face, wounding both eyes. (Victor J. Blue)
A U.S. Army captain I will call Alice Spence knew a group of Afghan women who were especially endangered. (Because she is still active-duty military, she asked for anonymity.) Spence, from a nonmilitary family in New England, had attended an Ivy League college. At 27, in the summer of 2014, she quit her job at an accounting firm and joined the Army. The recruiter warned that she wouldn’t get very far—she was too old and barely made the minimum weight requirement (her wrists and biceps were about the same size). But Spence became an officer and deployed to Afghanistan, where she trained Afghan units called Female Tactical Platoons.
FTPs were attached to Special Operations Forces and went on missions with male commandos—American and Afghan men and women flying on the same helicopters, humping heavy kits up the same mountains, the women joining the men on violent night raids against Taliban or Islamic State targets. The main job of the female troops was to search and question local women and children, but they also fired their weapons and were fired upon. The FTPs were particularly hated by the Taliban for being elite troops, for being women, and for being overwhelmingly Hazara—the Shiite minority that the Taliban continually targeted with suicide bombings and assassinations.
Hawa, a young Hazara woman from Bamiyan, in the center of the country, joined the army at age 18, in 2015. She loved watching war movies, and when military recruiters visited her high school she was drawn to the uniforms, the weapons, the bravery, the chance to serve her country. (I am using only her first name for her family’s safety.) Hawa’s parents vigorously opposed her choice—the army was too dangerous for their daughter. But she was determined. “It doesn’t matter if you say no,” Hawa told them. “You will see when I go there.”
Lieutenant Hawa met Captain Spence at Bagram Air Base. “Oh my God, you’re an FTP?” Spence asked her, laughing. “You’re so short. How did you get into the military?” Hawa replied that Spence looked like a skeleton and gave her the call sign Eskelet; Spence’s for Hawa was Tarbooz, for the watermelon she loved to eat at the base’s dining facility.
Spence formed a close bond with Hawa and another FTP member named Mahjabin. The women exchanged language lessons, and Spence learned a variety of jokes and vulgarities in Dari. They worked out together, shared midnight meals, and fell into hysterics over whoopee cushions.
The Afghan women saw the war with the fatalism of hard experience. They expected no final victory, only a long, perhaps permanent struggle to hold on to the gains for which they’d sacrificed so much. “I truly loved, admired, and respected them,” Spence told me. “There’s very few bonds that exist on this Earth like those between people who walk towards death together.”
After the Doha agreement, American Special Forces stopped going on missions against the Taliban with the Afghans. In the summer of 2020, Spence, now stationed in Hawaii, got a message from Hawa. Talibs had told the imam of the Shiite mosque in her family’s Kabul neighborhood that they would kill any local Hazara soldiers they might later find if he didn’t give up their names now. Hawa asked for Spence’s help to get out of Afghanistan. Spence put together an SIV application, but it was rejected—as a member of the Afghan National Army, Hawa lacked a letter from a U.S. employer.
After Biden declared the end of the war in April, Spence began to panic. “Hawa my friend are you still in Afghanistan?” she wrote in June. “I need to get you out somehow. I will try.”
“Please talk to a lawyer tell him/her how you can help me to get to the USA,” Hawa replied. “I know it is difficult but I need you to go out. Here is very dangerous for me now I need your help dear. I will compensation when I come to there.”
“No compensation, you are my azizam,” Spence wrote—“my dear.”
Spence and a few other female soldiers collected a list of FTPs in need of visas. They wrote their own employment-verification letters on Army letterhead. With Mahjabin’s help, they tracked down elusive birth dates, regularized spellings of Afghan names, and gathered details about threats. “Two months ago, the Taliban made three big explosions in the school nearest my house,” Hawa wrote in her statement. “My younger sister was there, but survived. Many of her classmates died in the attack.” (The bombings killed at least 90 people, most of them Hazara schoolgirls.) “She is very scared and cannot go to school anymore. They also killed my cousin in the explosion. I know they will kill me too if they find me.”
Spence and her colleagues assembled packets of documents and fed them into the sluggish gears of the bureaucracy as the last American troops left Afghanistan.
III.
“Optics”
On April 21, one week after Biden’s speech, 16 members of the House of Representatives—10 Democrats and six Republicans, led by Jason Crow and Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat—announced the formation of the Honoring Our Promises Working Group. Its purpose was to offer bipartisan support for bringing Afghan allies to safety. “The goal was: Let’s not let politics get wrapped up in this,” Peter Meijer, a Michigan Republican and an Iraq War veteran, told me. “ ‘Honor our promises! This shouldn’t be that hard’ was the sentiment that many of us had.” The next day, April 22, General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. of Central Command affirmed that the military, if so ordered, would be able to bring Afghans out of harm’s way as it withdrew.
At the White House, Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, held meetings on Afghanistan with the No. 2 officials from relevant agencies at least once a week. The subject of SIVs was also discussed at meetings of Cabinet principals led by Jake Sullivan. These discussions focused largely on ways to improve the visa program—adding staff in Kabul and Washington, identifying choke points, speeding up processing. But bringing all the SIV applicants to safety would still take at least two years. And it would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of other Afghans, who had American affiliations but were ineligible for the visas, with no hope of getting out. Advocates pressed the administration to create a new program that would give these Afghans priority access as refugees to the U.S.
It was too late to rely on fixing a broken bureaucracy. A catastrophe was coming. But April turned to May, American troops began to leave Afghanistan, and still the fate of endangered Afghans remained unclear. “Studying a problem for too long is an excuse to do nothing,” Becca Heller, a co-founder of IRAP who is now its executive director, told me. “You don’t study a problem in an emergency.”
IRAP and other groups created an unusual coalition of veteran, humanitarian, and religious organizations called Evacuate Our Allies. They were given meetings with mid-level White House officials who listened and took notes, saying little. At one meeting, when an advocate mentioned that some NATO allies were already bringing Afghans to their countries, an official suddenly perked up: “Which countries are willing to take people?” The official had misunderstood—the allies were taking their own Afghan partners, not America’s.
By late May, American troops were leaving Afghanistan so quickly that the last ones—except for a force of about 1,000 to protect the embassy and the airport—would be out by early July, far sooner than Biden’s September 11 deadline. The pace caught the administration’s top policy makers by surprise. “Speed is safety” was the Pentagon’s mantra, and the withdrawal was a superb example of military planning and logistics. Bases across Afghanistan were efficiently packed up, closed down, and handed off to the Afghan army without a single American casualty, and C-17s made hundreds of flights out with the remaining matériel of the American war, computers and coffee makers all accounted for, leaving the Afghans who worked on the bases behind.
On May 26, a small group of senators from both parties met with senior White House advisers in the Situation Room. The senators argued for mass evacuations—not just of SIV applicants, but of other Afghans at risk because of their association with the United States. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut later told me, “I remember our expressing the sense very directly that there had to be an evacuation, beginning right then, of thousands of our Afghan partners to Guam. The response basically was ‘We’re on it. Don’t worry. We know what we’re doing.’ ”
That same day, General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters, “There are plans being developed very, very rapidly here” to bring out “not just interpreters but a lot of other people that have worked with the United States.” Asked about an airlift, Milley replied, “That is a way of doing it.”
But the White House immediately shut the chairman down. “I can tell you that we have no plans for evacuations at this time,” a National Security Council spokesperson said. “The State Department is processing SIV applications in Kabul. They are focused on ensuring that the system functions quickly and consistent with U.S. security and other application requirements.” There would be no more talk of airlifting Afghans to safety.
As troops departed, the Taliban launched a spring offensive and closed in on provincial capitals throughout the south. Insurgent checkpoints blocked the roads to Kabul. “I’m gravely concerned for a very precipitous dissolution of the security environment,” Crow, a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, told me last March. “We are underestimating the timeline for what would happen for a post-U.S. withdrawal in Afghanistan. I think it would be far quicker and more devastating than our current assessments indicate.”
Alex McCoy of Common Defense, the progressive veterans group, viewed the Biden administration as the best hope for a new U.S. foreign policy of restraint, based on human rights, not militarism. This meant not just ending the war but also saving the Afghans whose lives would be jeopardized by an American departure. McCoy was seen as an ally by the NSC; he spoke frequently with a senior official in the White House. On May 24, McCoy texted the official asking to talk about the lack of progress on SIVs. The official called him late that night as she was driving home from the White House.
The official told McCoy that Guam raised legal problems as a U.S. territory. This confused McCoy—the whole point of Guam was to house Afghans somewhere on U.S. territory that was safe for them and that would allay American fears of terror on the mainland while their cases were processed. The governor of Guam, where 8,000 hotel rooms stood empty because of COVID-19, would soon put out a welcome mat. But the State Department was concerned that setting foot in Guam would give Afghans a legal right to claim asylum in the U.S. even if they didn’t pass security vetting. This was a risk that might involve a tiny fraction of refugees, and by law those found to be potential threats would be sent back.
The official moved on to the larger problem. National-security officials were in favor of evacuations, she said—but the president’s political advisers worried that the right would hammer Biden for resettling thousands of Muslims while historic numbers of Central American refugees were already overrunning the southern border. The Afghan evacuees would become part of one giant immigration disaster, exploited hourly on Fox News, when the administration still had to pass a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. “Remember, this kind of crisis was coming at the worst possible time,” a senior administration official told me. “In the spring there was wall-to-wall coverage of the border—‘Who are these people coming into our country?’—and at the same time we’re contemplating bringing in tens of thousands of Afghans. I feel passionately about it, but politically it could be risky.”
The administration countered every urgent proposal with objections so unconvincing that they suggested a deeper, unexpressed resistance. The Guam option—already suspect because of the notional Afghans who might fail screening and need to be returned—was downgraded to highly unlikely by the approach of typhoon season. When, in mid-June, I asked another senior administration official about Afghans who lived outside Kabul and were quickly losing any exit route, he replied, “The vast majority of SIV applicants, based on the work that could be done on this, are in or around Kabul.” This was untrue. Using a Facebook group that his white-paper co-author, Kim Staffieri, had created, Matt Zeller polled SIV applicants and received 4,000 responses: Half of them were outside Kabul, with little or no way of safely reaching the capital with their family; hardly any international flights were taking off from provincial cities.
Vietnam was the nightmare scenario that no one wanted to discuss. In July, when a reporter asked Biden if he foresaw any parallels in Afghanistan, the president retorted the way he had when he’d answered the question about his moral responsibility for Afghan women’s rights: “None whatsoever. Zero.” The Taliban had nothing like the strength of the North Vietnamese army, he insisted. “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan.” But the Vietnam precedent was inescapable. On a trip to Kabul in 2016, I had heard that American diplomats were studying old cables sent between the Saigon embassy and Washington in the last days of South Vietnam. In 2015 the Obama administration had conducted a secret analysis of a potential final drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, and Vietnam always lurked in the background of discussions, according to a former White House official who took part. The analysis showed that, if the U.S. reduced its troops to a reinforced Kabul embassy, there would be two dire consequences. First, the former official told me, the ability to gather intelligence on the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Islamic State would “drop precipitously.”
Second, any evacuation of thousands of Americans from a landlocked country with poor or nonexistent infrastructure would come down to “a single point of failure” at the Kabul airport, and it would be “dangerously vulnerable” to attack. “This was extremely risky short of paratroopers coming in,” the former official said. He added that the disturbing evacuation analysis was likely “a major factor” in Obama’s decision to keep almost 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.
The Vietnam analogy raised the specter of what Washington insiders call “optics.” Mass evacuations would evoke images of one of the most vivid humiliations in the history of U.S. foreign policy, and those images would conjure an impression of chaos and defeat. It would make the reality all too clear: America had lost another war. The September 11 withdrawal date was an effort to blur that fact, suggesting the honorable completion of what had started exactly 20 years before—not its tragic failure.
“Every week, someone was using the word optics to me,” Chris Purdy, the director of Veterans for American Ideals, a project of Human Rights First, told me. “ ‘We have to be concerned about optics.’ I’m thinking, They’re going to be murdered in the streets—that’s pretty bad optics.”
Taliban fighters on top of a Humvee they seized from Afghan forces when they took Kabul (Jim Huylebroek)
Most efforts to avoid bad optics avoid the truth and result in worse optics. In Vietnam, the last American ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, and his boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, believed that early evacuations of South Vietnamese, when the fall of Saigon might be weeks or months off, would cause the government’s abrupt collapse. Biden-administration officials made the same argument about Afghanistan. “The combination of two things—our belief that we had more time, a lot more time, and that we didn’t want to precipitate a crisis of confidence in the government—that’s what led us to the pace at which we were doing this,” Antony Blinken told me. A senior White House official argued that if early evacuations and the announcement of a priority refugee program had been followed by the collapse of the Afghan government, “the charge would have been that we undermined them.” (No White House official would speak with me on the record about Afghanistan.)
In June, Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president, came to the White House and asked Biden to hold off on evacuating Afghans, to avoid initiating mass panic. Afterward, Ghani met with a few members of Congress. Jason Crow used his time to make the case for evacuations. “I know what you’re trying to do, Mr. Crow,” Ghani replied with some heat. “It’s undermining what we’re trying to do in creating some stability and security.” Ghani didn’t move Crow, but he gave the administration another reason not to do what it already didn’t want to do. Biden later made Ghani’s plea public.
The spectacle of airlifts out of Hamid Karzai International Airport, of Afghans from civil society crossing borders to take advantage of a new American refugee program, would indeed have signified a lack of confidence in the Ghani government, and perhaps induced something like the chaos that would come in late summer. But Afghanistan’s fate was sealed the moment Biden gave his speech in April. No one in Washington or Kabul honestly believed that the Afghan government could survive the Americans’ departure. “They were done with us,” Hamdullah Mohib, Ghani’s national security adviser, told me. “The allies were fed up with us, and the Afghan people were also fed up with us.” The pretense of supporting a stable government gave everyone in power a chance to save face at the expense of ordinary Afghans.
The Biden administration thought Kabul wouldn’t fall before 2022. Most outside experts agreed. “I can tell you, having sat through every single meeting that took place on this topic and having read every single intelligence assessment, military document, State Department cable,” the senior White House official told me, “there was nobody anywhere in our government, even up until a day or two before Kabul fell, that foresaw the collapse of the government and army before the end of our troop withdrawal at the end of August, and most of the projections were that there would still be weeks to months before we would face the very real prospect of the collapse of Kabul.”
But while waiting for Kabul to fall, the administration could have timed the military withdrawal to support evacuations, rather than pulling out all the hard assets while leaving all the soft targets behind. It could have created an interagency task force, vested with presidential authority and led by an evacuations czar—the only way to force different agencies to coordinate resources in order to solve a problem that is limited in scope but highly complex. It could have assembled comprehensive lists of thousands of names, locations, email addresses, and phone numbers—not just for interpreters like Khan, but for others at risk, including women like Hawa. It could have begun to quietly organize flights on commercial aircraft in the spring—moving 1,000 people a week—and gradually increased the numbers. It could have used the prospect of lifting sanctions and giving international recognition to a future Taliban government as leverage, demanding secure airfields and safe passage for Afghans whom the Americans wanted to bring out with them. It could have used airfields in Herāt, Mazar-i-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Kandahar while those cities remained out of Taliban control. It could have drawn up emergency plans for Afghan evacuations and rehearsed them in interagency drills. It could have included NATO allies in the planning. It could have shown imagination and initiative. But the administration did none of this.
Instead, it studied the problem in endless meetings. While studying the problem, the government accelerated visa processing and reduced the wait time from four years to just under two. The number of SIV holders and family members reaching the U.S. rose from fewer than 300 a month through the winter and spring to 513 in June. That month, a COVID outbreak at the embassy stopped interviews for several weeks. With Afghanistan visibly collapsing, new applications arrived in record numbers. The administration looked for countries where applicants could be flown and housed while their cases were processed. Negotiations with various European allies, Central Asian countries, and Persian Gulf kingdoms consumed the State Department’s time and energy, but no firm deals were made. Why would other countries accept U.S.-affiliated Afghans whom America regarded as too potentially dangerous to bring onto its own soil?
These efforts were always several steps behind the deteriorating reality in Afghanistan. This sluggishness in the face of impending calamity continued the same self-deception, prevarication, and groupthink—the same inability to grasp the hard truths of Afghanistan—that had plagued the entire 20-year war.
As the advocates’ desperation grew, some of them began to harbor a suspicion that they were being played by the administration—that all the meetings in the Situation Room and the backgrounders with mid-level officials were meant to give an impression of movement that would never result in action.
“What they thought they were going to do was pull all the U.S. assets out, and the Afghan government would hold on long enough so that, when it collapsed, there would be no photographs of the evacuation,” Mike Breen, of Human Rights First, told me. “There wouldn’t be a Saigon moment, because there wouldn’t be any Americans around and any American helicopters to hang off. They thought the Afghan military was going to die in place to buy them time.” This scenario recalled the “decent interval” that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had sought between the end of the American war in Vietnam and the demise of the South Vietnamese government, to avoid the optics of an American defeat. As Biden had put it to Richard Holbrooke, this was how Nixon and Kissinger tried to get away with it.
Steve Miska, a leader of Evacuate Our Allies, concluded that the main obstacle must be the president. Nothing else made sense. Miska, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, thought that if he could just find a way to reach Biden, the president would understand the issue’s importance to veterans. If only Beau were alive, Miska thought, he would have been able to get through to his father. Miska approached Denis McDonough, the secretary of veterans affairs, who immediately grasped the implication for his constituency. The department augmented its mental-health hotline in case Afghanistan vets began to see their interpreters beheaded on social media.
Sam Ayres, a law student and former Army Ranger who had served three tours in Afghanistan as an enlisted infantryman, sent a letter to several people he knew in the administration, explaining why the issue mattered so personally to many veterans. He wrote that the faces and voices of individual interpreters stayed with American troops long after they returned home. He described driving past Dover Air Force Base, where the caskets of two of his Army teammates had arrived in 2018 and 2019. “For the next couple hours of my drive, I was thrust back into the ongoing debate in my mind about whether our service—and the loss of teammates, American and Afghan—was all a waste,” Ayres wrote. “Many of us veterans will spend the rest of our lives grappling with this question. At the very least, I hope we’ll be able to feel we did something honorable over there in our small corner of the war. That would provide some solace. But coming to that conclusion will be even harder if the Afghans who went out on missions with us are left to die at the hands of our onetime enemies.” The letter received a pro forma response.
During the final withdrawal from Afghanistan, Biden’s main—at times, it seemed, his only—focus was on keeping the number of American casualties as close to zero as possible. He didn’t reckon with the invisible harm of adding moral injury to military failure.
Within the administration, a few indicators were starting to flash red. By July the CIA, which had given the Afghan government a year back in April, now judged that it might fall in a matter of weeks. As it moved out of its bases around the country, the CIA decided to keep open a base called Eagle, near the Kabul airport, as a transit point in the event that the agency’s counterparts in the Afghan National Directorate of Security, along with their families, had to be evacuated quickly.
On July 13, Secretary Blinken received a “dissent-channel cable” from the embassy in Kabul, written by diplomats who disagreed with official policy. The cable warned that the Taliban were making rapid advances, and that the collapse of the Ghani government could happen within weeks. It urged the Biden administration to begin emergency evacuations of Afghan allies. Around the same time, the Atrocity Early Warning Task Force, an executive-branch committee, began drafting an assessment of how to prevent massacres in Afghanistan after a Taliban takeover.
Throughout the summer, the National Security Council held weekly virtual briefings for friendly groups like Common Defense, to enlist their help in amplifying the administration’s message and defusing criticism. Alex McCoy attended the briefings, but by July he had become so skeptical of what he was hearing that he began to secretly record the sessions. The briefing official was Carlyn Reichel, the White House speechwriter who had phoned him with the good news in advance of Biden’s speech in April. Week after week, in answer to increasingly pointed questions about SIVs and evacuations, Reichel kept offering the same vaguely positive phrases, which had the effect of deflating any hope of action: “We are exploring all options and planning for every contingency”; “I can assure you that we are working on it and that it has very senior levels of attention in this building.”
On July 14, Reichel informed McCoy and others that the president was about to announce a new initiative, called Operation Allies Refuge. The U.S. government would soon begin bringing SIV holders on flights to America. Reichel called them “relocation flights for interested and eligible Afghans.” The phrasing was curious; it avoided the word evacuation, and it suggested that some visa holders didn’t want to leave Afghanistan. On July 8, Biden had claimed that “fewer than half” of SIV holders had chosen to leave. This became a persistent talking point, and a false one: Almost all of the remaining Afghans with visas were in official limbo, waiting for the United Nations to put them on flights to the U.S., or for family members to receive passports and visas. The president, echoed by his officials, was trying to blame the Afghans for their own entrapment.
Still, with a presidential speech, a named operation, and planned flights, the administration finally appeared to be taking action. “It seemed like they were belatedly meeting the concerns we were raising,” McCoy later told me. But nothing happened until July 30, when one charter flight brought 221 SIV holders and family members to Fort Lee, outside Richmond, Virginia. These were Afghans whose visas had already been approved; the U.S. government was simply accelerating their arrival. McCoy began to think that Operation Allies Refuge was a “performative stunt,” intended to convince ordinary voters in, say, Michigan and Pennsylvania who might have seen something on TV about endangered Afghans that the administration had it covered.
After the military’s lightning withdrawal, the embassy was still moving at the pace of a mission with months to go. “From our perspective, the State Department was relying on a lot of hope that things weren’t going to fall apart in the face of increasingly bleak intelligence reports on a daily basis,” a soldier who remained in Afghanistan throughout the summer told me. “The military was just waiting for a decision point or guidance from the State Department, and it never came until things fell apart.”
On August 2, the administration finally announced a priority refugee program, which it had been discussing since the spring, for several categories of vulnerable Afghans who didn’t qualify for SIVs. But no Afghan could use the program—it existed only on paper, because there was no infrastructure for processing refugees in the neighboring countries to which they might flee. More relocation flights brought more interested and eligible SIV families to the U.S.; by mid-August the total was just under 2,000 people. The administration continued to explore all options and plan for every contingency. Major cities across Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. The Atrocity Early Warning Task Force finished its assessment on potential massacres and was about to start planning for ways to prevent them. An official who worked on the assessment later told me, “It was finalized the week before everything went to shit.”
IV.
Flowers
When Hawa, the Afghan special-forces lieutenant, learned from the media that her U.S. counterparts were about to leave Bagram Air Base, she was stunned. “Really?” she asked the American women on the base. The Americans apologized—they hadn’t believed it would happen either. To Hawa the Americans were still needed, and the future looked dire without them.
The shock in the Afghan army was widespread. The departure of foreign troops, contractors, technical support, and military intelligence dealt a fatal blow to morale. The Afghans’ job was now to hold out for a few months and then die in place.
Hawa was transferred to the Afghan special forces’ base in Kabul. A few days later, in the predawn darkness on July 2, the Americans packed up Bagram, switched off the electricity, and flew out of the nerve center of the war without telling the new Afghan commander.
In Kabul, Hawa trained new Female Tactical Platoons and awaited word on her visa application from Captain Alice Spence. On July 15, Spence texted her about Operation Allies Refuge: “Hi sweet Hawa, USA has good news and will evacuate many Afghans soon. I am still working on your application. Please stay safe and we will get you out.”
“That’s really good news,” Hawa replied. “Thank you so much my kind azizam.” She asked if her younger sister could be included in the evacuation. Spence said that she would try. By July 31 she and her group of U.S.-military women had completed paperwork for several dozen FTPs and sent it to the State Department.
Talibs had a practice of killing any female troops they found. In early August, as the Taliban conquered province after province, Hawa’s commander told the FTPs to take 20 days’ leave and go home for their own safety. Hawa knew that this was the end of her service. “That day was the bitterest day of my life,” she told me. And yet she still didn’t believe that the men with beards, long hair, and AK-47s would be able to enter the capital. Kabul was reinforced with the Afghan army’s best troops, including commandos she had fought alongside. Hawa thought they would keep the Taliban out at any cost. The foreign forces wouldn’t allow it, either. They would return and defend the Afghan government—or what had all the fighting and suffering been for?
In southeastern Afghanistan, Khan was closely following news from Washington. The announcement of Operation Allies Refuge raised his hopes; so did a bill passed by Congress at the end of July that increased the cap on Afghan SIVs by 8,000 and allowed applicants to defer their medical exam until they reached the U.S. But the sound of fighting kept getting closer to the center of his town, and the electricity kept going out in the rented house where he, Mina, and their small son were hunkered down. When the Taliban announced a new policy of clemency for interpreters who confessed and asked for forgiveness, Khan saw a trap to keep Afghans like him from trying to escape, so they could then be slaughtered. The murder of his family members and the threatening letter at his back gate had made the Talibs’ views on interpreters clear enough.
Khan’s family’s interview at the U.S. embassy, one of the last steps before visas would be issued, was canceled in June because of the COVID outbreak. They were given a new appointment on July 29. The Taliban had set up several checkpoints along the road to Kabul, where they had beheaded an interpreter in May. Khan and Mina decided to hire a more expensive ambulance taxi to the capital rather than risk a regular one. Her pregnancy gave them a good cover story, backed by a copy of her ultrasound and a bottle of prescription medicine. She hid their documents and a USB flash drive under her robe. Khan had grown his beard out, put on ragged clothes, and wiped his phone clean—the Taliban looked at everything, even Google search histories.
On the road they encountered two Taliban checkpoints. They were allowed through the first without being stopped; at the second they were stopped and insurgents glanced inside before letting the ambulance continue. But Khan saw them questioning passengers in other vehicles, mostly young men in their 20s and early 30s with no turbans or beards. “I think they were searching for people who worked with U.S. forces,” he told me later.
In Kabul the family had to keep changing their lodging as each place began to seem unsafe. Khan heard accounts of targeted killings of government workers that went unreported in international media. The city was filling up with refugees from the fighting in other provinces. He finally found a room in a cheap hotel, near the international green zone, that was a way station for Afghans like him—interpreters and others hoping for a flight out.
A bus convoy full of Afghans seeking to flee the country drives through the night toward the Kabul airport on August 22. It navigated checkpoints manned by both Taliban fighters and CIA-backed paramilitaries before entering the airport via the northwestern gate. (Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
The interview at the U.S. embassy lasted no more than five minutes. Khan mentioned Mohammad’s death, the threatening letter, Mina’s pregnancy—a few more weeks and she would no longer be allowed to fly. They had barely left the embassy when Khan received a text with instructions for their medical exams. Ordinarily the wait would have been months, but the exams took place on August 2, at a cost of $1,414 for the family. Khan was running out of money.
Everything was moving quickly now. The office of Jason Crow, the Colorado congressman, brought the family to the attention of the State Department, which expedited Khan’s case (I had alerted Crow’s office to their situation and provided Khan’s family with other help). His lawyer from IRAP, Julie Kornfeld, was trying to obtain plane tickets with the help of an organization called Miles4Migrants. Khan went to a travel agency and found a scene of panic. Seats were going at famine prices. “If you do not book tickets soon, they will not be available, because people are leaving,” the travel agent told Khan. The visas might still take weeks to be issued, and Khan was down to his last $50. But if he returned to his hometown he might never get out. All of these clocks were ticking against him and his family: money, visas, tickets, Mina’s pregnancy, the Taliban.
Khan decided to stay in Kabul and wait.
Even with the scenes of chaos at travel agencies and banks and passport offices, even with the Taliban just 20 miles away, a paralyzing denial settled over people in Kabul. It was possible to know that the city was in imminent danger and at the same time to believe that it couldn’t fall. A surprising number of Afghan Americans traveled to Kabul in the summer of 2021 for weddings or family visits. The same denial prevailed in Washington: On the weekend of August 14–15, most of the senior leadership of the Biden administration was away on vacation. The fall of Kabul would always happen sometime in the future.
“It was like a joke to me,” Hamasa Parsa, a 23-year-old Afghan army captain who worked as an assistant in the defense minister’s office, said. “I never thought that the Taliban would come to Kabul, even when Joe Biden said that our war is finished.”
On hearing Biden’s speech in April, Parsa (whose name has been changed for her safety) had cried and wondered whether the president felt any regret. But she was sure that Kabul, where she had grown up under American protection, was too big and modern to fall to the Taliban. “Kabul is a city full of younger generations,” she said, “full of girls and boys who can talk, who can fight with their writing, with their speaking.” Parsa loved to read and write novels, and after work she would meet three of her friends at a crowded coffee shop in downtown Kabul called Nosh Book Café. “It was like a heaven for us,” she said. Young men and women sat together at tables, the girls’ scarves falling back onto their shoulders, everyone talking, working at laptops, smoking cigarettes.
For such a city to fall would mean the end of the only life Afghans like Parsa had ever known. The rest of the country might now belong to the Taliban—perhaps it always had—but not Kabul. This Afghan illusion, widespread until the very end, was nourished by American illusions—by our refusal to face that we had neither the will nor the ability to create something durable in Afghanistan, that one day we would abandon them.
In early August Najeeb Monawari was in Bangladesh, so focused on the news from his homeland that he was unable to work. His foreign postings with Doctors Without Borders had kept him safely out of Afghanistan as the country descended into extreme violence, but he worried constantly for his family back home. His wife begged him to get her and their three small children out too, and he researched every possible way. The $125,000 purchase price for citizenship in a Caribbean country was too expensive. He even looked into immigrating with his family to Sierra Leone.
As the Taliban swept through Afghanistan, Monawari read online that the Canadian government was setting up a new emergency immigration program for Afghans with connections to Canada. Monawari immediately applied. On August 7, he received an email from the Canadian government: “We received your application and you are being invited to an appointment for biometric collection (fingerprints).” Monawari had worked with the Americans for four years, then waited 10 years for a U.S. visa that was finally, unjustly denied. He had worked with the Canadians long ago for a year, and they answered his prayers in a few weeks. “Hello dear Sir/Madam,” he wrote back, “thank you very much for saving my family and myself life.”
Monawari was now determined to get to Kabul. His mother told him that he would be crazy to come back at this moment. So did his colleagues in Bangladesh, including one who warned him that the Kabul airport would close before he could get his family out. So did a retired Green Beret weapons sergeant in Texas named Larry Ryland, who got back in touch with his former interpreter during the Taliban offensive and practically ordered him to stay in Bangladesh. Even the Canadian government warned him off. On the morning of August 8, a second email arrived: “Dear Sir, PLEASE DO NOT TRAVEL TO KABUL.”
Monawari disregarded all the advice. He was in the grip of a furious monomania: He had to get to Kabul, be fingerprinted, and fly out with his family. Maybe to Canada, maybe even to the U.S.—he hadn’t lost faith in his second try for an SIV. He could summon intense optimism while feeling intense pain. “I just put myself on fire,” he later told me. “When you want to survive, you get blind, you just struggle.”
Monawari arrived in Kabul on the night of Wednesday, August 11. First thing the next morning, he and his wife brought their passports and the email invitation to a Canadian military camp near the airport—the embassy was now closed to visitors—and talked their way past an Afghan guard. No one was on duty except one elderly Canadian, who took their fingerprints.
On Saturday, August 14, Monawari went to the bank where he kept his savings. He had intended to withdraw only a little, but when he saw the large and panicky crowd he thought the bank might shut its doors. He took out almost all the money he had and left with his pockets bulging with euros, sweating, tensed for someone in the crowd to pull a gun on him.
Khan, hiding with Mina and their son in the center of Kabul, kept refreshing a State Department website showing the status of his visa every 20 or 30 minutes. At 3 p.m. on August 11, it suddenly went from “refused” to “administrative processing” and then “issued.” Two minutes later, Mina’s and their son’s status also changed. But Khan waited the next three days for a summons to pick up their passports at the embassy, and his emails went unanswered. On August 14, unable to wait any longer, he left the hotel where they were staying and ventured into Kabul’s fortified green zone. Outside the U.S. embassy a guard couldn’t make sense of the various emails with which Khan had armed himself. Another guard told him to come back on a better day. Khan didn’t realize that, inside the embassy, in preparation for evacuation to the airport, diplomats were smashing up hard drives, destroying American flags and other symbols that could be used for Taliban propaganda, and filling sacks with documents for burning. Khan insisted that his case was urgent, and he was finally allowed inside.
At the consular office the family’s passports were waiting, miraculously stamped with the Special Immigrant Visas that had eluded Khan and thousands of other Afghans for so long. They’d been ready since August 11. Khan and his family could have left Afghanistan by now, but the embassy had neglected to summon him. It didn’t matter—Julie Kornfeld had booked three tickets to the U.S. via Istanbul and Brazil on Tuesday, August 17, three days away. When Khan got back to the hotel room and shared the news with Mina, now 34 weeks pregnant, their toddler twirled across the floor in a celebratory Afghan dance.
They still needed COVID tests, and a doctor’s report that would allow Mina to fly. Their hometown fell that day. Khan figured that Kabul had another month.
On August 12, three U.S. infantry battalions in the region—one of them staged there for this purpose—were ordered to secure the Kabul airport primarily for the evacuation of U.S. diplomats and American citizens. Two days later another 1,000 troops followed.
Alice Spence wrote to Hawa: “USA is sending 4,000 soldiers to help with SIV.”
“Wow that’s great. For which peoples they will help?”
“For you and others who are waiting.”
On August 14, Spence told Hawa to have a bag packed and her visa documents printed or stored on her phone. “I am very hopeful now. Maybe this week. Do not tell anyone.” She added an American flag, a heart, and an Afghan flag.
That night Hamasa Parsa, the Afghan captain who loved to read and write fiction, had a dream. Her best friend in the army appeared before her dressed in clothes covered with flowers that she had gathered off the ground where they’d fallen. “Do you know why I picked them up?” her friend asked. Parsa didn’t know. Her friend, with a face and voice of unbearable sadness, said, “Hamasa, they are all dead.” Then Parsa understood that the flowers on her friend’s dress were the Afghan people. Her friend started to cry, and Parsa cried too, and when she woke tears were streaming down her cheeks.
She called her friend at once, though it was the middle of the night. “Are you okay?” Parsa asked. She reminded her that she’d seen her name on a death list sent by the Taliban to the defense minister’s office.
“Hamasa, come on, stop crying, I’m okay,” her friend said. “Nothing’s going to happen. Go to sleep. We’ll see each other tomorrow.”
They had a plan to meet at the Nosh Book Café at 11 the next morning, Sunday, August 15.
V.
The Airport
The next morning, most people in Kabul went to work as usual.
At the palace, Hamdullah Mohib, President Ghani’s national security adviser—who had sent his wife and children out of the country—attended the regular 9 a.m. meeting of the president’s top advisers. For three days Mohib had been talking with American diplomats in Kabul about transferring power to an interim government and sparing the city the urban warfare that had destroyed it in the 1990s. Ghani wanted to hold a loya jirga—a conference of political leaders—in two weeks. It would essentially hand power to the Taliban, but by constitutional means. Ghani wanted this to be part of his legacy. But he and Secretary Blinken hadn’t discussed the idea until the night before, when Blinken agreed to send an envoy to Doha. At the Sunday-morning meeting, Ghani’s advisers decided on a team that would fly to Doha that evening. Taliban representatives there had agreed that the insurgents would stay out of Kabul during negotiations. But Afghan intelligence knew that factions were competing to take the city, and that government forces would melt away rather than die in a pointless fight. That morning, Khalil Haqqani, whose Islamist network had inflicted numerous suicide bombings on Kabul, called Mohib and told him to surrender.
Around 11 a.m., Ghani and Mohib were talking in a garden on the palace grounds when they heard automatic-weapons fire. They later learned that guards at a nearby bank were dispersing customers trying to withdraw their money—but at the sound of gunfire everything fell apart. Staff began to abandon the palace. Guards took off their uniforms and went home in the civilian clothes they wore underneath. As Mohib prepared to escort Ghani’s wife by helicopter to the airport for a flight to Dubai, the pilot told him that Afghan troops had prevented one of the presidential helicopters from leaving the airport and fired shots at another that was going to pick up the defense minister. These troops were not about to let their leaders save their own skins.
“When I heard that, I felt, We are done,” Mohib told me. He quickly returned from the helipad to the palace. “It’s time to leave,” he told the president.
Ghani had been worried about the fate of his cherished library. He didn’t even have his passport or a change of clothes. “I have to go upstairs and get some things,” he said.
“No, there’s no time,” Mohib insisted.
Ghani, having convinced the Americans to leave his endangered people in harm’s way, was flown by helicopter with his wife and a few advisers to safety in Uzbekistan.
Just before noon, Hawa was riding a bus to collect her uniform and papers, so her identity wouldn’t be discovered if the base where she kept them was attacked, when her mother called. The Taliban were in their area of western Kabul, searching for military people, her mother said. Hawa should not come home.
Not knowing what to do, Hawa texted Alice Spence in Hawaii, where it was still Saturday night: “The Taliban come to our area. I am outside I don’t know how should I go home ohhh.”
“Oh God Hawa,” Spence wrote back a minute later. “Ok where are you? You are not in Kabul?”
“Yes I am at Kabul. They came to Kabul.”
“Fuck.” Spence continued, “Ok it will be ok.” She advised Hawa to find a safe way home and hide all her documents and anything suggesting military affiliation.
“Thank you dear sorry about the bad news,” Hawa wrote.
“Don’t be sorry the Talib they will be sorry.”
“Okay dear. I really scared.”
“I know. Please be brave Hawa. I will not go to sleep until you are safe.”
Hawa was lucky to be wearing a long dress and a scarf that she’d put on to avoid trouble with the Pashtun women outside the base. She later heard that Talibs were ordering girls to cover themselves, and shot one who refused. They also shot a military woman discovered in her house. Hawa’s face was recognizable—she had appeared in army recruitment ads on social media. With nowhere else to go, she searched for a taxi home, but no driver would take her, and she spent four hours trying to get there, through streets thronged with people running. For two days she didn’t leave her house.
From his hotel room that morning Khan saw smoke rising above the U.S. embassy as the last burn bags were incinerated. They included the passports of Afghan visa hopefuls, who would now have to try to escape without them. It was protocol to destroy that kind of thing during a noncombatant-evacuation operation, and no one at the embassy was willing to break the rules and bring the passports to the airport. The removal of the embassy to the airport had been carefully planned at the Pentagon, but with no discussion of how to bring out Afghans. Khan saw Chinook transport helicopters taking off from the embassy grounds every 15 minutes and clattering low over city streets the short distance to the airport.
Around noon, the hotel manager told Khan and the other interpreters lodged there to leave. With the Taliban in Kabul, the interpreters were now a security risk. Khan, Mina, and their son wept as they packed their bags. There were no taxis and most hotels were closed, so they walked for an hour and a half around central Kabul until they found a room in a dirty hotel. Talibs could be seen in the streets outside.
Afghans wait outside an entrance to Kabul’s airport on August 22. In the background, U.S. Marines guard the wall. (Jim Huylebroek)
The day before, with visas and tickets finally in hand, Khan had felt like one of the saved. Now the flight had been canceled and, because of the Afghan government’s sudden demise, the airport was closed. “We came to a bad fate,” Khan told Julie Kornfeld.
“I don’t want to give you false hope,” she said, “but I do still have a little.” She urged him to get some sleep until there was news of flights out.
“I cannot sleep.”
“Can you listen to soothing music, or take deep breaths, or, we have a saying, ‘count sheep’? You need to do something to try and put your mind at ease.”
“OK I will apply your prescription. But flights come and go in my mind.”
That day, Najeeb Monawari’s old Green Beret teammates flooded him with emails from Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas. One of them urged him to get to the airport immediately—the office of Senator Thom Tillis had put his name on a list. It was nearly midnight. When Monawari looked out the window he saw streets deserted of every living creature except stray dogs. Thinking this might be his only chance, Monawari woke his three children and prepared a backpack with food and printouts of SIV correspondence. He had to ask his neighbors to move their cars so he could get out. His mother told him that leaving the building at this hour tipped the neighbors off that he was a “traitor.”
The airport was only 15 minutes away, but Monawari drove so fast that his father, who came along, warned him that the police might shoot at the car. But there were no police. Kabul was under no one’s control, and looting had broken out around the city. The Taliban were as unprepared as everyone else for the speed of their conquest. That day their leader in Doha, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, asked the head of U.S. Central Command, General McKenzie, whether the Americans wanted control of the city during the evacuation. McKenzie replied that his orders were to secure the airport and nothing else. U.S. troops were not to venture beyond its perimeter. “The Taliban were willing to let us do all that was necessary to control the terrain to get out,” a former senior military officer told me. “When you consciously choose that the terrain you control is the fence line of the airport, you give up a lot of your prerogatives, and you permit yourself to be quite vulnerable to infiltration by suicide bombers.” The exchange between Baradar and McKenzie would contribute to making the evacuation the nightmare that it became.
Monawari parked on a side street and left his father with the car. Hamid Karzai International Airport is small, with a cramped passenger terminal and a single runway. On the north side of the runway were a series of small bases belonging to NATO countries and the Afghan army. Civilians approaching from the city entered through the South Gate. The airport was ringed by miles of fortifications—concrete blast walls, Hesco bags, concertina wire—with about eight public or unofficial entry points.
That night thousands of Afghans converged on the terminal at the South Gate. Monawari left his wife and children next to a wall for cover and tried to get close enough to find someone who could bring them inside. Four U.S. armored vehicles blocked the way, and Marines fired warning shots. People were shouting and running back and forth based on rumors. Some Afghans, mostly single men with no American connections, had gotten inside the terminal and would eventually force their way, two with guns, onto C-17s intended to transport U.S. personnel and matériel to Qatar. Monawari spent the night looking for some authority with a list of names that included his. But there was no such authority. There was no list. On that first night Monawari learned what everyone who dared to come to the airport would have to find out for themselves during the next two weeks: There was no system, no plan. They were on their own.
Shortly before dawn, a report flew around that Talibs were arriving. Afghan paramilitaries in civilian clothes suddenly disappeared. Monawari thought of running. Beyond the South Gate he saw a pickup with Taliban gunmen sitting in the bed, their legs hanging over the sides. This first sight of them in Kabul frightened him. He was their enemy, and they had the upper hand.
After daybreak the entrance road swelled with new crowds trying to reach the airport. Monawari and his family had spent nine hours outside the terminal. They had exhausted their crackers and water, and the kids were out of control. He decided to take the family home. “It is a big mess right now,” he texted the Green Berets stateside.
At home he heard from a friend that Talibs would be searching houses that night. He burned his military certificates and SIV documents. He asked his mother if he could hide his Green Beret uniform, but she said that their apartment was too small—it would be found. With a pair of scissors, he cut to shreds his cherished uniform and hat and unit patches. He put the remains in a garbage bag for his father to take outside and bury deep in the trash.
Around midnight on Sunday, Sam Ayres, the former Ranger who’d sent the letter about veterans to Biden-administration contacts, texted his friend Alice Spence, whom he’d gone to college with. He was trying to find a way to help Khan, whose case he’d heard about.
“My FTP was hanged last week,” Spence told him.
Mahjabin—the woman who, along with Hawa, was Spence’s closest friend among the Afghans—had been killed in the bathroom of her in-laws’ house a week before the fall of Kabul. It wasn’t clear whether Talibs had done it, but Mahjabin’s picture had been circulating around their checkpoints outside the city.
“Oh Jesus,” Ayres wrote. “I’m so sorry.”
“She was a magnificent person. I loved her so much.” After a moment: “I refuse to let this happen to the rest of them.”
In those first hours and days after the fall of Kabul, thousands of people in the U.S. and across the world began to live mentally in the city and its airport. Most of them had a personal connection to Afghanistan. More Americans cared about the country than the Biden administration had accounted for in its political calculations. Most of these Americans were in their 30s or 40s—the generation that came of age with the 9/11 wars, now reaching a calamitous end. Helping Afghans escape would become a way to avoid succumbing to a sense of waste and despair and helpless rage.
Veterans approached friends to offer or seek help for interpreters they knew, and these informal networks grew to a dozen or 50 people on Signal and WhatsApp, with smaller side groups connecting to military and political contacts and refugee organizations. Members of Congress with high profiles on the SIV issue received hundreds of texts on their personal phones from complete strangers, some of them Americans looking for help, others desperate Afghans reaching for any name they could find. Jason Crow got a voicemail from a man who was barely audible, as if he was hiding somewhere: “I’m sorry if I bother you, but as you know better than me that the situation getting worse and worse in Afghanistan, especially for my people and my family. And this morning, they’ve killed one of the young boys.” Congressional offices became 24-hour operations centers.
Some groups—West Point alums, retired Special Forces operators, women’s-rights advocates—grew to several hundred and acquired names like Task Force Dunkirk and Task Force Pineapple. They spanned time zones and continents. Other groups consisted of three or four friends working their contacts. Mary Beth Goodman, the official who leads the State Department’s global pandemic response, took two weeks off to spend every hour on evacuations, except the two or three at night when she slept, and even those hours were interrupted by phone calls, including one from an Afghan man in a convoy bound for the airport, whispering that ISIS terrorists had just boarded the bus, before the line went dead.
Using digital devices, foreigners tried to navigate Afghans thousands of miles away through the needle eyes of Kabul’s airport gates. This global effort emerged spontaneously to fill the gaping void left by the U.S. government.
Afghans at Hamid Karzai International Airport prepare to be evacuated on August 22, 2021. Some from their bus convoy will wait on the tarmac for 48 hours. (Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
In spite of three deployments, Sam Ayres had no close personal ties in Afghanistan. He wanted to help Afghans escape as a moral imperative, and out of loyalty to Alice Spence. Spence was propelled by the memory of her dead friend, whom she now had no time to grieve, and the distress calls of friends like Hawa who were still alive.
Several hours before dawn on Wednesday, August 18, Hawa got a message from Spence: She should be at the airport by sunrise. Spence instructed Hawa not to bring a suitcase, to wear a full face covering, and to hide her smartphone, keeping a simple Nokia in hand, in case she ran into Taliban checkpoints. The smartphone would have everything she needed to communicate with Spence and others and for them to share locations, as well as important documents—but it could also give her away.
Spence and her colleagues were trying to bring a group of 16 FTPs and 10 dependents—husbands and children—into the airport. The SIV applications submitted in July had gone nowhere, but at least they provided the paperwork for identity packets to be sent to State Department inboxes, set up after the fall of Kabul as a clearinghouse for potential evacuees. The inboxes were soon overwhelmed, and the government asked people to stop sending names. What mattered most, Spence discovered—and this would be the key to all successful evacuation efforts—was having a contact inside the airport. “The people with the most power at that time were low-ranking gate guards,” she told me. “They had more power than any general in D.C., hands down.” Representative Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat, put it this way: “This was a situation where knowing the secretary of state and the national security adviser personally was vastly less valuable than knowing a Marine major on the airfield.”
Hawa packed a small bag with a change of clothes and her passport. She set out with her teenage sister for the North Gate, on the military side of the airport. At the gate—a barrier of concertina wire between sections of 16-foot blast walls—was a crush of human beings, including families with small children, all trying to push forward under the blinding sun until they could speak to a soldier. On the outer perimeter of security were Taliban guards, using whips, gun stocks, and bullets to intimidate the crowd. The middle layer consisted of a paramilitary force from the Afghan intelligence agency, which was under the command of overseas CIA agents via WhatsApp, and which was liberal with warning shots. Inside the gate, and often outside, were American troops, who sometimes used tear gas and flash-bangs for crowd control.
Spence put Hawa in charge of keeping track of the other 15 FTPs, who arrived separately from around the city. “Can you please count how many FTPs are there,” Spence texted. There was no answer for 20 minutes. “Hawa I need your help.”
“They bring a lot of their families,” Hawa finally replied. There were at least a dozen family members—parents, siblings—who had not been on the original list and had to be counted one by one in the crowd.
Spence encouraged her: “Yes I know but you are soldier.” Keeping track of the families while pushing toward the gate was like a mission—the hardest Hawa had taken part in. She sent a head count and then asked if she could call her two other sisters to join them. Spence told her to hurry. It was eight in the morning and the group was 150 feet from the gate.
They waited all day. As they ran out of food and water, some of the FTPs began to faint. When Talibs found military papers on one woman, they set on her with fists and feet, leaving a swollen eye and a large purple bruise on her cheek. A round of gunfire nearly struck the baby of one of the women, who decided to go home. Hawa’s teenage sister cried that she wanted to go home too. “If the Taliban come to our house you won’t be able to go to school,” Hawa told her; they had no future here.
One FTP reached the gate and showed an American guard a picture on her phone of an “emergency visa” that read: “Present this visa to security checkpoints and Consular Officers to access flights departing for the United States.” It was a PDF that the State Department had created and emailed to SIV applicants. Now everyone in Kabul seemed to have a copy. The guard turned her away.
Spence was three degrees removed from a Defense Department civilian at the airport. At sunset she sent his photo to Hawa and told her to look for him. Hours went by. Then, after midnight, he emerged from the gate—a middle-aged American in civilian clothes, with salt-and-pepper hair and a black mustache. The women shouted, “FTPs! FTPs!”
Two-thirds of the group made it inside, including Hawa and her sister. But when the crowd saw so many women getting through, it grew angry and blocked the others, including the ones with small children farther back.
It was 2:30 a.m. on August 19. The ordeal had lasted almost 24 hours. “Came in very hard,” Hawa reported to Spence.
They had come in hard, and the others would have to be brought in later. But the operation had been a success. Spence would try to repeat it for other military women in the coming week and meet nothing but failure after failure.
VI.
The Damned and the Saved
“By and large, what we have found is that people have been able to get to the airport,” Jake Sullivan told the White House press corps a few hours before Hawa left her house. “In fact, very large numbers of people have been able to get to the airport and present themselves.” Sullivan acknowledged that the Afghan government had fallen in spite of the Biden administration’s decision to show support by refusing calls for early evacuations. He blamed the decision on bad advice from the Afghan government. “What you can do is plan for all contingencies,” he said. “We did that.”
Biden also pointed a finger at the Afghans. In a televised speech the day after Kabul fell, he blamed the lack of early evacuations on the Ghani government and SIVs who “did not want to leave earlier.” He blamed Afghan troops for failing to defend their country, even though the monthly toll of those killed in action reached its highest level in years after his withdrawal announcement. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.” His words, spoken at the very moment when Afghans were trying to escape with their lives, were chilling.
Biden had revised the deadline for the troop withdrawal to August 31, and he imposed the same deadline on the evacuation. Now the administration acted with the urgency that it had failed to show since April. A total of 5,000 troops were sent to Kabul, along with two dozen State Department consular officers. The U.S. government’s priority was to evacuate American citizens and green-card holders first, then SIVs and other “at-risk Afghans.” But the government, having failed to plan for an evacuation on this scale, didn’t know who those Afghans were, where to find them, or how to get them into the airport.
Events were moving so fast that a paratrooper I talked with who arrived the weekend Kabul fell expected to go straight into a firefight with Talibs, while a Marine who landed two or three days later considered the Taliban “an adjacent friendly unit.” The paratrooper soon realized that the most important tool of the mission was his phone. Texts poured in from friends back home, all asking for help getting Afghans they knew into the airport. In the first few days the paratrooper thought that a prioritized system of entry for each category of evacuees would soon be in place at assigned gates. He heard of plans to create safe areas around Kabul where U.S. forces could collect people and ferry them to the airport. But such a system was never created. With each day the chaos at the gates only grew. He learned details of the madness on the other side of the wall from people thousands of miles away who were in minute-by-minute contact with Afghans trying to get in.
“It’s an absolute gut wrenching shit show,” the paratrooper texted his friend Sam Ayres. Ayres connected the paratrooper with Julie Kornfeld, who sought information for Khan and her other clients about flights, paperwork, and gates. But there was no consistent information to give. Everything depended on an Afghan getting to a gate, a guard being in the right place at the right time, the gate staying open long enough for the Afghan to be pulled through. And it never worked the same way twice.
The paratrooper’s official job was to get U.S. matériel and personnel out of Afghanistan. He and other troops spent every spare waking hour—and they barely slept—fielding texts and working on what they called “recoveries.” To help them identify certain Afghans in the mob, the troops asked for photos, or identifying garments such as red scarves, or call-and-response passwords: “Detroit”–“Red Wings”; “What do you like to drink?”–“Orange juice.” The paratrooper argued with consular officers who wanted to send people back out of the airport for lack of paperwork. “SIV to me meant nothing, because that thing will take 24 months,” he said. “What, are we going to expect them to get on Wi-Fi and fill out a quick application on State.gov while they’re waiting outside the gate? ‘You washed dishes at the embassy—you’re in.’ ”
Most of the paratrooper’s activity was unofficial. The chain of command almost certainly knew, could have stopped it, and would have done so if the troops had made serious mistakes. So they were careful not to venture too far outside the gate—less out of fear for their safety than worry that a firefight with a Talib would shut the whole thing down.
Just inside the perimeter, consular officers had to make instant decisions about whom to admit, torn between their fluctuating rules and the human faces in front of them. Though State Department officials from around the world had volunteered to go to Kabul, only 40 consular officers were on hand to deal with the huge flow at the airport. On August 19 John Bass, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, arrived to oversee the evacuation. His top priority was getting American citizens, green-card holders, and Afghan embassy staff into the airport. Talibs kept blocking entry for some evacuees and shutting down gates when the crowds became unmanageable; the Americans also closed gates when they received intelligence about terror threats. Bass resorted to using unmarked gates to avoid the crowds at the public ones; at times, to keep this official evacuation going, he had to refuse entry to groups of Afghans who were part of the unofficial effort.
When Representatives Seth Moulton and Peter Meijer made an unannounced visit on August 24, two senior diplomats broke down in tears and told Moulton they were “completely overwhelmed.”
Children and parents lost each other. Troops saw children trampled underfoot. A Marine saw a Talib knife a boy who was climbing over a wall. A tear-gas canister struck the side of an 8-year-old girl’s face, melting her skin. A new mother staggered through the gate with her baby, who had just died, sobbing so hard that she threw up on the shoes of a consular officer checking documents. By the East Gate, a stack of corpses baked in the sun for hours. Outside the North Gate, the crushed bodies of four babies floated in a river of sewage.
To avoid the besieged gates, U.S. troops brought women and children over the 16-foot blast wall using ladders under cover of darkness. They paid Afghan paramilitaries and even American Marine guards in cigarettes to let people through. They had to make up their own priority list and find immediate grounds for saying yes or no to the immense volume of equal desperation on their phones: military women, then interpreters, then male commandos, then embassy staff. Women, but not men; families, but no children over 15. “It’s an awful thing to make a decision about,” one soldier told me.
An Afghan family hurries to join a group awaiting access to the northwestern gate of the Kabul airport on August 24. (Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
Many of the troops quickly realized that escorting a newly orphaned child onto a plane to a new life would be the most important mission of their lives. “This is going to be our legacy,” the paratrooper said, “whether we do two years in the Army, or 20 years, or 40 years.”
Khan was expecting a State Department email that would tell him when to go to the airport and where, but it never came. (No SIVs received specific instructions like this throughout the evacuation.) Kornfeld was trying to get him on a flight, military or commercial. On Monday, August 16, he went with Mina and their son to the North Gate. They spent all day in the sun, unable to get past the Taliban fighters and the crowd of thousands. Khan saw that all kinds of people were trying to escape—ordinary shopkeepers, young men without even a national-identity card—while Afghans like him, who had checked every box, couldn’t get inside. At one point Mina was pushed to the ground. She was afraid she would miscarry.
The next day Khan returned by himself, but Talibs with guns and horsewhips kept him from getting anywhere close.
Before dawn on August 18, the family tried again. Khan had all of 500 afghanis—about $6—in his pocket. They left small travel bags with a food peddler and, with just biscuits and water, their documents hidden under Mina’s clothes, they waded into the crowd at the North Gate as the sun was coming up over the Hindu Kush mountains. They decided that they would stay at the airport until they got out or died. Talibs were firing in the air, and several of them kicked Khan and beat him with rifle butts and a lead pipe. His son screamed at the sight of the men with long hair and beards. Mina kept encouraging her husband, telling him not to lose hope.
They abandoned the North Gate and walked for almost an hour along the airport perimeter to the Abbey Gate, on the southeast side. Here the troops were British and Canadian, and the family wasn’t allowed through.
“Say you have a pregnant wife!” Kornfeld texted. “Say she’s in labor!”
It was no use. The family continued their odyssey until they arrived at the South Gate, the main entrance. Here there were U.S. Marines, but also thousands of Afghans. “Less than 300 have valid docs,” Khan texted. “All the looters and others came.” It was almost noon.
His phone rang. When he answered, an unfamiliar voice spoke his full name. “We found your number on your work desk. You supported the Americans. You distributed weapons and ammunition.”
“You have the wrong number,” Khan said. “I’m a university student in Khost.”
“No. We know who you are.”
There was no time to be unnerved, with the gunfire and tear gas and people running and falling. Mina kept getting squeezed, but she wanted to hold their position and refused to let Khan pull her out of the crush. Their son, in Khan’s arms, was so traumatized by the Talibs that he kept flailing at his father.
Suddenly the Marines were firing warning shots and flash-bangs to disperse the crowd; people ran in every direction, and the way to the checkpoint was clear. Khan saw his chance and rushed forward. Mina cried out not to be left behind, but he kept going.
Through the smoke Khan saw the figure of an older man in civilian clothes and body armor. He was pulling in people with dark-blue U.S. passports. Seeing Khan’s blue-green Afghan passport, the American pushed him aside, but Khan refused to be turned away. He opened to the page with his Special Immigrant Visa. The American looked it over. All the years of application forms and background checks and employment-verification letters and death threats and anxious waiting had brought Khan to this moment. Everything was in order. He asked to go back for his wife and son, 20 meters outside the gate. Did they have visas? They did. Khan ran out and waved them forward.
“How much luggage?” the American asked.
“About 300 grams of documents,” Khan said.
They were inside the airport.
From Hawaii, Captain Spence and her American compatriots spent the days after Hawa’s successful escape trying to save the other FTPs. They needed an interpreter and seldom had one, relying instead on broken English and emoji. They had to persuade the women to go out after dark, despite a curfew enforced by Taliban checkpoints, because that was when they had the best chance. Spence relied on one particularly resourceful trooper in the airport who made the Afghan women his priority, bringing them in over ladders, darting outside the fence to grab a husband separated from his wife, a son from his mother. An attempted helicopter rescue that Spence helped arrange through a Pentagon contact failed on two successive nights. A few women gave up trying and fled by car to Mazar-i-Sharif or Pakistan. And all the while hundreds of others Spence didn’t know, regular army women who had heard about her from the FTPs, were imploring her through her phone.
“At first I said yes to everyone,” she told me. “Then I started to say no to men; to people without docs; to people with docs but not for their families; to people writing me really long messages, because I didn’t have time to read them. If it was a single woman, I would be more apt to talk to them. And then it was, honestly—it’s really terrible—if a photo spoke to me, if their words spoke to me, if their English was good, if I sensed this person would be responsive and could get their stuff together.” She called it “a really terrible Sophie’s Choice situation.”
Spence’s Army boss allowed her to stay off the base until August 31. She sat in her living room alone with her phone, sleeping one or two hours a night, eating whatever she had in the cupboard, losing 15 pounds. When Hawa was trying to get into the airport Spence threw up from exhaustion and stress, then felt annoyed because she didn’t have time to throw up. Once, she looked outside and was startled to see a palm tree. She had thought she was in Kabul. Others working on evacuations around the clock from a Washington suburb or upstate New York had the same hallucinatory experience.
Everyone sensed that the window was closing. On August 24, the Taliban announced that only U.S.-passport and green-card holders would be allowed near the airport. The U.S. government was going to limit its efforts to the same group. The evacuation of Afghans appeared to be ending after just one week.
The difference between the damned and the saved came down to three factors. The first was character—resourcefulness, doggedness, will. The second was what Afghans call wasita—connections. The third, and most important, was sheer luck.
Najeeb Monawari possessed character and connections, but his ordeal suggested that a malign fate was working against him. He tried to get into the airport with his family four times through four gates and failed each time. Many of his relatives worked for the Afghan security forces, which controlled a “hidden” gate on the northwest side, but Panjshiris had lost their power overnight, and his relatives were unable to do anything. At the North Gate, Afghan guards—Pashtuns from an intelligence unit in Jalalabad—were letting in their ethnic relatives while jeering “Traitors!” at northerners like Monawari. At the Abbey Gate, when he took a picture of the crowd to show his Green Beret friends, an armed Talib grabbed him by the shirt and began dragging him off. Other Talibs whipped his back and yelled, “Take him to the boss!” Monawari was carrying printed email correspondence and the useless “emergency visa” PDF. If he uttered a word they would know he was Panjshiri and kill him on the spot.
“This motherfucker took a picture of women!” the Talib told the boss’s bodyguard.
“The boss is busy now,” the bodyguard said. “Take his phone.”
Monawari tried to open his phone, but his fingers kept mistyping the passcode. He finally managed to get it open. He deleted the picture. And then he took off, into the crowd, away from the gate, pulling off the white scarf that made him noticeable, soon losing his pursuers. He found his family and said, “Let’s go home.”
By the morning of August 19, Monawari and his wife and three kids were exhausted. His mother was alternately praying and berating him for coming back to Kabul. His phone rang: It was Larry Ryland, the Green Beret weapons sergeant. Ryland, who lived outside Houston, where he ran a military-contracting business, was in a rage at the failure to get his interpreter into the airport and out of Afghanistan. He was considering traveling to Qatar and appropriating a small turboprop plane to personally evacuate Monawari. “If anybody deserved it, it was him and his family,” Ryland told me. “Dude, he was probably one of the top-five people in the world I’d trust.”
Ryland was calling with a new plan. It depended on his contacts in the Special Forces world, who had eyes on Monawari from a “satellite country.” They set up a route for him to get to the airport, with Afghans positioned along the way to create a diversion in case there was trouble at a Taliban checkpoint. The Special Forces operators connected Ryland with a U.S. soldier on the inside, who would come out for Monawari at a specific moment.
The plan also involved congressional letterhead. One of Monawari’s colleagues in Doctors Without Borders was the niece of Jim Coyle, the president of a New Jersey chamber of commerce, who in turn knew Representative Malinowski. Coyle asked Malinowski to sign a letter of support for Monawari’s entry into the airport. “This letter is completely irregular and contrary to established procedures,” the congressman replied. “Therefore I will be happy to sign it!” The letter and Ryland’s word were enough to make Monawari—a rejected SIV applicant—the priority for the soldier inside the airport.
But the gate names were confusing, and the grid coordinates were slightly off, and Monawari and his family showed up in the wrong spot. There was no American looking for a letter from Malinowski. Then the soldier called Monawari and told him to go as fast as he could a mile east to another gate and look for a soft hat held high on a baton. A mile! They ran, and with the running and his children crying and a dehydration headache coming on he was too tired to answer the calls that kept coming—if he answered, he feared, he would take his last breath and die. At the second gate there was no phone signal, and no soldier holding a soft hat high on a baton. Then the hat and the soldier were there, 50 feet away, across the concertina wire, in front of the Hesco bags, and Monawari pushed his family through the crowd that grew denser and denser near the wire until he reached the barbed coils and his kids were gone—they must have fallen underfoot, trampled, if they weren’t crying it meant they were dead, and he opened his mouth to yell but he couldn’t make a sound, couldn’t say that he’d come back to Kabul and done everything in his power to reach this place and now it had all turned to shit, they were gone, there was no reason to leave, and he started punching wildly to get people off his children.
“Your kids are here,” a Marine said.
Another Marine was carrying his 9-year-old girl over the wire. Monawari grabbed her younger sister, and as he lifted her, a Marine pulled him forward and he fell, the wire making a deep cut in his thumb. Then they were brought through an opening between the Hesco bags into the airport. Planes were waiting on the runway, with people standing in long lines. Immediately the pain of his headache and gashed thumb disappeared, and he was overcome with happiness.
In July Monawari had applied for Canadian immigration. At the airport he discovered that he had a choice: He could fly out with most of the other departing Afghans on a U.S. C-17 to Qatar. Or he could board an earlier Canadian military flight through Kuwait to Canada. He had waited 10 years for a U.S. visa—would his family have to wait another year in Qatar? He had always wanted to be an American. He now owed his life to American friends and strangers who had used every means to bring his family to safety. But Monawari didn’t want to wait any longer. He would become a Canadian.
On August 25, in Toronto, he received an email from a U.S. State Department official. “I want to apologize for the delay in response time and process,” it said. “I want to assure you that we are working around the clock to help address these delays for applicants such as yourself during this very difficult time.” The official reported that the U.S. embassy had approved him for a Special Immigrant Visa. It was welcome vindication, and it was too late.
On the afternoon of August 26, outside Abbey Gate, an Islamic State suicide bomber detonated a vest with 25 pounds of explosives, killing nearly 200 Afghans and 13 American troops who had left the protection of the wall and waded into the sea of desperation to bring people into the airport. After that, the chance for Afghans to get out dwindled quickly toward zero.
VII.
Honor
The United States government estimates that it airlifted 124,000 people from Afghanistan before the last troops flew out on August 30, a day ahead of Biden’s deadline. This total—which surprised many of those who struggled night and day to get a family of five through a gate—counted everyone who left Hamid Karzai International Airport: the 45,000 on private and non-U.S. aircraft, as well as approximately 2,000 U.S.-embassy personnel, 5,500 American citizens, 2,000 citizens of NATO countries, 3,300 citizens of other countries, 2,500 SIVs and family members, and 64,000 “at-risk Afghans,” including the many thousands who found a way into the airport regardless of status or threat. The Biden administration declared the evacuation a historic triumph.
The achievement belonged mainly to the troops and civilians who worked tirelessly at the airport, and to the ordinary people who worked tirelessly overseas on WhatsApp and Signal, and above all to the courage, born of mortal panic and tenacious hope, of the Afghans who lost everything. Without the unofficial evacuation efforts, many of them funded by private citizens, the number would have been far lower. But no one who took part described it as a success. The constant emotions of those days and nights at the airport were frustration and heartbreak.
September 11, 2021: A Taliban flag flies atop Bibi Mahru Hill, in Kabul. (Andrew Quilty / Agence VU’)
Human Rights First estimates that 90 percent of SIVs—including some with visas in hand—were left behind with their families. The number of Afghans who remain in danger because of their association with the 20-year American presence in their country must be counted in the hundreds of thousands. By the end of August, Alice Spence and Sam Ayres and their colleagues had evacuated 145 military women and family members. They still had a list of 87 people whom they couldn’t get out. After August 31, the list would continue to grow. “I can’t even contemplate what I’m going to have to say to these women,” Ayres told his paratrooper friend.
“Everyone wants to stay, including the leadership,” the paratrooper texted Ayres on August 27. Many troops felt that they’d left the mission unfinished. During the final hours at the airport, one soldier received 120 calls for help. “People are talking about the greatest airlift in history,” he said, “when in reality it was a complete clusterfuck and a lot of people died that didn’t need to.” Ambassador Bass, who oversaw the evacuation, left Afghanistan deeply proud of his colleagues’ efforts, he told me, but also “haunted” by the number of people who didn’t get out. “I really felt just this enormous sense of regret.”
Administration officials told me that no one could have anticipated how quickly Kabul would fall. This is true, and it goes for both Afghans and Americans. But the failure to plan for a worst-case scenario while there was time, during the spring and early summer, as Afghanistan began to collapse, led directly to the fatal chaos in August. The Taliban gave every indication of wanting to cooperate with the American withdrawal, partly because it hoped for a continued diplomatic presence. “They’re still asking us today, ‘Why did you leave?’ ” a senior official told me. But the administration never tried to negotiate a better way out with the Taliban, didn’t establish green zones in Kabul and other cities with airfields. Instead, the evacuation came down to 10 days and one runway.
The end was always going to be messy. But through its failures, the administration dramatically compressed the evacuation in both time and space. It created a panic to squeeze perishable human beings through the dangerous openings of a fortress before they closed forever. It left the burdens to a 20-year-old infantryman trying not to make eye contact with a mother standing in sewage; to an Afghan woman choosing which sister to save; to an Army captain alone in her faraway house.
“There are a number of truths about the war that this evacuation yielded,” Ayres told me, “and one of them is that shortsightedness and failures at the top created slack that had to be taken up by the men and women on the ground—by the Marines on the perimeter, by the families that couldn’t get through the crush of the crowds.” Mike Breen, of Human Rights First, told me that the administration “took the life-and-death decisions that should have been at the highest level of the government and sent them down to the lowest level, which is a pretty good metaphor for the whole war. It ended as it was fought. Same old story.”
Everyone who joined the unofficial evacuation was struck by its lack of partisanship. George Soros and Glenn Beck both sponsored charter flights. Trump-supporting veterans worked with Democratic members of Congress, and liberal journalists sought help from Republican Hill staffers. The quickest way to get kicked off a group chat was to make a political point. But an event as big as the fall of Kabul inevitably absorbed the poison of American politics. Early in the evacuation, a flock of progressive pundits suddenly all flew in the same direction and accused the administration’s critics of using the crisis as an excuse to keep the war going forever. This same talking point had emerged during the White House’s messaging campaign earlier in the summer. It shifted the argument from Afghanistan to the Washington foreign-policy “blob,” as if the latter were the really important battleground. Those taking the brunt of the catastrophe were women and girls, members of religious and sexual minorities, civil-society activists, all of them people of color—groups that progressive pundits are supposed to care about. The end of the war was the first test of a new foreign policy based on human rights rather than military force. The administration and its defenders failed it.
The hypocrisy on the right was worse. Republican members of Congress and media figures heaped scorn on the Biden administration for a withdrawal policy that it had inherited from the Trump administration, then fomented outrage over Afghan refugees on U.S. military bases and in American towns. Biden’s political advisers had not been wrong to think that Republicans would try to exploit the issue to stir up xenophobia.
But across the country, ordinary Americans rushed to embrace the arriving refugees. They left bundles of clothes and baskets of food at the gates of the military bases where the refugees were housed. They volunteered their communities, even their homes, for resettlement: in Houston, where Khan, Mina, their son, and their new American daughter now live; in Spokane, Washington, Hawa’s choice for her new home as she seeks a chance to enlist in the U.S. military. A woman in Denver wrote to me: “When we posted on our neighborhood’s [Facebook] page on a Wednesday that an Afghan refugee family with children would be staying with us starting in 2 days we had 100s of items of clothes, toys, toiletries, baby gear, and winter gear show up on our porch, in addition to a job offer and dental services for the family. People I didn’t even know were dropping off donations with promises of more to come. People want to help!” It was as if Americans were seeking some way to feel better about their country.
The evacuation effort drew on a similar longing. It ran especially strong in the generation of Americans whose adult lives were shaped by the 9/11 wars—who experienced a kind of personal crisis at the way the era ended. “What I wanted out of this was to salvage a little bit of honor from this whole debacle,” Ayres told me. “Every person we got out, I’d be able to look back on my service and my experience with slightly more pride.”
Months after the end of the August evacuation, Ayres, Spence, and their colleagues are still working day and night to save Afghan allies, many of them women. Some are hiding in safe houses and selling their furniture to feed their children. After years of drought, and the economic collapse that followed the Taliban victory, Afghanistan has descended into a winter of starvation. Spence receives hundreds of messages a day from Afghans telling her that she is their only hope for rescue from the Taliban and hunger.
One of the women on Spence’s list is Hamasa Parsa, the soldier-writer who dreamed of dead flowers the night before Kabul fell. A friend gave her a number for Spence, who responded within 10 minutes. Parsa spends her days at home caring for her younger brothers and sisters, and limits the family to two meals a day. When she ventures out she fears being denounced by a neighbor, or forced by the Taliban into marriage. One day in November she went out fully covered to buy a phone charger. A Talib was in the store, weapon slung over his shoulder, playing the video game Ludo King on his phone. Suddenly he looked at Parsa. “It was my first time in my life that I looked into the eye of a Talib,” she told me. She gasped, and her hand trembled. The Talib smiled, as if to say, You’re scared of me, right?
A man keeps calling Parsa’s phone. She knows him from her old office at the Ministry of Defense. He tells her to bring in the gun that she was issued, and she answers that she doesn’t have a gun, though her family has buried it in their yard, along with military documents. The summons is a trap. She no longer trusts anyone. For the first time, she finds writing impossible. “I just don’t know what will be the end,” she told me. “That scares me. I want to find a happy ending for my book first.” Recently, Spence told Parsa that it will be at least half a year before she has a chance to get out.
The U.S. government is not making it easy. It is chartering flights out of Kabul for SIV holders and others of high priority, but the effort is so sluggish, and the rules for authorizing passengers so onerous, that State Department officials have turned to private groups for help evacuating Afghans they know. At the same time, the department is reluctant to negotiate landing rights in other countries for private charters. Before Afghans can apply for the priority refugee program they must somehow get out of Afghanistan, but the U.S. government won’t help them leave. The most direct way to bring at-risk Afghans to the U.S. is through a program called humanitarian parole; at least 35,000 Afghans have applied, for a fee of $575 each, but the Department of Homeland Security is processing the backlog neither quickly nor generously.
“The State Department always insists that we have to play by the rules,” Representative Malinowski, who once served in it, told me. The department celebrates Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who forged passports to save Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. “But if any State Department employee tried to pull what Raoul Wallenberg did, he’d be fired in three seconds.” This was the thinking of the period before the August evacuation. “And then, for two glorious weeks, we threw out the rules.” Now the department is back to its risk-averse, pre-August thinking, with an obstacle for every human need. “Bureaucracy is killing more people than the Taliban,” Mary Beth Goodman, the State Department official, told me.
To Spence it seems as if the U.S. government has moved on. “Afghanistan keeps descending into hell, and what are people like us supposed to do?” she asked. “Are we supposed to leave these people who helped Americans, including people we served with personally, behind? I’m a very idealistic person in some ways, and I understand we can’t save everyone, and there are crises everywhere. But there was a 20-year war, and that changed a lot of people here. A lot of people served and went there. Our policy, our money, went there. Do we just abandon the people? I don’t think that’s who we are as a country. I don’t think that’s who we should be as a country.”
This article appears in the March 2022 print edition with the headline “The Betrayal.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
16. Both the Right and Left Have Illiberal Factions. Which Is More Dangerous?
Some very interesting data.
Both the Right and Left Have Illiberal Factions. Which Is More Dangerous? - The Bulwark
America is having an illiberal moment, with parts of both the right and left flirting openly with illiberalism. Both are dangerous. But which danger is more clear and present?
To get at this, we have to start by settling on a definition of illiberalism.
I posit that a working definition of illiberalism that applies to both left and right might be summarized as any system of beliefs which run counter to the political philosophy summarized in the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration’s main principles are political egalitarianism; human rights; limited government; electoral democracy; the legitimacy of change; the rule of law; and tolerance. You could define illiberalism many ways, but an easy one would be: any explicit rejection of, or attack on, that order. Any ideology of whatever orientation, right or left, that explicitly repudiates these principles is illiberal.
Some illiberal ideologies are well known. On the left are all forms of communism—Leninism, Maoism, Guevarism, Trotskyism, etc.—some forms of Marxism, anarchism, and others. On the right are all forms of fascism, authoritarianism, theocracy, all forms of racial domination, etc. In recent years, a menagerie of right-wing illiberal ideologies has re-emerged or sprung up: neo-Nazis, KKK groups, anti-Semitic movements, and newcomers such as the Alt-Right, the Alt-Lite, the Manosphere, the Dark Enlightenment, the European New Right, White Supremacy, and more.
Which of these two sets of illiberal ideologies—the right or the left– represents the greatest threat to liberal democracy right now?
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One relevant measure of an ideology’s potential influence is the size of its following. Public data on visits and visitors to web pages are not perfectly accurate, but are easily available from digital analysis firms such as Similar Web. The nonpartisan watchdog group Media Bias/Fact Check has usefully sorted hundreds of web pages into the ideological categories of Left, Left Center, Least Biased, Right Center, and Right.
Right illiberal sites can be identified in several ways. Many such outlets identify themselves in their content or with their very names: Alt-Right.com, kkk.com, third-reich-books.com, national-socialist-worldview.blogspot.com,
radioaryan.com, and even nwordrmania.com (the actual URL uses the full racial expletive). Such self-identified sites often feature link lists and blog rolls that indicate sites of similar orientation. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the Anti-defamation League, and the Counter Extremism Project maintain lists of such extremist sites. Academic and journalistic literatures also identify right illiberal outlets, and two openly Far-Right oriented competitors to Wikipedia—Metapedia and InfoGalactic—identify sympathetic websites.
By similar means Left illiberal sites can also be identified. (Readers who desire a fuller account of how I identified and classified sites of various ideologies can consult my recently published book, The Rise of Illiberalism.) In the end I came up with a group of 1,952 web sites that ranged from the illiberal Left, through all the mainstream ideological categories, to the illiberal Right. Of particular interest were the 131 Left illiberal sites and the 215 most extreme rightist sites (what I refer to as the Hard Core Illiberal Right). I obtained data on traffic to these sites for the first 11 months of 2019; all figures given here are for that time period, unless otherwise noted.
In terms of audience size, Hard Core Right illiberal sites averaged about 186 million visits monthly. That’s about 31 percent the size of the audience for sites representing the mainstream Right and 19 percent the size of the audience of mainstream Left sites.
Not to put too fine a point on it: That’s a lot.
As I said, third-party web traffic numbers are not perfectly accurate. But consider a poll conducted in 2017 by Reuters/Ipsos in conjunction with the University of Virginia Center for Politics: It found that “6 percent of respondents said they strongly or somewhat supported the alt-right . . . 8 percent expressed support for white nationalism [and] . . . 4 percent expressed support for neo-Nazism.”
Given that America has roughly 250 million adults, if at least 4 percent of them support neo-Nazism, then our nation has at least 10 million proponents of one form of radical right-wing illiberalism. That would be larger than the number of adult Jews in America (of whom there are about 4.2 million). Or, if you prefer: larger than the populations of 43 states.
And what about the threat which the illiberal left poses?
Unlike the Hard Core Right illiberal sites, the audience for Left illiberal sites is miniscule. Left illiberal sites received a monthly average of about 2.5 million visits.
Which is about 1.3 percent the size of the Hard Core Right illiberal audience.
Moreover, while the Right iIlliberal audience is nearly a third the size of the mainstream Right’s following, the Left illiberal audience is just 0.2 percent of the mainstream Left audience.
In short, the illiberal Right is an important part of the audience for right-of-center outlets, while the illiberal Left is an exceedingly small part of the audience for left-of-center outlets.
Engagement matters, too. And it appears that the Hard Core Right illiberal audience is much more engaged than the audiences of any other ideology.
Hard Core Right illiberal sites had an average engagement rate of 3.07 visits per unique visitor over the period of my analysis, the highest of any ideological category. Moreover, if we look at the top 50 sites in terms of engagement (from the entire sample of 1,952), we find that the Hard Core illiberal Right dominates. Of these top 50 sites by engagement, 19 belonged to the Hard Core illiberal Right—the most of any ideological category and 38 percent of the total.
The most engaged site of them all was extremely radical Vox Popoli, with an extraordinary 21.54 monthly visits per unique monthly visitor. The better-known Daily Stormer had “only” 10.92 visits per unique monthly visitor.
Meanwhile, the illiberal Left had the lowest mean engagement rate of the ideological categories with only 1.76 visits per unique monthly visitor.
Given the size of its audience, it would be comforting to believe that the illiberal Right doesn’t really repudiate liberal democracy—that it’s just a cruder form of the mainstream Right.
But the reality is not comforting. Here are a handful of excerpts from sites my analysis considered to be part the illiberal Right:
Vox Popoli: “As I have repeatedly observed, there is no such thing as equality, the grand rhetorical flights of Thomas Jefferson notwithstanding. The artificial distinctions that conservatives attempt to make between equality of opportunity and equality of result, and between equality before the law and equality of condition simply do not exist.”
Daily Stormer:Morals and Dogma…the Daily Stormer is…an outreach site, designed to spread the message of nationalism and anti-Semitism to the masses. . . . The basic propaganda doctrine of the site is based on Hitler’s doctrine of war propaganda outlined in Mein Kampf, Volume I, Chapter VI.”
Zero Hedge: “Democracy’s pitting of individuals against each other leads to moral degeneration and impairs capital accumulation.”
Occidental Dissent: The Alt-Right looks at the question of racial equality, demands to see the evidence, and draws the conclusion it is just a bunch of bullshit. . . .The evidence for racial equality is less plausible than Medieval alchemists trying to turn lead into gold.
Return of Kings: “6 Ways Liberal Democracy Destroys the Goodness of Humanity: America indeed has the *potential* to be great… But the current system of liberal democracy destroys all potential for this success.”
Mattforney.com: “It’s time to stop beating around the bush: feminists want to be raped. . . . Everything feminists do, from holding up “Refugees Welcome” signs at airports to passing affirmative consent laws, is geared around encouraging men to assault them…”
VDARE: “If anyone thinks we need an original sin, I would like to propose the five most destructive words in American history: ‘All men are created equal.’”
Each of these sentiments runs directly along our definition of illiberalism as being opposed to the political philosophy of the Declaration of Independence.
Illiberalism is dangerous in whatever form it takes. But not all dangers are created equal. And in America, right now, it is clear that the size and influence of right-wing illiberalism dwarfs that of left-wing illiberalism.
Those of us who seek to conserve and defend American liberalism should act accordingly, which involves recognizing that the illiberal threat comes overwhelmingly from the right.
17. Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan vs. Spotify
Another aspect of the disinformation war.
Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan vs. Spotify
If you logged into streaming giant Spotify recently hoping to rock in the free world or searching for a heart of gold, you’d be disappointed.
The musician Neil Young’s catalog all but disappeared from the platform — at his request — last Thursday over the Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast on the platform that boasts 172 million subscribers.
Rogan has come under fire for hosting a guest skeptical of covid vaccines, and the controversy prompted an apology from him on an Instagram video Sunday saying he “could do better.”
“If I’ve pissed you off, I’m sorry,” Rogan said in a nearly 10-minute-long Instagram video. Spotify also announced new rules Sunday about dangerous or misleading content and pledged to add a content warning to any podcast episode about covid-19.
Over the weekend, other musicians expressed support for Young, including his former bandmate David Crosby, and Joni Mitchell also pulled her catalog. Meanwhile, Rogan’s fans, including the musician Jewel and entertainer Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, cheered on his explainer video in the comments.
This isn’t the first time Rogan has come under fire for spreading misinformation. In the last year, his guests promoted covid conspiracy theories including that covid vaccines are gene therapy (they are not) and that vaccines contain microchips (they do not). He also treated his own case of the virus with ivermectin, an anti-parasite medication that is approved for human use but not proven to effectively treat covid, and has repeatedly promoted it as a viable cure. He’s particularly popular among young men; one audience survey found that Rogan’s listenership is 71 percent male.
The saga indicates that Spotify, the 15-year-old audio streaming platform, is now in the company of other new media peers like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Amazon in being held responsible for the content shared on their platforms, without necessarily having mechanisms or policy in place to deal with a flood of problematic material.
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And when it comes to misinformation, audio is arguably unique. Audio is an intimate experience, and audiences often develop parasocial, or one-sided, relationships with a voice so closely in their ear. As misinformation experts have studied, we trust information more when we know — or think we know — the person who shared it. Rogan’s audience is both enormous and devout. About a third say his podcast is the only one they listen to.
Podcasts also occupy a special place in new media, argues Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior data analyst at the Brookings Institution who has researched misinformation in audio. It is a media form less gatekept than traditional broadcast but doesn’t have the same robust debate over what role platforms should play in regulating what content is published.
“Part of what defines a sort of relationship in new media is, yes, anybody’s a publisher, but anybody can also be kind of a critic,” Wirtschafter told Grid. “That sort of dynamic relationship between audience and podcast host really doesn’t exist.”
Joe Rogan has a reputation for “just asking questions”
Rogan is one of the most successful podcasters of all time. Before signing an exclusive deal with Spotify in 2020, he built an audience of millions for both his podcasts and YouTube videos of podcast tapings. (Observers noticed more than 40 episodes were removed from Spotify’s archives after Rogan made the transition to the platform, targeting episodes that featured guests who often backed anti-scientific theories.) Most of his listeners are young men, who admire his willingness to challenge progressive attitudes about gender, politics and cultural norms in general.
His fans praise him for bringing on a wide variety of guests with a variety of viewpoints. Some of these guests are mainstream public figures like Andrew Yang, who ran for president and for mayor of New York, and technology billionaire Elon Musk.
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He also brings on controversial figures like Jordan Peterson, a Canadian academic who argues in favor of strict gender roles. He’s also hosted Alex Jones, a popular internet figure who promotes conspiracy theories, including about the Sandy Hook massacre.
In Sunday’s video, Rogan affirmed his philosophy but said he tries to correct himself when he gets things wrong.
“Whenever I get something wrong, I try to correct it, because I’m interested in telling the truth. I’m interested in finding out what the truth is, and I’m interested in having interesting conversations with people that have differing opinions,” he said. “I’m not interested in only talking to people that have one perspective.”
To Rogan’s critics, the presence of Dr. Robert Malone on Dec. 31 was an example of oxygen for dangerous ideas, not an interesting conversation. Malone is an infectious diseases expert who helped develop the mRNA technology on which covid vaccines are based. He compared vaccination efforts to living under Nazi rule.
In response, 270 medical experts signed onto an open letter, published on Jan. 10, calling on Spotify to be transparent about its standards regarding misinformation and do more to flag false claims.
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The dispute drew more attention when Young published an open letter, addressed to his management and record label, saying he would remove his catalog if Spotify didn’t remove Rogan.
Rogan’s presence on Spotify is valuable to the streaming company, which entered the podcasting space in 2018 after building its reputation through music. The multimillion-dollar acquisition of the Joe Rogan Experience gave the company exclusive rights to Rogan’s entire catalog going back more than a decade. Inked around the same time as Spotify acquired other podcasting companies wholesale, the deal was a significant investment in Spotify’s podcasting future — and a big bet that that’s where the money is.
“It has been very successful,” said Wirtschafter. “These exclusive shows, and especially the Joe Rogan Experience, brings in a ton of ad revenue.”
Rogan is now the star of the company’s podcasting ambitions — his podcast is the most popular on Spotify’s U.S. and U.K. platforms — at a time when the company has become the largest audio streaming company in the world with 172 million subscribers, surpassing Apple Music and Amazon Music.
In statements to other media outlets, Spotify says that it maintains certain standards when it comes to audio misinformation.
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“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic,” the statement reads.
It is true that the worst of the worst podcasts don’t have a presence on Spotify; a search for the far-right podcasts that the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as part of an extremist “network of hate” yields no results, for example.
And Spotify has responded to criticism in the past by removing Alex Jones’ podcast, Infowars, in 2018, citing Jones’ “hate speech.”
Spotify might need Rogan more than Rogan needs Spotify
Spotify signed an exclusive deal in 2020, reported to be worth about $100 million, to exclusively host Rogan’s hugely popular podcast. The company received some early pushback for the decision because of Rogan’s history of hosting guests who espoused racist and homophobic views, as well as some who spread misinformation.
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Then, on New Year’s Eve, as covid hospitalizations peaked and with the unvaccinated most at risk for hospitalization and death, Rogan published an episode interviewing Malone, who promotes conspiracy theories about covid vaccines, such as saying that they harm children.
Medical experts pushed back. “Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals,” read the letter from medical experts. “This is not only a scientific or medical concern; it is a sociological issue of devastating proportions and Spotify is responsible for allowing this activity to thrive on its platform.”
Last week, Young, a polio survivor, issued an ultimatum to Spotify: They could host his music or Rogan’s podcast, but not both.
“I realized I could not continue to support SPOTIFY’s life threatening misinformation to the music loving public,” he wrote, calling on other musicians to join him in pulling their catalogs.
In the days that followed, some large left-leaning Twitter accounts began promoting #DeletedSpotify tweets vastly overstating the number of artists who had pulled their music from Spotify over the controversy. One now-deleted tweet with high engagement claimed Bruce Springsteen had pulled his music (though he had not).
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Spotify — which did not respond to Grid’s requests for comment — published a content policy on Sunday, outlining rules about what will not be allowed on the platform. Those categories include content that promotes or glorifies serious harm to others; content that promotes harassment, violence or hatred; and “content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health.”
Rogan’s Instagram video pushed back against the term “misinformation” but said he would bring more opposing viewpoints onto episodes with controversial guests.
“If there’s anything that I’ve done that I could do better, it’s having more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones,” he said. “I would most certainly be open to doing that. And I would like to talk to some people who have differing opinions on those podcasts in the future.”
The challenges of moderating audio misinformation
In some ways, Spotify does have more control over content than a social media company; the company approves who is allowed to upload content, and it’s more difficult to share content to other users.
But the closed nature of the platform makes it harder for misinformation researchers to audit the claims in a Spotify podcast series at scale, exacerbating the existing challenge of monitoring spoken-word content.
Wirtschafter’s research team, for example, used machine-learning to trawl through transcripts of thousands of political podcasts to identify misleading claims. She said the Joe Rogan Experience — arguably the most influential example of the form — has more barriers for researchers because of Spotify’s format.
“He’s very visible, very loud, he has a massive audience. You see these people who appear on his show, and then they start to pop up in these other series as well,” she said. “I think there is an agenda-setting … that can happen with Joe Rogan. But it’s harder to analyze in this scale, simply because Spotify is closed, because that episode data is unavailable.”
Spotify doesn’t appear to routinely fact-check content before artists post it. Attempts to force Spotify to do so are likely to meet pushback from across the political spectrum.
Spotify is now up against age-old disputes over how to regulate speech and artistic expression, and facing a business consideration: How many artists, and their subscribers, is Spotify willing to sacrifice to keep Rogan and his fans?
18. Biden Administration Backs Levant Energy Deal That Violates Bipartisan Caesar Sanctions
Conclusion:
Congress should insist that President Joe Biden implement the law as written. Its meaning is clear. The House and Senate foreign relations committees should call administration officials to testify about the legal rationale for exempting the deal from sanctions. If those rationales do not hold water, Congress should move to block the agreements or force the administration to exercise the Caesar waiver. Bending the law only serves the interests of Assad and others determined to undermine sanctions.
FDD | Biden Administration Backs Levant Energy Deal That Violates Bipartisan Caesar Sanctions
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · January 31, 2022
The Lebanese, Jordanian, and Syrian governments signed a deal last week to export surplus Jordanian electricity to Lebanon by routing it through Syria, potentially violating U.S. sanctions on the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The Biden administration strongly supports the agreement but has yet to provide a clear explanation of why such transactions should be exempt from the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019, which mandates sanctions on those who do business with the Assad regime.
Last August, the Biden administration announced its support for the inclusion of Syria in two regional energy accords that would facilitate Lebanese imports of gas and electricity, respectively. This decision reversed the previous U.S. policy of opposing Arab governments’ push for economic engagement with Syria and diplomatic rehabilitation of Assad.
The estimated value of the electricity deal is $250 million, and the Assad regime will receive compensation for letting Jordanian power flow through the Syrian grid en route to Lebanon. The terms of the gas accord, which also includes Egypt, are not yet public. The Caesar Act requires the executive branch to impose sanctions on any party that “knowingly provides significant financial, material, or technological support to, or knowingly engages in a significant transaction” with the government of Syria.
The Biden administration has provided shifting rationales for why the law should not apply to these accords. Initially, a top State Department official visiting Beirut said the agreements were clearly humanitarian measures to mitigate fallout from the implosion of the Lebanese economy. In practice, the humanitarian exemption usually applies to food, medicine, and related items.
The administration could also assert that the electricity deal does not constitute a “significant transaction” for the purposes of the Caesar Act, yet that claim would not be very plausible given the deal’s $250 million value. There is also precedent for sanctioning and prosecuting violators whose transactions were far smaller.
As negotiations progressed, the Lebanese and Egyptian governments indicated a need for additional reassurance. Their fears were not unfounded: A change in control of Congress or the White House could leave them exposed.
Two weeks before the signing of the electricity accord, the U.S. ambassador in Beirut, Dorothy Shea, met with the Lebanese prime minister, Najib Mikati, to convey “an official written communication from the U.S. Department of the Treasury” intended to allay concerns about sanctions. According to a leaked copy of the letter (whose authenticity Washington has not confirmed), the Treasury Department said it expects the two energy deals will be exempt from sanctions, with a final determination resting on the precise terms of the signed agreements.
The letter does not provide a legal rationale for this conclusion. An unnamed Democratic congressional staffer said, “No Caesar Act sanctions are triggered,” since no one has “contemplated direct payments to the Assad regime.” Instead, Damascus would likely receive a share of the gas and electricity traversing its territory. Yet in-kind payment clearly constitutes material support, which the law explicitly prohibits.
The statute does, however, provide the president with broad authority to waive Caesar Act sanctions if doing so “is in the national security interests of the United States.” Yet the administration is loath to admit it is making a major exception to a law that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. It prefers to bend the law to the breaking point, which sets a troubling precedent wherein the executive branch employs its discretion to defy a plain reading of the statute.
Congress should insist that President Joe Biden implement the law as written. Its meaning is clear. The House and Senate foreign relations committees should call administration officials to testify about the legal rationale for exempting the deal from sanctions. If those rationales do not hold water, Congress should move to block the agreements or force the administration to exercise the Caesar waiver. Bending the law only serves the interests of Assad and others determined to undermine sanctions.
David Adesnik is research director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Matthew Zweig is a senior fellow. They both contribute to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from Matthew, David, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow the authors on Twitter @MatthewZweig1 and @adesnik. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · January 31, 2022
19. What the Ukraine Crisis Looks Like from Beijing
Conclusion:
The Chinese Communist Party will cautiously attempt to walk a tightrope in the crisis, aiming to preserve its economic ties with the West while capitalizing on Russia’s growing dependency. By aligning itself with Russia, the CCP gains a valuable economic and security partner, but also a potentially destabilizing liability.
What the Ukraine Crisis Looks Like from Beijing - The Bulwark
A Russian escalation in Ukraine could complicate the Chinese Communist Party's plans.
The unfolding crisis in Ukraine is being watched closely not just by Moscow, Washington, Kyiv, and Brussels, but also by Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party’s interests in the crisis are complicated and often contradictory, but it likely believes that the situation presents more risks than opportunities. The potential pitfalls are numerous: Economic disruptions from the crisis could pose dangers for China’s domestic economy, and therefore its politics, while a poorly timed offensive could distract from its Olympic plans as the Russo-Georgian War did during the 2008 Beijing Olympics—all while pushing the world further into rival blocs.
So far, the CCP has generally attempted to disassociate itself from the crisis, at least publicly, and has adopted a cautious, calculated approach. The People’s Daily, the authoritative mouthpiece of the CCP, stopped updating its Russia-affairs section in early November, likely to maintain strict message discipline. Other Chinese state media and, more importantly, the Chinese foreign ministry have generally refrained from commenting on the crisis or have largely stuck with matter-of-fact reporting.
The relatively quiet response from the CCP does not mean the party has failed to indicate its preferences. The CCP strongly desires that Putin delay any escalation at least until after the Olympic opening ceremony and the Xi-Putin bilateral summit conclude around February 4, and potentially until after the Olympics conclude on February 20. (Then again, if Putin escalates during the Olympics, it might deflect attention from Beijing’s ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang, censorship of athletes, ubiquitous electronic surveillance, etc.) Xi and Putin are expected to issue a major announcement at their in-person bilateral summit, but an escalation before the meeting could make Putin too toxic a figure and lead to the meeting’s cancellation.
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Even as the CCP has likely discouraged Putin from intervening at an inopportune moment, the party has also signaled its broad support for Putin and opposition to constitutional democracy. The People’s Daily published an article series in November that attempted to discredit the U.S. intelligence community just as the United States was sounding the alarm about Russia’s military buildup along the Ukrainian border. Chinese state media have also criticized claims of a “so-called ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine,’” echoing the Kremlin’s false claim that Russian forces are not and have never been deployed in the Donbas. The Chinese foreign ministry has thrown its weight behind Moscow, saying “Russia’s legitimate security concerns should be taken seriously and addressed.” So far China has largely “leaned to one side” and supported Putin’s position, and it will likely maintain this posture.
Although Taiwan is not Ukraine and their contexts are completely different, the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army will nevertheless watch how the United States and its allies respond to Russian aggression against Ukraine for any lessons vis-à-vis Taiwan. While there’s debate about whether the sanctions regime NATO is threatening against Russia is sufficient to deter it, there’s not really a comparable debate about China: It’s so large a player in the global economy that it would be much less vulnerable to such threats. But the military and political actions of NATO, both in support of Ukraine and in strengthening NATO’s eastern member states, may be instructive to Beijing.
Beijing’s muted opposition to an invasion is not grounded in any concern about the potentially catastrophic human costs of warfare in Ukraine. Rather, Beijing fears that its economic, geopolitical, and, most importantly, domestic political interests may be harmed by large-scale war in Europe. In a worst-case scenario for Xi, the knock-on effects would severely complicate his plans for the Party Congress in late 2022, when he will almost surely seek to become party-secretary-for-life.
The most likely outcome for China from an escalation in Ukraine is economic pain. Violence in Europe would send commodity prices higher, increase China’s energy import bill, and pose sanctions risks for Chinese corporations. China is already struggling with its own slow-moving real estate debt crisis and Omicron-related shutdowns, so any more economic turmoil would be extremely unwelcome.
A new offensive in Ukraine would also likely exacerbate geopolitical divides, forcing the CCP into an uncomfortable choice between its preferred security companion—Putin’s Russia—and its trade and investment partners in the United States and Europe. As American diplomats call on China to help resolve the crisis, the CCP’s passivity in the face of mass bloodshed could lead to guilt by association. It is entirely conceivable, perhaps even likely, that the free world will be more unified at the end the crisis than before it began, causing countries across Europe to reevaluate their relationship with China.
At the same time, the CCP could see an escalation in Ukraine as an opportunity to secure some benefits from Russia. Putin’s alienation from the West will leave him even more dependent on China for export markets, security, foreign investment, and political support, thus enabling Beijing to extract greater economic, political, and security concessions from Moscow. The CCP would likely find it much easier to secure bargain prices on Russian commodity exports and the Power of Siberia 2, a proposed Russia-to-China natural gas pipeline. Russia’s growing isolation from the West and dependency on China may also ultimately weaken Mongolian sovereignty, enabling Beijing to exploit that country’s renewable energy potential or even annex regions of the surrounded democracy with Moscow’s tacit approval. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Moscow’s growing dependence on Beijing would likely lead to greater military coordination in the Indo-Pacific. Russian and Chinese air and naval assets may integrate to unprecedented levels, while Moscow could be forced to restrict or even cease military cooperation with India, Vietnam, and other Chinese rivals.
With the Olympics and the Xi-Putin summit fast approaching, the most important factors influencing China’s response will be the scale and timing of Russia’s offensive. It is important to stress that the situation remains uncertain. No one actually knows what Putin will do, the dictator may not have decided himself, and de-escalation remains possible, albeit unlikely.
An escalation in the next few days—that is, before the Olympics—would be a highly risky course of action for Putin, but each additional week of delay also presents risks as more arms and aid shipments arrive in Ukraine and NATO and the EU plan their coordinated responses. If Putin escalates before the opening ceremony, all bets about China’s response are off. Xi could cancel his planned bilateral meeting with Putin, or, more likely, the Russian autocrat would cancel the summit, citing his need to remain home and manage the crisis. This path would almost surely lead the two sides to delay any announcement regarding the Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline and would have unpredictable consequences for Sino-Russian relations.
Other issues would arise in the weeks and months following a significant escalation. Beijing largely complied with sanctions put in place after Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas in 2014. It seems highly unlikely that China would join a new round of sanctions, but the conduct of the war could change the circumstances. There were approximately 30,000 Chinese nationals in Ukraine in 2017, and the indiscriminate bombing of Kyiv or other Ukrainian cities will likely lead to Chinese casualties, which might force a response from Beijing.
The Chinese Communist Party will cautiously attempt to walk a tightrope in the crisis, aiming to preserve its economic ties with the West while capitalizing on Russia’s growing dependency. By aligning itself with Russia, the CCP gains a valuable economic and security partner, but also a potentially destabilizing liability.
20. 'No war pls' — Gen Z is spamming Putin's Instagram asking him not to start World War III
"Vlad daddy"
Hmmm... maybe we are executing a whole of society effort to counter Putin. Let's let Gen Z go to work on influence campaigns. After all of the Ukraine problems blow over, it will be worth studying to see if any of these types of information activities had any effect on decision making and the outcome.
'No war pls' — Gen Z is spamming Putin's Instagram asking him not to start World War III
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As tensions rise in Europe and the United States prepares to send troops to support Ukraine against Russia, Generation Z has taken on another approach — simply asking Russian President Vladimir Putin to “please consider to just not start the war.”
An unverified Instagram account for Putin has been flooded with comments, apparently from Gen Z users born between 1997 and 2012, saying that World War III is “not the vibe,” and offering an exchange of “5 mcnuggets to stop the war.”
“Vlad Daddy we are in Mercury Retrograde!” one person commented. “Not a good time to start a war! I suggest an art project instead!”
“Hey daddy putin, I know you’re in a silly goofy mood but please don’t start ww3,” another commented.
“No war pls,” reads another.
The U.S. and its NATO allies have been mulling what comes next as Russia has bulked up its military presence on the border of Ukraine. Russia’s movements have been a “consistent and steady pace involving tens of thousands of Russian troops,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Friday, and are supported by increased Russian naval activity in the northern Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea.”
The Pentagon confirmed that 8,500 service members in the U.S. were on heightened alert for a possible deployment to Europe in support of NATO allies, including the 82nd Airborne Division which makes up the Immediate Response Force.
“[T]he United States will stand shoulder to shoulder with our NATO allies,” Austin said on Friday. “That includes reinforcing security on NATO’s Eastern Flank, and as you know, we’ve placed thousands of U.S. troops on prepare-to-deploy orders earlier this week. If NATO activates its response forces, these troops will be ready to go.”
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, brief media members at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 2022. (DoD photo by U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Taryn Sammet)
Austin also said, however, that he doesn’t believe Putin has made any “final decisions … to conduct any sort of offensive operation,” and that there is “still room for a diplomatic outcome.”
As the situation has evolved over the last few weeks, social media app TikTok has been at the center. It has started being used by “professional analysts and amateur sleuths … in an attempt to gain insight into the Kremlin’s plans,” NBC News reported. TikTok “is overflowing with hundreds of videos recording military might as it heads to the Ukrainian border,” The Daily Telegraph reported, adding that Ukraine “may be the first TikTok conflict.”
Although the outcome of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine is unknown at least one thing is certain: Gen Z will continue asking “Vladdy daddy” to reconsider.
Haley Britzky is the Army reporter for Task & Purpose, covering the daily happenings in the Army and how they impact soldiers and their families, as well as broader national security issues. Originally from Texas, Haley previously worked at Axios before joining Task & Purpose in January 2019. Contact the author here.
21. FBI chief: Threat from China 'more brazen' than ever before
FBI chief: Threat from China 'more brazen' than ever before
AP · by ERIC TUCKER · February 1, 2022
WASHINGTON (AP) — The threat to the West from the Chinese government is “more brazen” and damaging than ever before, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Monday night in accusing Beijing of stealing American ideas and innovation and launching massive hacking operations.
The speech at the Reagan Presidential Library amounted to a stinging rebuke of the Chinese government just days before Beijing is set to occupy the global stage by hosting the Winter Olympics. It made clear that even as American foreign policy remains consumed by Russia-Ukraine tensions, the U.S. continues to regard China as its biggest threat to long-term economic security.
“When we tally up what we see in our investigations, over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information or technology, there’s just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation, and economic security than China,” Wray said, according to a copy of the speech provided by the FBI.
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The bureau is opening new cases to counter Chinese intelligence operations every 12 hours or so, Wray said, with Chinese government hackers pilfering more personal and corporate data than all other countries combined
“The harm from the Chinese government’s economic espionage isn’t just that its companies pull ahead based on illegally gotten technology. While they pull ahead, they push our companies and workers behind,” Wray said. “That harm — company failures, job losses — has been building for a decade to the crush we feel today. It’s harm felt across the country, by workers in a whole range of industries.”
Chinese government officials have repeatedly rejected accusations from the U.S. government, with the spokesman for the embassy in Washington saying last July that Americans have “made groundless attacks” and malicious smears about Chinese cyberattacks. The statement described China as a “staunch defender of cybersecurity.”
The threat from China is hardly new, but it has also not abated over the last decade.
“I’ve spoken a lot about this threat since I became director” in 2017, Wray said. “But I want to focus on it here tonight because it’s reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging, than ever before, and it’s vital — vital — that all of us focus on that threat together.
The Justice Department in 2014 indicted five Chinese military officers on charges of hacking into major American corporations. One year later, the U.S. and China announced a deal at the White House to not steal each other’s intellectual property or trade secrets for commercial gain.
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In his speech, Wray recounted the case of a Chinese intelligence officer who was convicted of economic espionage for targeting an advanced engine by GE that China was working to copy.
But there have also been some setbacks. Though the FBI director mentioned Monday night that the bureau was working to protect academic research and innovation at American colleges and universities, he did not discuss the much-criticized China Initiative.
The department is in the process of reviewing the fate of the China Initiative, and expects to announce the results soon.
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Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/etuckerAP
AP · by ERIC TUCKER · February 1, 2022
22. America Is Stronger Than It Looks
Excerpts;
The factors making for the long-term success of Anglo-American order building are still present today. An open society and competitive business climate promote the technological progress and economic growth that underwrite our foreign policy. As a global sea power interested in preventing large land powers from dominating either Europe or Asia, Americans are the natural allies of smaller states seeking to protect themselves against the ambitions of aspiring hegemons like China and Russia. Overbearing Chinese policies in the Indo-Pacific have strengthened U.S. alliances there, and Russia’s threats to Ukraine are reinvigorating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and reminding Europeans why Washington, warts and all, is a good ally.
Winston Churchill prepared himself for the struggle against Hitler by studying his ancestor John Churchill’s military and diplomatic path to victory over Louis XIV. Theodore Roosevelt was a serious student of both British and American history, as was his cousin Franklin. Unfortunately, the American educational system in recent decades has treated the study of the foundations of American success with suspicion and disdain. Americans seeking to prepare themselves for the struggles of our era would do well to renew their acquaintance with the history of the world system we are called again to defend.
America Is Stronger Than It Looks
Moves by China and Russia have bolstered the U.S. Indo-Pacific alliances and NATO.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
By
Walter Russell Mead
Jan. 31, 2022 6:02 pm ET
The Siege of Maastricht, June 24, 1673.
Photo: Getty Images
The world’s attention may be fixed on Russia’s challenge to Ukraine, but the Biden administration faces something much larger: an intensifying challenge by China, Russia and opportunists such as Iran and North Korea to the global order that the U.S. inherited from a faltering British Empire in the 1940s. While Vladimir Putin tightened his grip on Belarus and stepped up his war of nerves against Ukraine, China signaled its support for Russia’s Ukraine policy, sent record numbers of fighter jets through Taiwan’s defense zone, conducted joint naval drills with Russia near Japan, and beefed up its naval presence between Japan and Taiwan. While China’s ambassador to the U.S. warned of a growing danger of war over the island, Jin Canrong, a leading Chinese academic with extensive contacts in the Chinese Communist Party, predicted that China would carry out an “armed unification” with Taiwan by 2027.
For some, this crescendo of global crises illustrated the overextension of American power. Why, they ask, does every problem in the world end up in America’s inbox? Why not give the world a rest and turn our attention to urgent problems at home?
It is an appealing idea, but the last time we tried it things didn’t end well. In the 1920s Americans hoped that standing for democratic principles, international law and economic cooperation with other countries could prevent another world war. It didn’t, and after the shock of World War II and Stalin’s postwar hostility, American policy makers decided that constructing an Americanized version of the old British world system, a global economic order backed by U.S. military might, was the safest and cheapest way to defend core American interests.
That post-1945 system proved resilient and effective, brushing back the Soviet challenge, providing for the integration of postcolonial countries into an expanding world economy, preventing major great-power wars across seven decades, and bringing both Germany and Japan into the system as “responsible stakeholders” in a world order they had once tried to destroy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, American policy makers hoped to extend that system further, with Russia and China joining Germany and Japan among the principal pillars of an American-led but internationally responsive world order. At the same time, Americans sought to purify and elevate a world order that no longer faced hostile communist rivals, with a greater emphasis on human rights, women’s equality, democracy promotion and such transnational issues as climate change and migration.
That post-1990 version of the 1945 project has hit a wall, with Russia and China categorically refusing to accept the American vision of a post-Cold War world. With American opinion increasingly divided over basic elements of our world-order-building strategy ranging from free trade to global security guarantees and the place of such issues as climate change and LGBTQ rights in American foreign policy, it is growing harder for presidents to summon the domestic support for energetic foreign policy even as the global situation turns grim.
But the pessimism is easily overdone. History did not start in 1945, and there are important structural reasons why both Britain and the U.S. were able to construct and defend a liberal capitalist world system that in some respects dates back to the 17th-century wars between Britain and France. The British model of a liberal and pro-business society at home focused on global trade and sea power proved robust and durable. Louis XIV, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all tried to break the evolving Anglo-American world system. They all made history, and they all shook the order to its foundations. But they still all fell short.
The factors making for the long-term success of Anglo-American order building are still present today. An open society and competitive business climate promote the technological progress and economic growth that underwrite our foreign policy. As a global sea power interested in preventing large land powers from dominating either Europe or Asia, Americans are the natural allies of smaller states seeking to protect themselves against the ambitions of aspiring hegemons like China and Russia. Overbearing Chinese policies in the Indo-Pacific have strengthened U.S. alliances there, and Russia’s threats to Ukraine are reinvigorating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and reminding Europeans why Washington, warts and all, is a good ally.
Winston Churchill prepared himself for the struggle against Hitler by studying his ancestor John Churchill’s military and diplomatic path to victory over Louis XIV. Theodore Roosevelt was a serious student of both British and American history, as was his cousin Franklin. Unfortunately, the American educational system in recent decades has treated the study of the foundations of American success with suspicion and disdain. Americans seeking to prepare themselves for the struggles of our era would do well to renew their acquaintance with the history of the world system we are called again to defend.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the February 1, 2022, print edition.
WSJ · by Walter Russell Mead
23. Opinion | How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?
For reflection.
Opinion | How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?
Guest Essay
How Do You Respond When an Anti-Vaxxer Dies of Covid?
Jan. 30, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET
Credit...Giacomo Gambineri
By
Father Martin is a Jesuit priest and the author of “Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone.”
In the earliest days of the pandemic in New York City, I would often pass the refrigerated morgue trucks parked outside Mount Sinai Hospital, just a block from my Jesuit community.
In those days, it seemed that everyone was masking, everyone was keeping distant, everyone was washing hands and wiping down packaged groceries. And everyone was praying (or hoping) for a vaccine.
Then, incredibly, it came. Then, even more incredibly, some who were eligible for these medical miracles resisted. And among those who refused the vaccine, many have died. Many more will die.
Both the famous and not-so-famous, perhaps some of your friends or family members, have joined the long line of those who have died from Covid after resisting what nearly every reputable scientist and physician has said, even as misinformation spreads: Getting vaccinated, wearing masks and maintaining social distance are the best protections from Covid, and also help protect others, particularly those who are sick, elderly or immunocompromised.
Pope Francis has called getting vaccinated an “act of love.” To put it more bluntly than the Holy Father: It’s not just about you.
Opinion Conversation Questions surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine and its rollout.
It’s not surprising then that when a prominent person who has refused to perform this act of love — particularly when that person has railed publicly against these health-saving measures — dies from Covid, some people are eager to say, “I told you so.” A few go further, mocking those who have died or even trolling their survivors.
This welter of strong feelings can be disorienting: We see someone resisting vaccines or masking (which frustrates us); thus endangering others (which angers us); perhaps even endangering ourselves (which frightens us); and then dying — which should sadden us but, some of us are horrified to discover, doesn’t. Feeling vindicated by someone’s death seems immoral, but it also seems reflexive. Human.
There are several possible theories of how humans evolved a tendency to feel schadenfreude, the German term for the joy one takes in another’s misfortune. Perhaps our cave-dwelling forebears felt something similar when they saw an enemy get too close to a saber-tooth tiger, despite repeated warnings, and end up as an afternoon snack. “That’s what you get, Og!”
Colin Wayne Leach, a psychology professor at Barnard College who has studied schadenfreude and gloating, told The New York Times recently that the schadenfreude many feel in response to the death of anti-vaccine activists is an outgrowth of the country’s polarization: “In many ways, it’s seeing your enemies suffer because of what they believe. That is the sweetest justice, and that’s partly why it’s so satisfying to the other side.”
Whatever its evolutionary roots, many people experience satisfaction in saying (or thinking): “See? I was right.” After months of trying to convince anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and anti-social distancers that life-saving measures are both for their own good and that of others, frustration might get the better of people.
There’s schadenfreude across the ideological spectrum. Recently, on Fox News, Laura Ingraham, a commentator who often expresses her belief in “Christian values,” applauded the news that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had tested positive for the coronavirus despite being vaccinated and boosted.
The problem is that even a mild case of schadenfreude is the opposite of a “Christian value.” Jesus asked us to pray for our enemies, not celebrate their misfortunes. He wanted us to care for the sick, not laugh at them. When Jesus was crucified alongside two thieves, he says to one of them, according to Luke’s Gospel, not “That’s what you get,” but “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Schadenfreude is not a Christian value. It’s not even a loosely moral value.
At this point I could run through a list of philosophers, theologians and wise voices from religions and traditions around the world to prove my point. Instead I will reclaim a word that has been largely lost from our discourse: mean. Crowing over someone’s suffering or demise is as far from a moral act as one can imagine. It’s cruel.
Indulged in regularly, schadenfreude ends up warping the soul. It robs us of empathy for those with whom we disagree. It lessens our compassion. To use some language from both the Old and New Testaments, it “hardens” our hearts. No matter how much I disagree with anti-vaxxers, I know that schadenfreude over their deaths is a dead end.
“Come on!” some might say. “It’s a natural emotion.” That’s true — and emotions are usually beyond our control. If someone coughs intentionally (or thoughtlessly) in your face on the subway, it’s natural to get angry. At least for a few seconds.
But what you do with those emotions — give in to them, prolong them or intensify them — is a moral decision. After your fellow subway rider coughs in your face, you don’t need to express your anger by punching him. Simply letting your emotions take you wherever they please is what a baby does, not an adult.
When it comes to schadenfreude, a line from Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” is apposite. The dotty father of Charles Ryder, the protagonist, is hosting a meal at home. The father mentions someone whose business has failed, and another guest chuckles.
“You find his misfortune the subject of mirth?” Charles’s father retorts.
It’s a lighthearted scene, probably not meant to carry as much weight as other scenes in Waugh’s novel about moral choices. But it has always stuck with me. Don’t find another person’s misery the subject of mirth, glee or satisfaction. Doing so is mean. It’s immoral. And one day you may be the unfortunate one.
24. What Are Hypersonic Missiles and Who’s Developing Them?
What Are Hypersonic Missiles and Who’s Developing Them?
Missile tests by U.S. rivals raise pressure for defenses and America’s own hypersonic missiles
There are two main types of hypersonic missiles. The first is launched on a ballistic course. “Ballistic” refers to the curved arc of any projectile shot into the air, and in this case the arc tops out high above the earth. As it begins its descent, the tip carrying the warhead heads back to earth at hypersonic speed with the ability to change course throughout its flight.
This tip is called a glide vehicle because it doesn’t have its own power source like a jet airplane’s fuel tank—it moves, or glides, while being buffeted by forces such as aerodynamic lift and drag. A variant called a maneuverable re-entry vehicle typically makes just a single turn before reaching its target.
The second type of hypersonic missile is a cruise missile. It flies on a flatter course and is powered throughout its flight, so it isn’t a glider.
DF-17 hypersonic ballistic missiles were featured in a parade in Beijing on Oct. 1, 2019.
Photo: xinhua/EPA/Shutterstock
What are the advantages of hypersonic missiles compared with other missiles?
Because of their maneuverability, hypersonic ballistic missiles are harder to track and destroy. They often begin their descent at lower altitudes than other ballistic missiles, which may allow them to fly below the coverage area of land- or sea-based radar-detection systems.
As for cruise missiles, most common types currently travel at less than hypersonic speed. Making the missile fly faster has obvious advantages in catching an opponent by surprise, but also requires more advanced propulsion technology.
Can hypersonic ballistic missiles be intercepted?
It is difficult with existing missile defenses because of the missiles’ combination of speed and an unpredictable flight path. The U.S. issued contracts to three defense contractors in November 2021 to develop interceptor missiles against hypersonic missiles, but American officials have said it will likely take until the middle of this decade to develop a defensive capability.
A Zircon hypersonic cruise missile launched from a Russian frigate on July 19, 2021.
Photo: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service/Associated Press
Which countries are developing hypersonic missiles?
China has conducted hundreds of hypersonic ballistic missile tests, according to the former vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Hyten, including two in the summer of 2021 in which missiles circuited the globe. Russia is developing both ballistic and cruise hypersonic missiles. Several other countries, including the U.K. and India, are researching them.
North Korea has been testing a lot of missiles. Are any of them hypersonic ballistic missiles?
Quite possibly. Keep in mind that, under common military terminology, “hypersonic ballistic missile” refers to a missile with a maneuverable warhead traveling at hypersonic speed. After North Korea tested a ballistic missile on Jan. 11, Japanese officials said their tracking data showed the missile turned sharply before it landed in the sea. That suggested it was a hypersonic ballistic missile, which is how North Korea’s official media described it.
What about the U.S.?
The U.S. has several programs to develop hypersonic glide vehicles and hypersonic cruise missiles but suffered two failed tests of a hypersonic glide vehicle in 2021. U.S. defense officials say the development of hypersonic missiles is now a priority.
This article may be updated.
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.
