Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners


Quotes of the Day:

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” 
- George Orwell

“Indeed, Clausewitz was wary of the general who tried to be too smart. He preferred those who kept their imaginations in check and a firm grip on the harsh realities of battle.”
- Sir Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History

 "Truth exists, only lies are invented." 
- Georges Braque



1. Last Flight From Kabul
2. State Department vows to evacuate Americans, allies from Afghanistan after military exit
3. U.S.’s Pledge to Fight Terrorists in Afghanistan Will Be Harder Without Boots on the Ground
4. How Turf Wars Mucked Up America’s Exit From Afghanistan
5.  6 Naval Task Groups From U.S., U.K., India, Japan and Australia Underway in Pacific
6. SAS unit vows to avenge fallen Marine comrades
7. Osama bin Laden’s security chief triumphantly returns to hometown in Afghanistan
8. Russia and China Eye a Retreating U.S.
9. Analysis | No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons
10. Perspective | Five myths about the Taliban
11. As US military leaves Kabul, many Americans, Afghans remain
12. The Last U.S. Military Plane Has Left Kabul. What’s Next for Americans, Afghans Left Behind?
13. 90 retired generals and admirals call for Austin and Milley to resign
14. For Biden, ‘forever war’ isn’t over, just entering a new, perilous phase
15. Inside the Final Hours at Kabul Airport
16. A Required Course for Americans: Strategic Failure 101
17. House defense bill targets Chinese influence operations
18. DoD planned to spend billions on Afghan security forces. This group has a suggestion for those funds
19. Dueling Dyads: Conceptualizing Proxy Wars in Strategic Competition
20. Afghan Resistance Smashes Taliban; Kills 85 & Captures 7 In Afghanistan's Andarab


1. Last Flight From Kabul

Last Flight From Kabul
A day that will live in infamy as thousands are left behind.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board

Planes are seen on the tarmac at the airport in Kabul late on August 30, 2021.
Photo: -/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The last American troops left Kabul on Monday—before the Aug. 31 deadline as the Taliban and President Biden had insisted—ending a 20-year conflict but also diminishing the hope of escape for tens of thousands of Afghan interpreters and others who helped America. The frantic evacuation flights managed to get many out, but this was a shameful day in American history, no matter how much the White House wants to spin it otherwise.

Aug. 31 was the arbitrary deadline Mr. Biden set when he thought he would be able to boast on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 that he had ended a “forever war.” He refused to extend the date despite pleas from NATO allies and knowing the date was too soon to evacuate the deserving. Mr. Biden nonetheless told Americans that he would evacuate all Americans who wanted to leave.
His deadline meant that the evacuation failed as much as his withdrawal strategy did. An unknown number of Americans—perhaps a few hundred—weren’t able to leave on the last flights. Nonprofit groups estimate that as many as 60,000 Afghans who fought or assisted the NATO mission were left behind.
Many are in hiding amid reports that special Taliban squads are searching for the names on lists they may have acquired in the willy-nilly U.S. withdrawal. Many will be tortured and killed, and their families too.
Incredibly, Mr. Biden plans to rely on the mercy of the Taliban to get the remaining people out on commercial or charter flights. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is already laying the groundwork for this American pleading as he says that the Taliban have reason to cooperate to earn international goodwill and presumably access to foreign aid. The apt phrase for this is paying diplomatic ransom.
The catalogue of strategic and military misjudgments that led to this ignominious day are many, and they flow from the current President of the United States. He insisted on a rapid, complete departure, despite the recommendation of most advisers to keep a residual force. He insisted on leaving Bagram and other airfields, taking U.S. contractors who were needed to keep the Afghan air force flying.
After the government fell, Mr. Biden refused to alter his plan in order to create safe spaces beyond the Kabul airport to help with the evacuation. That would have required more troops and Mr. Biden was set on rapid withdrawal to vindicate his original decision.
The Washington Post reports that, amid the Afghan government’s collapse, the Taliban offered to let the U.S. provide security in Kabul. Mr. Biden and the U.S. military said all they needed was the airport. Mr. Biden also chose to rely on the Taliban for security around the airport—with deadly results for 13 young American servicemen and women.
Mr. Biden and his aides have been repeating like a mantra that there will be time for assessing responsibility for what went wrong and why after the evacuation ends. That should start immediately. A national-security calamity of this magnitude demands an accounting, and it should start at the top.
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
WSJ · by The Editorial Board



2. State Department vows to evacuate Americans, allies from Afghanistan after military exit


State Department vows to evacuate Americans, allies from Afghanistan after military exit
militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · August 30, 2021
Secretary of State Antony Bliken said the end of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan does not mean the end of efforts to evacuate American citizens from the war-torn country, but that work will be part of a new “diplomatic” mission instead of a military one.
“The protection and welfare of Americans abroad remains the State Department’s most vital and enduring mission,” he said in a speech just a few hours after the last American troops left Kabul airport, ending the nearly 20-year military presence there.
“Additionally, we worked intensely to evacuate and relocate Afghans who worked alongside us. We’ve gotten many out, but many are still there. We will keep working to help, and our commitment to them has no deadline.”
RELATED

A total of 132,000 civilians were evacuated since late July.
Blinken’s vow came after Pentagon officials acknowledged that several hundred Americans and an unknown number of Afghan allies remain trapped in the Taliban-controlled country after the end of the 18-day U.S. evacuation mission, which transported roughly 132,000 people out of Afghanistan.
It also cost the lives of 13 U.S. service members, killed in a terrorist attack on Aug. 26.
Numerous lawmakers and humanitarian groups had urged the administration to extend the self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline to end the evacuation mission, arguing that confusion and chaos around the airport stopped thousands of vulnerable individuals there from escaping.
In a statement just after the last U.S. military flight left, President Joe Biden stood by his decision to end the American military presence there.
“For now, I will report that it was the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs and of all of our commanders on the ground to end our airlift mission as planned,” he said.
“Their view was that ending our military mission was the best way to protect the lives of our troops, and secure the prospects of civilian departures for those who want to leave Afghanistan in the weeks and months ahead.”
Blinken promised that is still a possibility, even without the American military firepower to secure flights.
“The main point I want to drive home here today is that America’s work in Afghanistan continues,” he said. “We have a plan for what’s next. We’re putting it into action.”



3. U.S.’s Pledge to Fight Terrorists in Afghanistan Will Be Harder Without Boots on the Ground

A potentially effective way to operate in a denied area which is through, with, and by indigenous forces. And we seem to have evacuated a large pool of well trained personnel from the Afghan Commandos and Special Forces.


U.S.’s Pledge to Fight Terrorists in Afghanistan Will Be Harder Without Boots on the Ground
Biden promises ‘over-the-horizon’ surveillance and attacks; officials say U.S. has lost many key assets for tracking violent militants
WSJ · by Warren P. Strobel, Gordon Lubold and Michael R. Gordon
Gone are the military bases and other infrastructure that provided a platform for operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. Gone is the U.S.-backed Afghan government and its intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, which worked closely with American spy services. Gone, evacuated or scattered are Afghan agents and troops who fed on-the-ground information to the CIA.
U.S. officials acknowledge the military has lost 90% of the intelligence collection capabilities it had using drones before the drawdown of forces began in May.
“It is not the way you generally ever want to structure a counterterrorism campaign,” said Seth Jones, a former adviser to U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
The potential perils of the Biden administration’s from-a-distance strategy were illustrated on Sunday. The U.S. military said a U.S. drone strike killed several suicide bombers inside a car that was laden with explosives. But many Afghans on the ground said the strike killed 10 civilians, including several children. The strike was the second the U.S. military launched following Thursday’s suicide bombing at Kabul airport that killed nearly 200 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops. The military’s U.S. Central Command said it was aware of reports of civilian casualties.
Mr. Biden, long a skeptic of counterinsurgency campaigns involving large U.S. troop deployments, has promised Americans that he will deter and detect emerging threats without them.
“We conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have a permanent military presence,” he said Aug. 16. “If necessary, we will do the same in Afghanistan. We’ve developed counterterrorism over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.”
“Over the horizon” refers to drones that can soak up electronic intelligence and launch Hellfire and other missiles, U.S. strike jets based on aircraft carriers or overseas bases, assets such as spy satellites that can snap images of terrorists’ encampments or intercept their communications, and possibly commando raids launched from afar.
While such technologies have advanced rapidly in the two decades since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, military and intelligence officials say they are generally less effective without U.S. personnel and local partners on the ground in conflict zones.
“We will be able to do some good with over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations from distant locations against threats emerging from Afghanistan, but we will be unable to achieve anything close to what we could once achieve by having boots on the ground,” said retired Army Gen. Michael Nagata, who held senior positions in U.S. Special Operations and the National Counterterrorism Center.
“Particularly worrisome will be our weakened ability to gather the intelligence and targeting insights we need to both understand what and where the threat is, and also be sure that when we do strike, we are…effectively attacking the threat while also minimizing the likelihood of harm to innocent people,” said Gen. Nagata, who spoke before reports of civilian casualties emerged after Sunday’s strike.

People gathered Monday by a damaged vehicle a day after a missile strike in Kabul.
Photo: wakil kohsar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
When the U.S. pulled its troops from Iraq in 2011, many officials and analysts say, it lost much of its ability to closely track the growth of Islamic State, which seized swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and prompted the U.S. military to return.
When Mr. Biden announced the pullout of all American forces in April, he said the U.S. would retain the capability to collect intelligence and conduct airstrikes to prevent the rise of al Qaeda or other groups that could pose a threat to the American homeland. Administration officials explained that the U.S. would keep forces in the region for that purpose. Some administration officials said that Central Asia would be the ideal place to deploy, even on a temporary basis, drones and other aircraft.
The American military used bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan during the early phases of its post-9/11 operations in Afghanistan but left after Russia and China pressured countries in the region to cut off their military cooperation with Washington.
While the U.S. government has been talking to Uzbekistan officials recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Mr. Biden at their June summit meeting in Geneva that he objected to any role for U.S. forces in Central Asia. Russia has sought to use its influence publicly and privately with countries in the region to prevent this, a U.S. official said. So far, the U.S. hasn’t negotiated arrangements to temporarily position forces there.
Russia’s opposition leaves the U.S. reliant on bases in Qatar and other Arab Gulf states and U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean to fly aircraft to Afghanistan.
Flight times from the Gulf states are so long that a U.S. drone might spend more than 60% of its mission flying to and from Afghanistan, retired Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. and allied forces there, told a seminar hosted by the Atlantic Council think tank recently.
Drones’ flight time over Afghanistan can be extended by adding fuel tanks, but that takes load capacity that could otherwise be used for Hellfire missiles or devices to intercept militant communications, a current official said.
Intelligence agencies had estimated it would take terrorist groups about two years following the U.S. departure to reconstitute themselves and possibly pose a threat to the U.S. or U.S. interests globally. That timeline is being reassessed following the U.S.-backed Afghan government’s collapse, senior military officers said.
In the past two decades, the U.S. has significantly hardened its defenses at home, strengthening security on airlines, at ports and along the border.
In Afghanistan, officials said, the CIA and other agencies will retain some intelligence collection capability.
It “doesn’t mean you go to zero,” said a senior congressional aide. Since Mr. Biden’s withdrawal announcement “people have been preparing from the get-go…to establish the strongest counterterrorism presence we can, given the facts on the ground.”
U.S. military officials have acknowledged that they have shared some intelligence with the Taliban as part of the daily coordination with the militant group on security at Kabul’s airport and the emergency evacuation of Americans and some Afghans.
Lisa Maddox, a retired CIA analyst, said U.S. intelligence officers will maintain longstanding relations with Afghans throughout the country; modern communications will provide some insight into developments there; and some countries could establish a diplomatic or economic presence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, providing opportunities for information gathering.
“In the end, we need humans and partners to detect and thwart terrorist threats,” she said.
Write to Warren P. Strobel at Warren.Strobel@wsj.com, Gordon Lubold at Gordon.Lubold@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com
WSJ · by Warren P. Strobel, Gordon Lubold and Michael R. Gordon



4.  How Turf Wars Mucked Up America’s Exit From Afghanistan

One of the many post-mortems to come. The military will AAR Afghanistan and the withdrawal in detail. What about the rest of the interagency and the other agencies' role in all this?

This excerpt illustrates one of our major strategic weaknesses - we wait until the crisis occurs. If you anticipate something happening -even if it is anticipated to occur 18 months in the future why wait until the crisis occurs?

Excerpts:
When asked why the department waited until Kabul was on the verge of falling, on August 14, to establish that very task force, the official answered, “Task forces are to manage immediate crisis situations.” He then elaborated, “The assessments from the part of our government that does these assessments was that there would certainly be a civil war, it was likely that the Taliban would come out on top at the end of it, but it was going to be a year or 18 months was the initial expectation.”
But back at that July 14, 2021 town hall session—about seven weeks ago—those purportedly “good advance plans” were not on display.
I am reminded of the usefulness of the SOF imperatives - these should not be exclusive for SOF, they can be applied by any military or government organization. 

At these links are the details of the SOF imperatives in SF and SOF doctrine from 1990 (HERE) and 2012 (HERE)

SOF Imperatives
Understand the operational environment
Recognize political implications
Facilitate interagency activities
Engage the threat discriminately
Consider long-term effects
Ensure legitimacy and credibility of Special Operations
Anticipate and control psychological effects
Apply capabilities indirectly
Develop multiple options
Ensure long-term sustainment
Provide sufficient intelligence
Balance security and synchronization

And I would adapt this SOF truth to all organizations: "Competent Special Operations Forces cannot be created after emergencies occur." to this "Competent task forces cannot be created after emergencies occur." If you canticpate a crisis it is better to establihs the task force to deal with it before the crisis occurs.



How Turf Wars Mucked Up America’s Exit From Afghanistan
In July, at Antony Blinken’s State Department, bureaucratic decisions affecting the Afghan withdrawal, one insider said, were “slightly more organized than a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.”
Vanity Fair · by Condé Nast · August 30, 2021
On the afternoon of July 9, 2021, William Walters rode an elevator to the seventh floor of the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Building. Passing a praetorian guard of aides, assistants, and diplomatic security agents, he entered the wood-paneled sanctum of his boss, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. The visit was professional, personal, and pressing.
A physician and a veteran of the Army’s most elite special operations unit, “Doc” Walters headed up Operational Medicine, or OpMed—the State Department’s little-known expeditionary force that has helped organize and carry out daring rescues of U.S. officials, American citizens, and foreign nationals imperiled overseas. Created in 2013, after the deadly siege of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Walters’s directorate had been a turnkey solution for overseas operations at times when the proverbial shit hit the fan. Indeed, only a few months before, Blinken had thrown his public support behind OpMed, telling Vanity Fair—in a May story on Walters’s team—that the unit was a “lifeline for the Department of State and the American people. Though perhaps lesser known outside of the Department, it’s vital to our operations. That’s because OpMed provides the platform and personnel to save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis.”
But with a potential Afghan crisis on the horizon, OpMed was in limbo. There had been plans in the offing to elevate its status at Foggy Bottom with an expansive new title, befitting its robust mission: the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response (CCR). Then in July, everything changed. Blinken approved a recommendation against upgrading OpMed into a bureau. A unit distinguished by its ability to blow through bureaucratic wickets would instead be forced to play “Mother May I,” answering to a series of administrators: a director, an acting undersecretary, and on up to the deputy secretary for management and resources (DMR). To outsiders, this might seem like a low-stakes game of Jenga in reverse. But the move, which blindsided many, appeared to have profound consequences.
Walters, who in his role also served as an official physician to the secretary of state, was alone with Blinken. Temperamentally adverse to small talk, Walters got right to the point. “I am resigning,” he said, according to three State Department sources with knowledge of the encounter. He explained that, in his view, Blinken’s decision not to move forward with the establishment of the CCR bureau, which Walters had been slated to lead, was a mistake. Given simmering tensions in Afghanistan and elsewhere, Walters said, he believed that throwing out plans for the new unit and thereby marginalizing OpMed would impact State’s ability to respond to threats to U.S. diplomats and citizens abroad. “Sir, you deserve to have leaders who can get behind the decisions you make. I can’t do that. So I’m leaving.”
Blinken, these sources say, was exceedingly polite. He inquired about Walters’s future plans. But he did not defend his CCR decision so much as explain it away, purportedly telling Walters he had delegated the matter down to his deputy, Brian McKeon. (A higher-up at State characterized the meeting as extremely cordial and said that Walters did not make any appeals.) The doctor and patient parted ways, and Walters left the building—an exit that in hindsight might have hampered the State Department’s ability to properly prepare for what both men feared might be coming in Afghanistan.
America’s chaotic departure from Afghanistan was not unforeseeable. Nor was it an intelligence failure—that old chestnut often used to absolve leaders of culpability. Instead, the Biden administration’s tumultuous exit from the war-torn country seems to have been the result of incremental and baffling bureaucratic decisions.
Throughout the summer, I had been fielding Cassandra-like calls from U.S. officials. They warned of impending doom in Afghanistan. They spoke of scenarios in which the Taliban, on the eve of President Joseph Biden’s mandated pullout, might crater the runway at Hamid Karzai International Airport and create humanitarian and security disasters. It sounded far-fetched. Then again, maybe I was biased. After working in the intelligence community as a young attorney and reporting on national security issues for 20 years, I still believed the U.S. government had the wits and wherewithal to ensure that its decades-long Afghan misadventure would end with a whimper, not a bang. So while I discussed the conversations with my editors, I did not write about them, not wanting to sound alarmist.
Yet what was most striking to me about these summer exchanges was where the blame seemed to land: at the foot of State Department leaders, whom the callers insisted were undermining contingency planning and shirking their legal responsibility—as enumerated by statute and executive order—to protect, and evacuate as necessary, U.S. posts and personnel as well as American citizens abroad. Instead, said one senior official, State was “pressing the DOD easy button”—shorthand for shoveling State’s problems onto the plate of the Department of Defense. This individual described the decision-making process at Foggy Bottom as being plagued by “pathologic optimism.” But as the days and weeks wore on, several other State Department sources would explain that the problem came down to hubris. Eliminating CCR and degrading OpMed, without clearly defined alternatives, was evidence, they said, of meta-ignorance (known in psychology circles as the Dunning-Kruger effect); America’s diplomats, in the view of these insiders, were ignorant of their own ignorance.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives to the Capitol Visitor Center to brief members of Congress on the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan on Tuesday, August 24, 2021. By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images.
And so it would come to pass. “We will not conduct a hasty rush to the exit,” President Biden had said when he stepped up to the podium in the White House Treaty Room on April 14, 2021, to announce he was bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan by late summer. “We’ll do it responsibly, deliberately, and safely.” True, the American government, in recent days, has arranged for the emergency evacuation of some 120,000 people, an impressive feat. Moreover, even as ISIS terror attacks claimed the lives of 13 members of the U.S. military and more than 110 Afghan civilians last week, the Biden administration has said it is determined to honor its pledge to extract American forces from an unpopular and devastating conflict. But what happened at the State Department in the months leading up to the fall of Kabul seems to have undermined Biden’s promise back in April. It appears to have involved self-sabotage, bureaucratic infighting, and disjointed planning with, at times, an apparent lack of urgency. This account is based on a review of sensitive memos, emails, texts, calendar entries, audio recordings, situation reports, and intelligence threat summaries—as well as interviews with 16 current and former officials who had a ringside seat to the internecine battles that marred the end of America’s longest war.
This past spring, I got to know Doc Walters and the OpMed team, who were at the forefront of the State Department’s efforts to help protect and repatriate Americans across the globe on very short notice and under the most trying of circumstances. I traveled with their dynamic and diverse squad of doctors, scientists, logisticians, and veteran Special Forces medics in the final phase of Operation Icebox, a Herculean undertaking that involved flying 574,000 miles on 26 separate aircraft to 212 airports to supply more than 190,000 COVID vaccine doses to 257 U.S. diplomatic posts.
The unit had just come off a pandemic year in which, as Blinken put it, “OpMed was integral to our evacuation and repatriation of 100,000 Americans to the United States as countries began locking down their borders.” And yet, for OpMed, COVID was almost a side mission. Its stock and trade had been dispatching “medics with guns” to posts at risk of being attacked; embedding with rapid-reaction forces in response to life-threatening incidents worldwide; and supplying mass-casualty triage gear and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) countermeasures to far-flung locations.
So with a deadline looming to leave Afghanistan, the State Department certainly had a well-seasoned response force—with unique aviation and logistics capabilities—at the ready.
The events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, which rocked the national security establishment, made the creation of a group like OpMed an imperative. Out of the investigations that followed, some key findings emerged. First, Pentagon officials had warned their counterparts at State about the “tyranny of distance” in Libya and other parts of North Africa. Second, CIA medics on the scene in Benghazi had played an indispensable role in saving the lives of severely wounded diplomatic security personnel. Finally, an interagency panel of experts concluded that, in light of the “grossly inadequate” response time to evacuate the injured, “State must ensure it has the capability to rapidly deploy crisis responders and evacuate […] personnel in harm’s way.” It didn’t come as a surprise, then, that the Obama administration, in 2013, authorized this new State Department directorate.
Threats to America’s posts and people abroad are hardly an aberration. “Since the 1960s, terrorists have increasingly targeted diplomats as a high-profile means of advancing their ideology,” concluded an independent panel that in 2018 examined best practices for protective medicine in high-risk, high-threat diplomatic engagements. “The ‘symbolic identity’ and ‘representative character’ of U.S diplomats means that they are ‘not only at the frontline of the political battle but also directly in the firing line of terrorists seeking to undermine or derail the counter-terrorism process itself.’” Historians still recount the tragedies that befell U.S. diplomats, spies, and support staff in Saigon (1975), Tehran (1979), Beirut (1983), Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (1998), Benghazi, and elsewhere. In truth, from 1998 to 2016 there were more than 370 “significant attacks”—128 of which resulted in casualties.
In the past two years alone, according to several internal State Department documents, OpMed helped evacuate U.S. embassies in Caracas, Venezuela (March 2019) and La Paz, Bolivia (November 2019) and pre-positioned assets and personnel in anticipation of revenge attacks on our embassy in Beirut following the Trump-ordered assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in 2020. In each of those cases, State convened a task force—its traditional mechanism for responding to a crisis.
OpMed’s former managing director William Walters boarding a flight to oversee vaccine distribution in March 2021.By Adam Ciralsky.
Though it was founded during Obama’s second term, OpMed found its footing during the pandemic, much of which coincided with Trump’s frenzied final year in office. Walters and his teams accepted missions that others did not want or were ill-equipped to handle. The unit’s relentless tempo throughout 2020, however, exposed systemic weaknesses within the State Department, where foreign service officers could be less than diplomatic when they sensed someone might be infringing on their territory or pushing them outside of their comfort zone. Then secretary of state Mike Pompeo—a West Point grad and former CIA director—championed OpMed’s work even though the office was established on Hillary Clinton’s watch, drew Trump’s ire (both before and after he became president), and had no political appointees in its ranks, which exposed OpMed to allegations that it was staffed by Deep Staters.
In September of that year, Pompeo approved the elevation of OpMed from a directorate to a bureau. As detailed in official documents, Pompeo’s aim in creating the new CCR was to “synchronize Department capabilities including aviation, logistics, and medical support to disasters abroad, both natural and man-made, including the outbreak of infectious disease.” According to sources close to the matter, Pompeo (who declined to comment for this article) was also apparently hoping to end bureaucratic skirmishes and foot-dragging among those at State who believed that crisis planning can create self-fulfilling prophecies. This sentiment was certainly on display this summer with Afghanistan. “The second you stand up a task force and imply that we’re starting to plan for evacuation is the second you’re eroding the confidence of the government in Kabul that we were trying to support,” a senior State Department official told me this week in trying to explain, in part, why he and his colleagues waited until mid-August to create a task force fully focused on evacuating embassy personnel and other American citizens. “We were constantly having to balance our policy imperatives with the other policy objectives.”
CCR was a product of the times, literally growing out of the State Department’s response to the pandemic, according to Pompeo deputy Stephen Biegun. He recalled that in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, State had to “beg, borrow and practically steal” to repatriate Americans from every corner of the globe. “We used every asset, every aircraft, every mode of transportation available to us. We built a system that started with the evacuation of our diplomats and U.S. citizens in Hubei province of China, but ultimately culminated in the returning of more than 100,000 Americans.” The system, to his mind, worked and its codification and expansion seemed a logical next step.
The move to make OpMed a bureau continued right up until Trump left office. An Executive Resources Board met and approved establishing the position of CCR coordinator as well as Doc Walters’s promotion to the civil service’s senior executive ranks. An action memo, which Pompeo approved on January 15, describes Walters’s new role as follows, “The CCR coordinator is an assistant secretary-equivalent position responsible for the development, resourcing, deployment, maintenance, and oversight of the Department’s medical, aviation, and logistics support capabilities to address contingency planning and crisis preparedness and response in accordance with applicable laws and Presidential policy in those instances where traditional mechanisms are not available or cannot address the need.”
Another source close to Pompeo put it this way, “We needed to have a world-class organization that was ‘fit for purpose.’ What we had been doing previously was playing pickup games. What the secretary recognized is [that] if we’re going to be agile and have the ability to proactively respond...we've got to have a unit that could do operational planning and contingency scenarios and have the right capabilities and skill set, all in one, so that we can go to them when the decision is made and they can execute the hell out of it and we we can do it well.” Pompeo, said the source, wanted to eliminate silos and create an outfit with “a clear chain of command on who’s got the operational execution.”
On January 26, Blinken was confirmed by the Senate as the new secretary of state. And one of his early acts was to order a reassessment of the CCR edict, pending what one inside source described as a “holistic look back.” Diplo-speak aside, the job fell to Brian McKeon, Blinken’s deputy for management and resources (DMR), to conduct a 30-day review that began on April 14 but wound up dragging into July.
The writing was on the wall, according to State and congressional sources: OpMed, though an Obama brainchild, had somehow been tainted by its promotion under Team Trump, whose secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, had not exactly been welcomed with open arms by either Team Biden or the State Department’s rank and file. What’s more, to some in the foreign service, Doc Walters and his team were loose cannons who almost revelled in defying the buttoned-up veneer that diplomats tend to project.
The decision surprised some of those on Pompeo’s former team, who did not feel that centralizing State’s crisis planning and response capabilities had been controversial or partisan. Once McKeon took office, he reached out to Brian Bulatao, an undersecretary for management under Pompeo. Bulatao appealed to him, saying that of all the things McKeon might prioritize in his new role, two units were vital to protect. One was the Center for Analytics, which leverages data to help with diplomacy. The other was CCR. “CCR needs to endure,” Bulatao pleaded, according to a source familiar with the conversation. “There are those in the building that are going to tell you that it’s not necessary, that it’s redundant because they’re envious of [OpMed’s] capabilities and they want to protect their turf. But they don’t know how to do it [themselves].”
Blinken’s endorsement of McKeon’s CCR recommendation not only scuttled OpMed’s elevation to a bureau, but soon would parcel out its capabilities to other stakeholders at State. The new plan was for OpMed—which had been run with a fair amount of autonomy—to report up to Dr. Larry Padget, director of the Bureau of Medical Services (MED). Blinken was well within his rights to make the move and to run the department as he saw fit. But the optics of returning State to an earlier incarnation—and putting the Pentagon in the position of having to potentially risk soldiers’ lives to rescue American diplomats, citizens, and others—has since become a magnet for controversy. As one senior participant in the CCR process lamented, “If State had put half as much energy into evacuation planning for Afghanistan as it put into cratering OpMed and abolishing a bureau devoted to contingency planning and crisis response, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Some at the top echelons of the State Department don’t see it this way at all. Ned Price, Blinken’s spokesperson, stressed to Vanity Fair that the CCR bureau was never really greenlit in the first place. What’s more, he said, “The new bureau was not proposed to introduce any new capabilities, and questions were raised at the time”—meaning at the end of Trump’s and Pompeo’s time in office—“both internally as well as by Republican and Democratic Members of Congress about whether a new bureau was the right approach.” Despite these concerns, Price explained, “then-Secretary Pompeo decided to proceed with [CCR’s] establishment.”
Once Biden and his team took office, however, “Secretary Blinken,” according to Price, elected to conduct a review of “whether it was in the Department’s interest to proceed with that course of action.” The verdict? “A new bureau was not the right approach. Consistent with that finding, the Secretary decided to discontinue the proposed bureau.”
A senior source within State added that there was a judgment from leadership at Foggy Bottom and on the Hill that the establishment of what he termed a redundant bureau would potentially sap manpower and resources from State’s existing global emergency medical response structure and its medical care systems for its diplomats. This same source went on to say, in a more personal vein, that while Doc Walters may have fancied himself as having a broader mission, he and his office were primarily focused on medevac capabilities, not on full-on evacuations. The notion that the unit would have been overseeing the Kabul evacuation, the source claimed, was absurd on its face.
Some in Congress hold a distinctly different view about these matters. Texas representative Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Vanity Fair this week, “It is appalling that Secretary Blinken dissolved the bureau at the very time it was most needed. After the president made his decision to withdraw troops, it should have been all hands on deck from Day One. The [State] Department’s contingency planners and crises managers should have been consulted from the get-go and utilized at every juncture.
By Adam Ciralsky.An OpMed team preparing ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezers for Operation IceBox. Dr. Troy Glassman, Jimmy Algarin, Dr. William Walters, Samuel Bunch, Matthew Ferreira, Katrina Mayes, and Taylor Bunch.
“Call it OpMed, or CCR, or whatever you want,” McCaul continued, “the point is the Department had these people, and their experience was a huge asset. We chose not to draw upon them until it was almost too late—after the Taliban had overrun the country, and tens of thousands of people had to be evacuated in a matter of days. We should have started sooner, and we should have used our A-team. The tragedy we’ve seen unfold—people stranded, American lives lost—reflects…disorganization, mismanagement, and, worst of all, utter neglect.”
Stephen Biegun, deputy secretary of state under Pompeo, wondered why Blinken and the State Department insisted on starting from scratch. “I would have thought that the wisdom of this initiative might have been attractive to the Biden team. And the Biden team is very good.” Of Brian McKeon, he noted, “He and I worked together for many years on Capitol Hill and I have a huge respect for him. But I think this is kind of what happens in an administration. They get overwhelmed first with the initial wave of responsibility staffing up and then something like Afghanistan falls on them—or this one was actually by choice to make a policy decision like Afghanistan and [they] end up being caught flat-footed.”
OpMed, in Biegun’s view, had had a track record of arranging “incredibly successful” COVID-related airlifts. “A year ago, we had built the same thing” required in Afghanistan, essentially. But the incoming Blinken team, he said, seemed like it “forgot” it had this capability in-house already and wanted to begin afresh: “It was like the U.S. government had never done this before.” Biegun argued for a wholesale reassessment, “not from a political perspective but from a managerial perspective…. I sure hope they take a long, hard look at whether or not we have to keep reinventing the wheel. It’s time for the State Department to have a permanent crisis and contingency response capacity. This is not going to be the last time we have a crisis…. It would save us all a lot of grief and be [of] service to American foreign policy and especially to the American people.”
To CCR or not to CCR? The question was front-of-mind on August 20—five days after the fall of Kabul—when all 23 Republican members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) signed a letter to Secretary Blinken, as they put it, “to condemn in the strongest terms the Department’s senior leadership team in its dereliction of duty regarding Afghanistan,” including the decision “to dissolve the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response, which could have provided logistical support with Afghanistan.”
In their letter, the HFAC members asked Blinken whether State would “reconsider its upcoming Congressional Notification dissolving [CCR],” inquiring about who was “currently responsible for aviation, logistics, and medical support to crisis response operations,” and singling out the respective roles and responsibilities of McKeon and Undersecretary for Management Carol Perez.
To some, the letter read like a partisan pile-on. And had the Taliban not taken over city after city, had Afghan government forces not disintegrated, and had the withdrawal been pulled off without a hitch, the CCR decision would have likely been a non-issue. But that didn’t happen. It became evident to many that the eleventh-hour scramble to airlift people, the mayhem at the airports, and the stranding of hundreds of Afghan allies, might have been avoided had there been solid plans in place in the spring and summer.
Brian McKeon broke the news to Walters at a meeting on July 8: There would be no new bureau after all. According to three sources who received a readout of the exchange, upon hearing of CCR’s demise and OpMed’s new management structure, Walters is said to have warned McKeon, “You’re going to get your boss fired.” (Another source with knowledge of the meeting refuted the contention that Walters made such a statement.)
The damage from this byzantine imbroglio might have been contained were it not for the fact that the world was still turning. Haiti and Lebanon were in turmoil and the United States had less than two months to remove its forces from Afghanistan. The following week, on July 14, Dr. Larry Padget, the director of the Bureau of Medical Services who by then had OpMed under his direct command, convened a town hall, in part to address the elephant in the room: how OpMed’s missions—including its life-saving aviation, expeditionary medicine, and logistics sub-programs—would be managed moving forward. The day before, diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, en masse, sent a warning to Blinken—via the department’s dissent channel—that the Taliban’s advance was imminent and Afghan forces might collapse.
State, however, was already on notice about the emerging threat. In fact, at a June 30 meeting of the Afghanistan Non-Combatant Evacuation (NEO) Working Group—according to sources familiar with its operations and a review of contemporaneous notes—conversation turned to how the department might evacuate an estimated 25,000 Americans and Afghans eligible for U.S. visas. When someone from OpMed weighed in and presented a back-of-the-napkin plan to charter 100 flights over 25 days, the response, according to two sources at State, was tepid—there needed to be further discussion and additional working groups. “Whenever OpMed offered options for evacuating AmCits and SIVs, they were told to sit in the corner and color,” said a source whose descriptions of meetings in June, July, and August was confirmed by three others, “It was, ‘We’ll let you know when we need you. In the meantime, be quiet.’”
But OpMed did not stay quiet. In May, Walters, according to two knowledgeable insiders, began using his biweekly briefings with Undersecretary Perez to highlight the need to ramp up contingency planning for Afghanistan. (A senior State Department official claimed that those meetings were more focused on medevac options for Afghanistan as opposed to large-scale evacuations.)
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense had been honing its own contingency plans, starting last winter. Throughout the spring and summer, officials hosted so-called tabletop exercises—with representatives from State and other departments—to war-game out myriad responses, including a non-combatant evacuation operation (NEO). The Pentagon’s priorities, however, were different from State’s: Before they could safely evacuate diplomats and people associated with the embassy, for instance, the military, under President Biden’s timetable, first had to evacuate its troops.
A senior national security figure outside the State Department witnessed the interagency process play out over the summer. In his view, there was an odd resistance or reluctance on the part of State to fully engage in prepping for worst-case scenarios should things turn ugly in Afghanistan: “There was a clear lack of urgency by the Department of State. DOD got pushback from State. I can confirm that DOD told State that they needed more contingency planning and needed to do so earlier.”
A top Pentagon planner I spoke to went even further, spreading the blame across the board: “It didn't take high-fidelity intelligence to know that the Afghan national security forces were deteriorating as the Taliban were quickly overwhelming both the forces and the civilian population throughout Afghanistan. The State Department very much wanted to run this and control it, and then at some point it kind of became clear that it was very much over their head.” The source said that throughout the process of planning for the U.S. withdrawal, political considerations trumped operational imperatives. “There was a ‘sunk cost’ fallacy—there was [so] much invested in the Afghan people, the Afghan security forces, and the blood and treasure and munitions and capabilities that it was kind of a ‘too big to fail’ mindset. So I think that’s why the contingency planning wasn’t quite there, because it was a little bit antithetical to suggest that the national security forces would not be able to withhold the coming onslaught of the Taliban.”
This official insisted that a sort of willful “blindness” entered the equation and had ramifications beyond the evacuations from Kabul airport. In particular, he cited the decision to abandon Bagram air field (vital for staging U.S. military maneuvers, possible evacuations, and reprisals in case things went south) and the failure to mitigate the loss of high-end military munitions and hardware (now in Taliban hands) as “fundamental errors of strategy that any general officer in the military knows not to make that were made [anyway] and had to be political decisions and not military ones.”
A senior State Department official, in contrast, expressed no second thoughts about how things played out. He told Vanity Fair about Operation Allies Refuge, whose focus had been on Afghans eligible for exit visas: “During the course of the spring and summer, we were looking every day—as we watched the pace of this retrograde by the U.S. military and the military campaign of the Taliban—[at] what policy and decisions we needed to make...including bringing out special immigrant visa (SIV) holders. And as the Taliban campaign continued to march forward [we had] to look very closely all the time at the size and scope of our footprint at the United States embassy in Kabul…. The State Department [had been] warning Americans for 20 years that they shouldn’t be traveling to Afghanistan because of the danger. We effectuated these warnings that people should get out of the country over the course of the last seven months on a biweekly basis.”
But by the summer, the Taliban accelerated its advance and Afghan government forces began retreating at an alarming rate. As a result, U.S. personnel were left extremely vulnerable. “On August 14,” he said, describing the Pentagon-led operation, “when the decision was made to bug out of the American embassy in Kabul, we got out of the embassy and out to the airport in 48 hours, and the U.S. forces came in over that weekend and buttoned down the airport in about 72 hours. All of that because we had good advance plans. We had forces postured in the [Persian] Gulf that enabled us to get those forces there quickly.”
Moreover, the official noted, “Even if the CCR bureau existed, we would have had this task force and CCR would not have been leading the department’s response right now …. Even though this proposed bureau has the word[s] ‘crisis response’ in its title, the crisis response functions in the State Department are managed by a unit under the State Department operations center and often leads to, indeed in this case, the establishment of a cross-department and interagency task force, in which we have currently hundreds of people working 24/7 on this task force with different units focusing on different elements.”
When asked why the department waited until Kabul was on the verge of falling, on August 14, to establish that very task force, the official answered, “Task forces are to manage immediate crisis situations.” He then elaborated, “The assessments from the part of our government that does these assessments was that there would certainly be a civil war, it was likely that the Taliban would come out on top at the end of it, but it was going to be a year or 18 months was the initial expectation.”
But back at that July 14, 2021 town hall session—about seven weeks ago—those purportedly “good advance plans” were not on display.
On that day, the State Department’s Larry Padget addressed how contingency planning would be handled in the absence of a Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response and in the wake of Walters’s resignation. There were no blinking lights. Nor was there an apparent sense of urgency and imminent threat. Attendees submitted questions and the meeting was recorded via Microsoft Teams. According to two sources who were present and familiar with the aftermath, when some who could not attend later asked to see the video, they were informed that it had been deleted on orders. (Padget, approached through official State Department channels, did not respond to questions.)
Still, nerves were frayed, and some people used their phones to capture bootleg audio. I listened to one such recording. And as I did, I had to wonder if State leadership—Blinken, McKeon, Perez, and Padget—had thoroughly considered the downstream effects their decision-making might have on morale, on personnel, and most importantly, on their own ability to respond to the brewing crisis in Afghanistan.
Twenty-seven questions were posed in advance. Padget, however, addressed few of them directly. Considering their tenor and substance, it is not hard to see why:
  • What are MED’s current and planned actions that are being taken to prepare for the next international crisis or pandemic? A good example would be contingency planning for Kabul.
  • On April 22, 2021, in accordance with Presidential Policy Directive 40, thirty Mission Essential Functions [MEFs] were identified for the State Department. [One of them is] to “Protect, provide assistance to, evacuate U.S. Citizens abroad.” How does MED justify that OpMed is better able to support this MEF when OpMed provided justification that they are better able to support as CCR?
  • Why does MED believe some [OpMed] functions are best serviced through [the Bureau of Administration]? For example, having an internal aviation asset has been crucial throughout the pandemic. We were able to conduct countless biocontainment medevac’s, deliver testing capabilities and supplies directly to our posts, repatriate several thousand Americans and residents, deliver vaccines to all posts without incident, loss or issue. When you “own” the contract you have visibility on all aspects of an aviation operation—cradle to grave.
To be fair, Padget did take questions in the room. But, given the pandemonium and deaths on the ground in Kabul a month later, some of his answers do not age well. In fact, two sources present at the town hall that day say it confirmed their worst fears: that the State Department, for whatever reason, was severing the “lifeline” as Blinken had called it, that could “save American lives around the world, especially in times of crisis.” After praising OpMed for its hard work in carrying out difficult missions, Padget conceded, “I’ll confess to you that over the last few years, and especially since I have been Chief Medical Officer, I’ve not had a lot to do with [OpMed].... The first thing I want to say to you is a lot of your programs and sub-programs, I have a cursory, superficial understanding of it, but I don’t have an in-depth understanding.”
A few minutes later, he asked Tiffany Reeser to say a few words. Padget described her as “high up” in the department and someone who had been detailed to his office after stints with the brass on the seventh floor. She was nothing if not candid. “I think there was an impression, given [Blinken’s] decision, with [McKeon’s] recommendation,” she asserted, “that there was going to be a 25-point plan dropped on all of us for how this decision was going to be implemented. That’s not the case. This is, I would say, slightly more organized than a Choose Your Own Adventure novel.”
Manmeet Thind, an attorney who works with OpMed, spoke up too. She attributed OpMed’s success to its ability to house logistics, crisis response, aviation, and medical support under one roof. Distributing those responsibilities to different bureaus in the department, she warned, would have consequences: “Now, suddenly, you have more layers of bureaucracy, and as we all know, that’s going to slow response. And at the end of the day, that’s going to affect lives.”
Padget’s response at the July meeting suggests that the decision not to greenlight CCR may not have been exactly methodical. “I ask for some grace and forgiveness for not having a full program of how I see these [aviation and logistics] sub-programs and how things are going to work with the reintegration. Frankly, besides the [CCR] decision and a pretty rapid white paper going out to [McKeon], the focus of the front office and other things have been putting out other fires…so the attention that we pay for future planning and how things fit was a pretty rapid response on a pretty rapid turnaround on this. I don’t know how well thought-out it was, and it needs to be reconsidered.”
He may be onto something. The September 18, 2020 memo establishing CCR was drafted by Doc Walters, approved by McKeon’s predecessor, Bulatao, signed three days later by Pompeo, and cleared by 32 people in more than 12 different bureaus and offices—a number of them career civil servants and foreign service officers. One of those offering approval, according to the document, was none other than Larry Padget.
As late as Thursday, August 12, 2021 (the day the Taliban seized Kandahar and other provincial capitals), Blinken’s lieutenants still had not informed Congress, as required by law, of the secretary’s decision not to proceed with CCR. In fact, the State Department team was still noodling with a draft congressional notification entitled “Abolishment of the Bureau of Contingency and Crisis Response.” A week later, on August 19, State’s Ned Price would tell reporters, in a sort of semantic jujitsu, that CCR was never actually created, which begs the question: Why have Price’s colleagues at State been preparing to notify Congress of a decision to “abolish” something that never existed?
The academic debate over CCR’s existence, however, obscures a far more elemental issue, which, at this date, remains unresolved: Why did Antony Blinken and his lieutenants rejigger and possibly degrade State’s in-house crisis planning and response capabilities on the eve of ending the longest war in American history?
When asked if the department’s Afghan planning could have been better conceived and executed—and organized earlier—a senior source within state was unapologetic, “I think whenever the United States government and military decided to withdraw from Afghanistan, it was going to be messy. There’s no clean way for a civil war to end in the circumstance that we’re seeing now.”
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Vanity Fair · by Condé Nast · August 30, 2021



5. 6 Naval Task Groups From U.S., U.K., India, Japan and Australia Underway in Pacific

Seems like a formidable presence of the Quad plus the UK.

6 Naval Task Groups From U.S., U.K., India, Japan and Australia Underway in Pacific - USNI News
news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · August 30, 2021
USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70), navigates Tokyo Bay on the way to Commander, Fleet Activities Yokosuka for a scheduled port visit on Aug. 28, 2021. US Navy Photo
KUALA LUMPUR – Six task groups from the U.S, U.K., Australian, Japanese and Indian navies are currently on operational deployments in the Indo-Pacific region amidst an intense fall and early winter period of multilateral exercises.
Currently operating in the region are the Navy’s Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group and Japan-based America Expeditionary Strike Group, the U.K. Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth Carrier Strike Group 21 (CSG 21), Australian Defense Force Indo-Pacific Endeavour 21 (IPE 21) task group, Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) Indo-Pacific Deployment 2021 (IPD21) force and the Indian Navy Eastern Fleet task group.
USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) arrived at Fleet Activities Yokosuka on Aug. 28 for a scheduled port visit. The strike group deployed on August 2 for the Western Pacific and consists of Vinson, cruiser USS Lake Champlain (CG-57), and destroyers USS Dewey (DDG-105), USS O’Kane (DDG-77), USS Michael Murphy (DDG-112), USS Chafee (DDG-90) and USS Stockdale (DDG-106). The Carl Vinson CSG is expected to conduct an exercise with the U.K.’s CSG 21, which is now currently off the coast of South Korea for a scheduled bilateral exercise with the Republic of Korean Navy.
The America Expeditionary Strike Group – consisting of the USS America (LHA-6), USS New Orleans (LPD-18) and USS Germantown (LSD-42) with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked – are in the Philippine Sea conducting routine operations, with America and New Orleans coming off an intensive 12-day exercise and engagement period with both CSG 21 and JMSDF ships in the area. These exercises include the Large Scale 21 and Exercise Noble Union.
The 31st MEU said in a photo release that “Exercise Noble Union is part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit’s Noble Series of exercises which are used to test the Family of Naval Concepts, develop techniques and procedures for the employment of MEU assets in support of sea denial and fleet maneuver and inform future force design and experimentation efforts.”
JMSDF ships taking part in the exercise included helicopter destroyer JS Ise (DDH-182) and destroyer JS Asahi (DD119). A photo released by the JMSDF showed Ise carrying an embarked JGSDF AH-64D Apache helicopter, while the JMSDF release said that “from August 24-25, JS Ise and JS Asahi participated in the Multinational Advanced Aviation Cooperative Deployment as part of the Large-Scale Global Exercise 2021 in the west Pacific with [Japan Air Self-Defense Force], [Japan Ground Self-Defense Force], the Queen Elizabeth Carrier Strike Group, America and F-35B fighters from both the U.S. and Royal Navy.” A separate exercise called Pacific Crown 21-1 took place from Aug 25-26 off Okinawa between the two JMSDF ships and CSG 21.
HMS Queen Elizabeth (R-08) on Aug. 30, 2021. UK Royal Navy Photo
The UK CSG 21 elements that took part in the exercise were the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and embarked aircraft, which include The “Wake Island Avengers” of U.S. Marine Corps Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 211. The squadron is integrated with the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron “The Dambusters.” The multi-national U.K.-led CSG also includes destroyers HMS Defender (D36) and HMS Diamond (D34), frigates HMS Kent (F78) and HMS Richmond (F239), Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen (F805), and American destroyer USS The Sullivans (DDG-68). CSG 21 also includes Royal Fleet Auxiliary’s RFA Fort Victoria (A387) and RFA Tidespring (A136) and an Astute-class submarine. Destroyer HMS Diamond (D34) was forced to drop out of the group in July and dock in Italy due to problems with its engine. The ship was initially expected to get fixed and re-join the group in the Indo-Pacific, but the destroyer’s repairs are still not complete. Richmond had detached earlier from the group in July and is now in Guam following an equipment reset in Sasebo, Japan.
Kent also detached from the main group and docked on Aug. 27 at Sasebo, where it is slated to carry out a short maintenance period. The Astute-class submarine also supporting the deployment docked at the naval base in Busan, Republic of Korea on Aug. 11. The submarine was originally believed to be HMS Artful (S121), which was with CSG 21 during its Mediterranean deployment, but spotters of the submarine in Korea claimed that the nameplate on it said HMS Astute (S119), meaning a switch occurred prior to the strike group’s entry to the Indo-Pacific. Queen Elizabeth was scheduled to make a port call also in Busan along, conducting on-shore engagement activities, but that has been canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic and instead only an at-sea exercise between the Republic of Korea Navy (ROKN) and CSG 21 will take place from Aug. 30 to Sept. 1 before CSG 21 moves on to Japan.
On Aug. 23, the JMSDF Indo-Pacific Deployment 2021 (IPD21) force departed from Japan, with the task force consisting of the destroyer helicopter carrier JS Kaga (DDH 184), destroyers JS Murasame (DD 101) and JS Shiranui (DD 120), and a total of four embarked helicopters. Supporting the deployment is a submarine and a P-1 Maritime patrol aircraft. The IPD has been an annual deployment for the JMSDF since 2019, with this year’s deployment running until Nov. 25. The goal is to improve the JMSDF’s tactical capabilities and to strengthen cooperation with partner navies in the Indo-Pacific region by conducting joint exercises. The list of countries that the group would drill with include Australia, French New Caledonia, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Palau, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.
IPD21’s first engagement activity was phase 1 of the Malabar 2021 exercise between Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. that took place from Aug. 26 to 29 in the Philippines. The U.S. fielded destroyer USS Barry (DDG-52) and oiler USNS Rappahannock (T-AO-204), along with Naval Special Warfare forces and P-8 maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft from Task Force 72 for the drills, while India participated with frigate INS Shivalik (F47), corvette INS Kadmatt (P29) and a P-8I. Australia was represented by frigate HMAS Warramunga (FFH 152). Both the JMSDF P-1 and submarine supporting IPD21 also took part in the exercise. Mention of the submarine was omitted from all releases, but shown in the photos the JMSDF released of the exercise.
HMS Queen Elizabeth (front) with an Indian Shivalik Multi-role Frigate (second from front) in the Bay of Bengal. Royal Navy Photo
Sivalik and Kadmatt are part of a four-ship Indian Navy Eastern Fleet Task Group that left India in early August for a two-month deployment in South East Asia, the South China Sea and Western Pacific, according to an Indian Ministry of Defence press release. The other two ships in the task group are destroyer INS Ranvijay (D55) and corvette INS Kora (P61). The exercises will include drills with the Vietnamese Peoples’ Navy, the Republic of Philippines Navy, Republic of Singapore Navy, the Indonesian Navy and the Royal Australian Navy. Ranvijay and Kora carried out the exercise with the VPN frigate VPNS Ly Thai To (HQ-012) in the South China Sea on Aug. 18 and then carried out an exercise with the Philippine Navy frigate BRP Antonio Luna (FF 151) on Aug. 23 in the West Philippine Seas. The Indian Navy’s Eastern Fleet deployments to Southeast and Northeast Asia have been a regular occurrence over the years, in line with the Indian navy’s extensive bilateral engagements with countries there, along with engagements under the Quad partnership.
On Aug. 26 the Royal Australian Navy LPD HMAS Canberra (L02) and frigate HMAS Anzac (FFH150) left Darwin to begin the ADF’s Indo-Pacific Endeavour Deployment 21 (IPE21). The deployment has been an annual activity for the ADF since the beginning of 2017, with odd years taking place in Southeast Asia and even years taking place in the Southwest Pacific. The 2020 IPE was canceled due to COVID-19.
HMAS Canberra forms up with Navy Ships from United States of America and New Zealand on completion of Exercise Talisman Saber 17.
The deployment is run as a joint service deployment centered around a maritime task group built around one of the two Canberra-class landing helicopter dock ships. Australia’s Department of Defence said IPE21 involves approximately 700 people – including Australian Defence Force and civilian defense personnel, and sea riders from partner nations – and that the engagements have been modified in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The engagements will be carried out primarily through contactless port visits, including a range of virtual workshops and at-sea activities. The IPE21 deployment will see the task group engage with Australia’s partners in Southeast Asia, in addition to participating in the Five Power Defence Arrangements Bersama Gold exercise in October, which marks the 50th anniversary of the defense arrangement between Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. Because of the COVID-19 situation in Malaysia, which is slated to host the exercise, Australian, U.K. and New Zealand naval and air assets will stage out of Singapore, rather than Malaysia as originally planned. Activities will mainly include contactless at-sea and in-air engagements, though a scaled-down formal ceremony involving Ministers and Defense Chiefs of the five countries is still on schedule. It is unclear whether the ADF’s MRH90 fleet – grounded in June 2021 and what normally forms the helicopter component for the IPEs – are embarked for the IPE21 deployment. The IPE21 task group is expected to return to Australia in November.
Related
news.usni.org · by Dzirhan Mahadzir · August 30, 2021



6. SAS unit vows to avenge fallen Marine comrades

hmmm... interesting concept.

I am seeing a lot of videos of the Taliban wearing all western kit. Their appearance is much more professional looking (or should I say they have developed a "cool guy" look and swagger about them)


SAS unit vows to avenge fallen Marine comrades
Commanders aren't ruling out the possibility of the task force working alongside the Taliban to take on IS-K
asiatimes.com · by Dave Makichuk · August 30, 2021
It’s payback time.
And like the famous “Devil’s Brigade” of Second World War fame, they know full well they may not survive the coming battles.
According to British media reports, 40 of the bravest men in the world — elite Special Air Service elite troop — have asked to stay in the wartorn country to avenge the deaths of their fallen comrades.
The 13 US Marines killed in a suicide bomb at Kabul airport in Afghanistan.
One source told the Sunday Mirror: “The Marines who died were from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Force.
“That unit has given assistance to the SAS and SBS many times over the years in Afghanistan.
“They have helped resupply them with food and ammunition and treated their wounded.
“There is a strong bond between the two units, especially with the SBS who recruit largely from the Royal Marines.”
The dramatic move came as the last UK civilian evacuation flight left the airport on Saturday – with 150 British passport holders still stranded in the city.
Sources have claimed that the Who Dares Wins regiment will want to establish a base near to the Afghan-Pakistan border area to conduct undercover strikes against terrorist group IS-K, The Sun reported.
Due to the control the Taliban hold over Afghanistan, defense sources say the SAS group will need its approval to operate in the country.
The now-famous Devil’s Brigade was a special allied military unit of Canadian and American “bad-ass” commandos who terrorized Nazi forces in Europe.
That same “kill or be killed” attitude and their unmatched specialized commando training will no doubt infuse the SAS volunteers on future top secret missions inside Afghanistan.
IS-K won’t know what hit them — and no place, will be safe.
The ultra-violent Islamic State Khorasan Province jihadists based in eastern Afghanistan is believed to be behind the bomb attack which killed 170 people on Thursday.
IS-K claimed responsibility for the attack, naming Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri as one of the airport suicide bombers and have reportedly released his photo.
The terrorist group said one of its suicide bombers had targeted “translators and collaborators with the American army.”
Through a tweet by their spokesperson, the Taliban condemned the attack, saying “evil circles will be strictly stopped.”
The SAS squad’s base will be used by the Royal Navy’s SBS special forces, the US Army’s Delta Force and the US Navy Seals – the unit which killed al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in 2011.
All of the troops will be supported by drones as well as US and possibly British strike planes, with defense sources claiming that the Taliban will give them approval to operate in Afghanistan.
British and US special forces will be organized in a similar manner as the “Task Force Black” which operated during the Iraq war.
Eventually renamed to TF-88, Task Force Black’s primary role was to hunt down senior members of Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq.
Lance Cpl Rylee McCollum, from Bondurant, Wyoming was one of 13 US service members killed last Thursday as IS-K carried out the deadliest attack on American troops for a decade. His sister Cheyenne, told reporters: “He was so excited to be a dad, and he was going to be a great dad.”
Credit: US Marine Corps.
To this end, the Task Force had several successes including the killing of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist who ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.
In a shock move, senior commanders have also refused to rule out the possibility of the task force working alongside the Taliban to take on IS-K.
Islamic State named Abdul Rehman Al-Loghri as one of the airport bombers which killed 13 US servicemen, around 170 Afghans, including two UK nationals.
President Joe Biden pledged that the US would “hunt down” the terrorist who killed the servicemen, telling the world in a televised address “we will not forget.”
“This strike was not the last. We will continue to hunt down any person involved in that heinous attack and make them pay.
“Whenever anyone seeks to harm the United States or attack our troops, we will respond.”
US troops carried out a drone strike on an IS-K “planner” and another member of the jihadist group in the US military’s first act of revenge for the airport attack.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the weapon used was the infamous R9X Hellfire missile, known as the “flying Ginsu,” because of its vicious blades which slice apart the victim, without the use of explosives.
The R9X also limits the amount of collateral damage, and can even be directed against targets sitting in the driver’s seat, or passenger seat of a target vehicle.
According to The Conversation, IS-K was officially founded in January 2015.
Within a short period of time, it managed to consolidate territorial control in several rural districts in north and northeast Afghanistan, and launched a lethal campaign across Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Within its first three years, IS-K launched attacks against minority groups, public areas and institutions, and government targets in major cities across Afghanistan and Pakistan.
By 2018, it had become one of the top four deadliest terrorist organizations in the world, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Terrorism Index.
One of the group’s greatest strengths is its ability to leverage the local expertise of these fighters and commanders.
Forty of the bravest men in the world, elite British commandos, have asked to stay behind in Afghanistan, to give IS-K a bloody nose. Ten of the 13 Marines killed were from Camp Pendleton, California. Credit: Courtesy ITV.
IS-K used its position on the border to garner supplies and recruits from Pakistan’s tribal areas, as well as the expertise of other local groups with which it forged operational alliances.
Substantial evidence shows that the group has received money, advice, and training from the Islamic State group’s core organizational body in Iraq and Syria. Some experts have placed those figures in excess of US$100 million.
IS-K’s general strategy is to establish a beachhead for the Islamic State movement to expand its so-called caliphate to Central and South Asia.
It aims to cement itself as the foremost jihadist organization in the region, in part by seizing the legacy of jihadist groups that came before it. This is evident in the group’s messaging, which appeals to veteran jihadist fighters as well as younger populations in urban areas.
IS-K’s goal is to create chaos and uncertainty in a bid to push disillusioned fighters from other groups into their ranks, and to cast doubt on any ruling government’s ability to provide security for the population.
In addition to its attacks against Afghan minorities and civilian institutions, the group has targeted international aid workers, land-mine removal efforts and even tried to assassinate the top US envoy to Kabul in January 2021.
Meanwhile, sources claimed that MI6 are holding secret talks with the Taliban, and that British spooks wanted to tell them the war is over as far as the UK is concerned provided they do not give any terrorist sanctuary, The Sun reported.
Taliban leaders were also told that the UK would be willing to reopen the embassy in Kabul and provide assistance to the new government providing there are no more human rights abuses.
It comes as the last UK civilian evacuation flight left the airport on Saturday and left 150 British passport holders still stranded in the city.
It ended the biggest military evacuation in 80 years, and signalled the end of two decades of military involvement in war-torn Afghanistan.
More than 15,000 people including 5,000 British nationals have been airlifted to safety in less than two weeks under Operation Pitting.
RAF pilots flew 261,000 miles to carry evacuees to safety — among them 8,000 vulnerable Afghans, many of whom worked for the UK as interpreters or embassy officials.
One C-17 transporter plane leaving Kabul this week carried 436 people, the single biggest capacity flight in RAF history.
Sources: The Sun, Sunday Mirror, Express, Wall Street Journal, Elite UK Forces, The Conversation
asiatimes.com · by Dave Makichuk · August 30, 2021




7. Osama bin Laden’s security chief triumphantly returns to hometown in Afghanistan

Isn't the problem still Pakistan? Hasn't it always been the problem?

Excerpt:

Al Qaeda leaders and fighters have been in Afghanistan supporting the Taliban’s insurgency for the past two decades. Pakistan’s cities and the tribal areas have served as safe havens for Al Qaeda over the past two decades.

Osama bin Laden’s security chief triumphantly returns to hometown in Afghanistan | FDD's Long War Journal
longwarjournal.org · by Bill Roggio · August 30, 2021
The man who served as Osama bin Laden’s security chief at the battle of Tora Bora triumphantly returned to his home in eastern Afghanistan today, less than two weeks after the country fell to the Taliban. The Al Qaeda commander was reportedly freed by Pakistan a decade ago.
Dr. Amin al Haq, the former head of bin Laden’s Black Guard, was captured on video in a large convoy as it traveled through a checkpoint in Nangarhar province. Haq was accompanied by a large convoy of heavily armed Taliban fighters in brand new SUVs. A small crowd flocked to Haq to shake his hand and take selfies with him.
The video of al Haq is evidence that Al Qaeda commanders now feel secure enough to appear publicly in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Dr. Amin-ul-Haq, a major al-Qaeda player in Afghanistan, Osama Bin Laden security in charge in Tora Bora, returns to his native Nangarhar province after it fell to the Taliban. Dr. Amin became close to OBL in the 80s when he worked with Abdullah Azzam in Maktaba Akhidmat. pic.twitter.com/IXbZeJ0nZE
— BILAL SARWARY (@bsarwary) August 30, 2021
It was not immediately clear if al Haq was returning to his home in eastern Afghanistan for the first time, or if he has been in Afghanistan the entire time since being released from Pakistani custody. He may have also been traversing the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Either way, the confidence to travel and operate out in the open – in plain sight for the first time in a decade – speaks to the marked change in Afghanistan over the last month.
Al Qaeda leaders and fighters have been in Afghanistan supporting the Taliban’s insurgency for the past two decades. Pakistan’s cities and the tribal areas have served as safe havens for Al Qaeda over the past two decades.
From Tora Bora, to a Pakistani “prison,” to Nangarhar
Al Haq began his career as a jihadist as a member of the Hizb-i Islami Khalis (HIK), a faction of the Hizb-i-Islami group that was founded by Maulvi Mohammed Yunis Khalis, who was instrumental in welcoming Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan after Al Qaeda was ejected from Sudan in 1996.
As leader of the Black Guard, al Haq accompanied Osama bin Laden during the 2001 battle at Tora Bora in Nangarhar province. Al Haq helped the Al Qaeda emir and other senior al Qaeda leaders escape the U.S. and Afghan militia assault on the cave complex and flee to Pakistan.
During renewed fighting at Tora Bora in the summer of 2007, which was led by Anwarul Haq Mujahid, the eldest son of Khalis, al Haq was reportedly wounded and fled across the border into Pakistan’s Kurram tribal agency. A large Taliban and Al Qaeda force, which is said to have included Arabs, Chechens, and Uzbeks, battled with Afghan and U.S. forces, raising speculation that bin Laden was in the area.
Al Haq was said to be detained by Pakistani security forces in the city of Lahore in 2008. Lahore is the home of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Al Qaeda-allied, Pakistan-sponsored terror group that has significant infrastructure in the city. He was reportedly released in 2011, and he subsequently disappeared from public eye until he emerged in Nangarhar today.
Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.
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longwarjournal.org · by Bill Roggio · August 30, 2021



8. Russia and China Eye a Retreating U.S.

Excerpts:
In the Middle East, Iran is China’s oil supplier of choice and Russia’s partner in bolstering Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. For Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is a surrogate for destabilization work and a foil to expand their influence throughout the region, recently demonstrated by the military-cooperation agreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is hedging against U.S. disapproval and a possible Obama-style alignment with Tehran. Gulf Arabs fear America’s Afghan withdrawal could foreshadow the same in Iraq, or even from major U.S. air and naval bases in their countries. Who wouldn’t hedge?
Washington should emphatically not rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That part is easy, although the Biden administration still doesn’t get it. The key lies in recognizing that Iran’s objectives are fundamentally contrary to America’s, Israel’s and most of the Arab world’s. Only changing Tehran’s government stands a chance of reducing threats across the region, which is the last thing China and Russia want.
Sadly for those believing withdrawal from Afghanistan was a one-off decision with limited consequences, the world is far more complicated. The results are already deeply negative, and China and Russia are invested in making them worse. Over to us.
Russia and China Eye a Retreating U.S.
Beijing will push for more sway in Pakistan; Moscow will try in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics.
WSJ · by John Bolton
In the near term, responding to both menaces and opportunities emanating from Afghanistan, China will seek to increase its already considerable influence in Pakistan; Russia will do the same in Central Asia’s former Soviet republics; and both will expand their Middle East initiatives, often along with Iran. There is little evidence that the White House is ready to respond to any of these threats.
Over the longer term, Beijing and Moscow enjoy a natural division of labor in threatening America and its allies, in three distinct theaters: China on its periphery’s long arc from Japan across Southeast Asia out to India and Pakistan; Russia in Eastern and Central Europe; and the Russian-Iranian-Chinese entente cordiale in the Middle East. U.S. planning must contemplate many threats arising simultaneously across these and other theaters.
This underscores how strained our defense capabilities are to protect our far-flung interests, especially given the unprecedented domestic spending demands President Biden is now making. Washington’s most important task, therefore, is somehow to secure significant increases in defense budgets across the full threat spectrum, from terrorism to cyberwar. Diplomacy alone is no substitute.
Xi Jinping will be unimpressed by Mr. Biden’s assertion that America needs to end military activities in Afghanistan to counter China more effectively. Instead, Beijing has new opportunities: shoring up its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan; protecting against the spread of Islamic terror into China; and increasing efforts to establish hegemony along its periphery, especially regarding Taiwan, the South China Sea and India.
These initiatives fit seamlessly into Beijing’s existential threat to the West, extending well beyond our Afghan debacle. By contrast, Washington is floundering in tactical maneuvering and improvisational responses to particular Chinese ploys. Afghanistan is the urgent impetus to marshal our deeper conceptual and strategic thinking; while doing so, we can immediately seize several points of policy high ground. To eliminate ambiguity about our Taiwan defense commitment, for example, we should station military forces there. Theaterwide, we need those budget increases to boost our naval presence in the East and South China seas, thereby establishing deterrence and countering Chinese sovereignty claims.
Our defense relations with India, Vietnam and others must intensify. The scope of the “Quad” (India, Japan, Australia and the U.S.) should expand dramatically to include collective-defense issues and the Quad itself should consider expanding. We also must increasingly hold China accountable for its dangerous policy of proliferating ballistic-missile and nuclear technology to the likes of Pakistan and North Korea.
Russia’s Vladimir Putin was undoubtedly heartened by seeing a weak, flagging U.S. president at their June summit, recalling Khrushchev after meeting John F. Kennedy in 1961. Mr. Biden’s subsequent capitulations on Nord Stream 2 and Afghanistan now surely have Mr. Putin smiling broadly. He will act aggressively in Central Asia to stanch any resurgent Islamic terrorism, but his long-term focus remains Russia’s European neighbors.
Mr. Putin sees disarray in Europe, which fears the resurrection of endemic conflict, largely because it fears America faltering, even substantially withdrawing from world affairs. Although Presidents Trump and Biden don’t constitute a trend—the former was an aberration; the latter is merely a typical Democrat—Mr. Biden’s failure to warn North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies of his Afghan exit shattered already weak confidence levels. The inevitable calls for a larger “European” politico-military role will meet the fate of previous efforts. The European Union can never be a global geostrategic player because it habitually deploys more rhetoric than resources.
That leaves NATO, which Mr. Biden had eased back toward complacency, only to jilt the allies over Afghanistan. Instead of blaming Washington for being too interventionist and then for not being interventionist enough, Europe needs to decide whether it prizes collective self-defense in NATO seriously, or merely prizes dabbling in it. When Germany and others match their defense capabilities with their economies, their opinions will matter. While waiting, the U.S. should work with sub-NATO coalitions, mostly Central and Eastern Europeans, and threatened non-NATO countries just beyond, to counter Mr. Putin’s imperial instincts. Our force posture in Europe can be adjusted accordingly.
In the Middle East, Iran is China’s oil supplier of choice and Russia’s partner in bolstering Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. For Beijing and Moscow, Tehran is a surrogate for destabilization work and a foil to expand their influence throughout the region, recently demonstrated by the military-cooperation agreement between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Riyadh is hedging against U.S. disapproval and a possible Obama-style alignment with Tehran. Gulf Arabs fear America’s Afghan withdrawal could foreshadow the same in Iraq, or even from major U.S. air and naval bases in their countries. Who wouldn’t hedge?
Washington should emphatically not rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. That part is easy, although the Biden administration still doesn’t get it. The key lies in recognizing that Iran’s objectives are fundamentally contrary to America’s, Israel’s and most of the Arab world’s. Only changing Tehran’s government stands a chance of reducing threats across the region, which is the last thing China and Russia want.
Sadly for those believing withdrawal from Afghanistan was a one-off decision with limited consequences, the world is far more complicated. The results are already deeply negative, and China and Russia are invested in making them worse. Over to us.
Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.
WSJ · by John Bolton




9. Analysis | No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons

3 pinocchios.

But they do look pretty cool strutting around with a lot of western kit (but I guess they are authorized to wear ball caps and beards with sleeves only rolled above their wrists.).


Analysis | No, the Taliban did not seize $83 billion of U.S. weapons
The Washington Post · by Glenn KesslerThe Fact Checker Today at 3:00 a.m. EDT · August 31, 2021
“ALL EQUIPMENT should be demanded to be immediately returned to the United States, and that includes every penny of the $85 billion dollars in cost.”
— Former president Donald Trump, in a statement, Aug 30
We don’t normally pay much attention to claims made by the former president, as he mostly just riffs golden oldies. But this is a new claim. A version of this claim also circulates widely on right-leaning social media — that somehow the Taliban has ended up with $83 billion in U.S. weaponry. (Trump, as usual, rounds the number up.)
The $83 billion number is not invented out of whole cloth. But it reflects all the money spent to train, equip and house the Afghan military and police — so weapons are just a part of that. At this point, no one really knows the value of the equipment that was seized by the Taliban.
The Facts
The $83 billion figure — technically, $82.9 billion — comes from an estimate in the July 30 quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) for all spending on the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since the U.S. invasion in 2001.
In recent years, the spending has decreased. For fiscal 2021, about $3 billion was spent on security forces, which was similar to 2020.
Separately, the U.S. government spent about $36 billion on shoring up the Afghan government. The total bill for the Afghan project added up to more than $144 billion.
In any case, the $83 billion spent on the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) goes back two decades, including almost $19 billion spent between 2002 and 2009.
2017 Government Accountability Office report estimated that about 29 percent of the funds spent on the Afghan security forces between 2005 and 2016 went to equipment and transportation. (The transportation costs related to transporting equipment and for contracted pilots and airplanes for transporting officials to meetings. There appears to be no way to segregate transposition spending.)
Using that same percentage, that would mean the equipment provided to Afghan forces amounted to $24 billion over 20 years. The GAO said approximately 70 percent of the equipment went to the Afghan military and the rest went to the national police (part of the Interior Ministry).
That’s certainly a lot of money. Between 2005 and 2016, U.S. taxpayers paid for 76,000 vehicles (such as 43,000 Ford Ranger pickup trucks, 22,000 Humvees and 900 mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles known as MRAPs), 600,000 weapons and more than 200 aircraft, according to GAO.
Of course, some of this equipment may be obsolete or destroyed — or soon may not be usable.
The SIGAR report shows that 167 aircraft out of an inventory of 211 were usable — but the Afghan Air Force (AAF) still lacked enough qualified pilots. One issue was that the Taliban targeted pilots for assassination.
Even more problematic, there were not enough maintenance crews to maintain the aircraft. “Without continued contractor support, none of the AAF’s airframes can be sustained as combat effective for more than a few months, depending on the stock of equipment parts in-country, the maintenance capability on each airframe, and the timing of contractor support withdrawal,” the report said.
With great fanfare, the Taliban has seized a number of Black Hawk helicopters, including ones that the United States had just shipped this year at the request of former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani. But only the first crew of Black Hawk mechanics had been trained, so the military “can field no more than one UH-60 per night for helicopter missions,” SIGAR said.
Meanwhile, as the U.S. military wound down its mission, it turned over facilities and equipment to the Afghan security forces — which may have added to the total seized by the Taliban. But Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., head of U.S. Central Command, said that before leaving Kabul airport on Aug. 30, the military “demilitarized” 70 MRAPs, 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft. “Those aircraft will never fly again,” he said. “They’ll never be able to be operated by anyone.” (Demilitarized is a term that means damaging in place, sometimes with explosives.)
“No one has any accounting of exactly what survived the last weeks of the collapse and fell into Taliban hands, and even before the collapse, SIGAR had publicly reported no accounting was possible in many districts,” said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “In rough terms, however, if the ANDSF could not sustain it without foreign contractors, the Taliban will have very serious problems in operating it. That covers most aircraft and many electronics and heavier weapons.”
“One also has to be careful here,” Cordesman added. “The fact that Taliban fighters or cells of fighters get U.S. equipment does not mean it is pooled or shared. Factionalism and hoarding are the rule in Afghanistan, not the exception.”
The Pinocchio Test
U.S. military equipment was given to Afghan security forces over two decades. Tanks, vehicles, helicopters and other gear fell into the hands of the Taliban when the U.S.-trained force quickly collapsed. The value of these assets is unclear, but if the Taliban is unable to obtain spare parts, it may not be able to maintain them.
But the value of the equipment is not more than $80 billion. That’s the figure for all of the money spent on training and sustaining the Afghan military over 20 years. The equipment portion of that total is about $24 billion — certainly not small change — but the actual value of the equipment in the Taliban’s hands is probably much less than even that amount.
Three Pinocchios
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The Washington Post · by Glenn KesslerThe Fact Checker Today at 3:00 a.m. EDT · August 31, 2021




10. Perspective | Five myths about the Taliban

I will leave it to Afghanistan experts to critique.

Excerpts:

Myth No. 1
Pakistan controls the Taliban.

Myth No. 2
The Taliban fragments easily.

Myth No. 3
The Taliban has a plan for running Afghanistan.

Myth No. 4
The Taliban will bring
back al-Qaeda

Myth No. 5
The Taliban doesn't reflect Afghanistan's diversity.


Perspective | Five myths about the Taliban
By Ashley Jackson
Ashley Jackson is the author of “Negotiating Survival: Civilian-Insurgent Relations in Afghanistan” and a co-director of the Center for the Study of Armed Groups at the Overseas Development Institute.
August 27, 2021 at 10:43 a.m. EDT
The Washington Post · August 27, 2021
A little less than two decades after it was forced from power in Afghanistan by the U.S. invasion prompted by the 9/11 attacks, the Taliban has now captured most of the country and the capital, Kabul. The group’s return has raised questions about how it was able to seize so much territory so quickly, and whether — or if — it has changed from the brutal regime most remember from the 1990s. Its comeback has also revived several erroneous or outdated beliefs.
Myth No. 1
Pakistan controls the Taliban.
The Taliban has been variously portrayed as a proxy of Pakistan, so much so that #SanctionPakistan began trending across social media in response to the Taliban’s recent military advance. Former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani has long blamed Pakistan for the Taliban’s resurgence, as have many Western analysts.
It’s true that the Taliban could not have resurrected itself after 2001 without support, sanctuary, funding and protection from Pakistan’s primary intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and other Pakistani actors. But it is a complicated relationship: The Taliban deeply resents Pakistan’s attempts to keep it beholden. In February 2010, for example, the ISI arrested Abdul Ghani Baradar, then the Taliban’s deputy leader, after he discussed peace negotiations with then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai without Pakistan’s permission. Baradar’s release was brokered in 2018 after U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad intervened. Many within the movement also blame Pakistan for the death of the group’s second emir, Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, in a U.S. drone strike in 2016 in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.
The Taliban has repeatedly refused to bow to Pakistani pressure. Though Pakistan faced demands from the United States and Afghanistan to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, its efforts to strong-arm the militants into talks, notably the Murree process in 2015, badly backfired when many senior Taliban refused to attend (some even left Pakistan to avoid retaliation for their refusal). More recently, the Taliban has tried to widen its diplomatic relations, with senior figures seeking to build ties with China, Russia, Indonesia and even Iran, in part to lessen Pakistan’s grip.
Myth No. 2
The Taliban fragments easily.
The main proponent of this myth has been the U.S. military. Its origins date back to the troop surge ordered by President Barack Obama in 2009, partly premised on the idea that the Taliban could be divided and conquered. A range of respected policy experts, notably in an influential 2009 Foreign Affairs piece, argued that the Taliban could be split, “flipped” and realigned to support the Afghan government. This idea stubbornly persisted, even though there were no obvious signs that it was correct. In 2017, Gen. John W. Nicholson, then commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, described this strategy as: “We go at them hard. They go at us hard. Then we start peeling people off,” meaning that individual leaders and groups would seek reconciliation as “fissures” formed within their ranks.
Indeed, the Taliban is not homogenous. Its leaders have had to accommodate commanders and fighters with diverse interests and viewpoints, allowing them leeway at the local level. And the transition from fighting an insurgency to governing the country may yet exacerbate existing fault lines. But the Taliban has shown itself to be a cohesive and disciplined organization. Despite enormous military pressure, it has maintained a clear chain of command and avoided any significant splits or factional disputes. It has acted as one when it has truly mattered: The Taliban emerged even stronger after the succession crisis that followed Mohammad Omar’s death in 2013, drove back the Islamic State from its strongholds in eastern Afghanistan, ordered its forces to obey several temporary cease-fires and violence-reduction measures, and, since May, has coordinated a sweeping military campaign to capture most of the country.
Myth No. 3
The Taliban has a plan for running Afghanistan.
The Taliban’s swift military sweep has led many to conclude that the group was never genuine in its desire for peace talks and planned to take power by force all along. Afghanistan expert Michael Semple told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in March that “they are engaged in a military campaign to try to reestablish their Islamic Emirate — a government of Afghanistan dominated entirely by the Taliban movement.” Even as the Taliban seized control of the presidential palace in Kabul, USA Today and other outlets speculated that the militants intended to “declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.”
But for all its military success, the Taliban has no blueprint for a post-victory state. The group’s public statements suggest that it didn’t expect the Afghan government to fall this quickly and have been caught unprepared. Taliban leaders have made only vague allusions to the kind of state they plan to build, and some have assumed that this is a ruse to hide their true intentions. While many in the Taliban probably envision a return to an emirate of some sort, there is little consensus among the leadership about what that would look like, or about other key governance issues (which helps explain why it has taken them so long to form a post-Ghani government). In the meantime, the Taliban’s leaders have sought to calm the international community’s fears and buy themselves time by insisting that they are talking “with other parties to form an inclusive government acceptable to all Afghans.”
Myth No. 4
The Taliban will bring
back al-Qaeda.
The Taliban’s refusal to give up al-Qaeda after 9/11 was the main justification for the war in Afghanistan. Now that the group is back in power, there is growing concern that al-Qaeda will return in force, too. Rita Katz, of the SITE Intelligence Group, told the New Yorker that there is a “universal recognition” that the terrorist group can now “reinvest” in Afghanistan as a safe haven. Nathan Sales, a former State Department coordinator for counterterrorism and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the New York Times that “it is virtually certain that al-Qaeda will reestablish a safe haven in Afghanistan and use it to plot terrorism against the United States and others.”
The Taliban has never renounced or broken ties with al-Qaeda, a group that remains popular among Taliban fighters, and forsaking it in favor of the United States is a political nonstarter. To secure a political guarantee for U.S. military withdrawal, the Taliban nevertheless had to pledge to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for attacks on the West. Its leaders are betting they can deliver on this promise because al-Qaeda is a dramatically diminished presence, numbering a few hundred fighters by U.S. intelligence estimates. And the Taliban, never interested in international jihad, has little reason to allow al-Qaeda to regroup, given the likely dire consequences for its rule should it do so.
What is often overlooked is that the two groups have a fraught history: Osama bin Laden’s repeated attacks on Western targets, even after Taliban leaders sought to rein in Al Qaeda, were effectively responsible for the Taliban’s fall from power last time around. There have been growing concerns among the movement’s leadership about the presence of foreign groups on Afghan soil, leading the Taliban to place tentative restrictions on al-Qaeda and foreign fighters earlier this year. An al-Qaeda resurgence in Afghanistan is in no way inevitable, and much depends on how the international community engages with the Taliban on this issue now.
Myth No. 5
The Taliban doesn't reflect Afghanistan's diversity.
Afghanistan’s decades of conflict have often tracked along ethnic and tribal lines, with the Taliban seen as dominated by select tribal cadres among the nation’s largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. Indeed, the Taliban’s rise has long been portrayed in Western media as a Pashtun issue or an expression of “Pashtun nationalism,” as Selig S. Harrison put it in the New York Times. Semple has written that the “movement has retained a narrow social base, and its power is concentrated in the hands of mullahs from the Kandahari Pashtun tribes.”
That might have been true in the 1990s, but the Taliban’s recent takeover was partly premised on ethnic and tribal outreach far beyond its Pashtun base. While the leadership is still dominated by the old guard of southern Pashtun founders, the mid-level commanders and foot soldiers are much more diverse. The post-2001 government’s neglect, combined with rampant corruption, graft and ethnic infighting, fueled disillusion and disenfranchisement among Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek populations. This enabled multiethnic outreach that was integral to the insurgency’s spread through the west and the north of Afghanistan and its march on Kabul this summer.
In recent years, the Taliban has tried to present itself as multiethnic, appointing local officials from Tajik and Hazara areas and assuring Shiite communities that they can worship in peace. Shiites remain skeptical, though — especially given the alleged Taliban summary execution of Hazaras in July, and the Taliban’s pre-9/11 history of violence against Shiite populations.
Twitter: @a_a_jackson
Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.
The Washington Post · August 27, 2021



11. As US military leaves Kabul, many Americans, Afghans remain

This is going to cast a long dark shadow.

As US military leaves Kabul, many Americans, Afghans remain
AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR and MATTHEW LEE · August 31, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — As the final five U.S. military transport aircraft lifted off out of Afghanistan, they left behind up to 200 Americans and thousands of desperate Afghans who couldn’t get out and now must rely on the Taliban to allow their departure.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. will continue to try to get Americans and Afghans out of the country, and will work with Afghanistan’s neighbors to secure their departure either over land or by charter flight once the Kabul airport reopens.
“We have no illusion that any of this will be easy, or rapid,” said Blinken, adding that the total number of Americans who are in Afghanistan and still want to leave may be closer to 100.
Speaking shortly after the Pentagon announced the completion of the U.S. military pullout Monday, Blinken said the U.S. Embassy in Kabul will remain shuttered and vacant for the foreseeable future. American diplomats, he said, will be based in Doha, Qatar.
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“We will continue our relentless efforts to help Americans, foreign nationals and Afghans leave Afghanistan if they choose,” Blinken said in an address from the State Department. “Our commitment to them holds no deadline.”


Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told reporters the U.S. military was able to get as many as 1,500 Afghans out in the final hours of the American evacuation mission. But now it will be up to the State Department working with the Taliban to get any more people out.
McKenzie said there were no citizens left stranded at the airport and none were on the final few military flights out. He said the U.S. military maintained the ability to get Americans out right up until just before the end, but “none of them made it to the airport.”
“There’s a lot of heartbreak associated with this departure,” said McKenzie. “We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out. But I think if we’d stayed another 10 days we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out that we wanted to get out.”
McKenzie and other officials painted a vivid picture of the final hours U.S. troops were on the ground, and the preparations they took to ensure that the Taliban and Islamic State group militants did not get functioning U.S. military weapons systems and other equipment.
The terror threat remains a major problem in Afghanistan, with at least 2,000 “hard core” members of the Islamic State group who remain in the country, including many released from prisons as the Taliban swept to control.
Underscoring the ongoing security threats, the weapon systems used just hours earlier to counter IS rockets launched toward the airport were kept operational until “the very last minute” as the final U.S. military aircraft flew out, officials said. One of the last things U.S. troops did was to make the so-called C-RAMS (Counter Rocket, Artillery and Mortar System) inoperable.
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McKenzie said they “demilitarized” the system so it can never be used again. Officials said troops did not blow up equipment in order to ensure they left the airport workable for future flights, once those begin again. In addition, McKenzie said the U.S. also disabled 27 Humvees and 73 aircraft so they can never be used again.
Throughout the day, as the final C-17 transport planes prepared to take off, McKenzie said the U.S. kept “overwhelming U.S. airpower overhead” to deal with potential IS threats.
Back at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, watched the final 90 minutes of the military departure in real time from an operations center in the basement.
According to a U.S. official, they sat in hushed silence as they watched troops make last-minute runway checks, make the key defense systems inoperable and climb aboard the C-17s. The official said you could hear a pin drop as the last aircraft lifted off, and leaders around the room breathed sighs of relief. Later, Austin phoned Maj. Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was coordinating the evacuation. Donahue and acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson were the last to board the final plane that left Kabul.
Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details of military operations.
“Simply because we have left, that doesn’t mean the opportunities for both Americans that are in Afghanistan that want to leave and Afghans who want to leave, they will not be denied that opportunity,” said McKenzie.
The military left some equipment for the Taliban in order to run the airport, including two firetrucks, some front-end loaders and aircraft staircases.
Blinken said the U.S. will work with Turkey and Qatar to help them get the Kabul airport up and running again.
“This would enable a small number of daily charter flights, which is a key for anyone who wants to depart from Afghanistan moving forward,” he said.
AP · by LOLITA C. BALDOR and MATTHEW LEE · August 31, 2021


12. The Last U.S. Military Plane Has Left Kabul. What’s Next for Americans, Afghans Left Behind?

It is sad to read the subtitle to this article.

Will we support the resistance? We should keep in mind that one of the traditional lines of effort in unconventional warfare is the establishment of escape and evasion networks in denied areas. Can we conduct unconventional assisted recovery in Afghanistan?

Excerpts:

The veterans and groups who couldn’t get their Afghan partners out are now coaching them on how to stay alive.

“Don't dress like westerners but instead, look like the Taliban and blend in,” one rescue group advised in an alert it sent out to multiple networks Saturday.

“You need to hide in plain sight to survive,” the group advised. “There is talk about an Afghan Resistance as well as getting people out across the border. That will take shape over the next few months. As much as we hope for this, you need to think about surviving with the Taliban starting THIS WEEKEND.”

“Right now, do not count on Americans to save you.”



The Last U.S. Military Plane Has Left Kabul. What’s Next for Americans, Afghans Left Behind?
"Do not count on Americans to save you," one volunteer rescue group warns Afghans now at risk.
defenseone.com · by Tara Copp
Updated: 4:41 p.m.
The last U.S. military plane has left Afghanistan, U.S. officials announced, ending 20 years of war but also closing down the main route home for stranded Americans and Afghans who are now running for their lives.

"I'm here to announce the completion of our withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Marine Corps Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., commander of U.S. Central Command, told reporters via videoconference. “The last C-17 lifted off from Hamad Karzai International Airport on August 30, this afternoon, at 3:29 p.m., East Coast time. And the last manned aircraft is now clear of the airspace above Afghanistan.”
Pentagon and White House officials had earlier acknowledged that operations would end with some American citizens and others left behind.
For “Americans and other individuals that want to be able to leave Afghanistan after our withdrawal is complete, the State Department is going to continue to work across many different levers to facilitate that,” said Pentagon spokesman John Kirby. “We do not anticipate a military role in that.”
The lightning-fast collapse of Kabul just two weeks ago exposed just how ill-prepared the State Department and supporting U.S. government agencies were to get their employees out.
Some evacuation flights were underway before the capital fell, flying some 5,600 people out under an effort the U.S. government dubbed Operation Allies Refuge. But on Aug. 15, the day the Taliban took over Kabul, tens of thousands of diplomats, U.S. citizens, and Afghan partners still needed rescue.
Within days, 6,000 U.S. troops and dozens of C-17 Globemaster III airlifters were deployed to help. C-17s are usually manifested for a maximum load of about 300 passengers. On one now-iconic flight, Reach 871, the crew flew out 823.
The rescue effort peaked on Aug. 23, when some 21,600 Americans, Afghans, and allied partners left aboard U.S. and allied military and chartered aircraft.
By the time the last military plane departed in the early hours of Aug. 31 Kabul time the airlift had flown out more than 116,700 people on more than 720 military and chartered flights in just 15 days, according to daily passenger and flight data released by the White House.
In all, more than 122,300 people were rescued, including about 5,000 who were evacuated before the fall of Kabul, according to the data.
The Kabul airport rescue is “the largest airlift that the U.S. military has conducted” in its history, Kirby said.
But the operation was also marked by desperation and chaos. Several Afghans died after clinging to a departing C-17 on Aug. 23.
Thousands more faced danger, heat and panicked crowds to get to the airport, fearing for their lives as Taliban fighters went house to house seeking those who had aided the Americans.
Those who managed to pass or evade Taliban checkpoints joined huge throngs outside the airport’s security gates.
But once they got to the gates, not all were allowed in. Afghans were rejected because the State Department and other U.S. agencies or companies who had hired them under federal contracts failed to process the paperwork needed to be able to escape.
On many flights out, seats were empty and the security situation quickly worsened.
ISIS-K, a terror group U.S. forces had hunted in eastern Afghanistan for years closed in on Kabul airport. On Aug. 26 an ISIS-K fighter detonated a suicide vest at a screening point right outside the airport gate, killing eleven U.S. Marines, one soldier and one Navy corpsman. On Sunday, U.S. officials said an unmanned system destroyed an ISIS-K car carrying two suicide bombers heading for the Kabul airport.
In the final weekend of flights, the desperation of those still trapped on the ground in Afghanistan was also felt throughout a vast network of war veterans and volunteers who were feverishly working to find them a way out.
“If we don’t find a way to recover American citizens and SIVs, they will die,” one U.S. extraction volunteer wrote to Defense One on Saturday.
The U.S.-based volunteer was helping busloads of U.S. and Special Immigrant Visa evacuees whom she said had been blocked and harassed by the Taliban for days.
“In the last ten days we’ve coached a woman to give birth in literal dirt, an American citizen in a wheelchair was beaten, young girls shot in the face with gas, which resulted in extreme burns, and men and sons hunted and killed.”
“We have all hands on deck making asks to the White House, State Department, CIA, the Hill, ODNI, Centcom, SOCOM, JSOC, J3, and others,” she wrote. “We are being told ‘no one can help.’”
One U.S. special forces veteran reached out in another last-minute effort, after all previous efforts to get government help had failed. The Afghan he’d served with had “guarded us while we slept,” the veteran wrote. On Friday, the guard’s house “was raided…he is on the run for his life.”
For American citizens and their families still stranded, U.S. officials are pledging to continue to negotiate with the Taliban through economic and diplomatic means.
But it’s not clear how the U.S. will engage. On Sunday Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said the U.S. will not keep a diplomatic presence on the ground in Afghanistan, even as scores of nations and the U.S. released a letter of their commitment to get any of their citizens out who are left behind.
Military rescue post-withdrawal is also an option, one defense official said.
“You've seen the U.S. military locate and extract citizens all over the world,” the defense official said. “There’s no reason we wouldn't do it in Afghanistan.”
The veterans and groups who couldn’t get their Afghan partners out are now coaching them on how to stay alive.
“Don't dress like westerners but instead, look like the Taliban and blend in,” one rescue group advised in an alert it sent out to multiple networks Saturday.
“You need to hide in plain sight to survive,” the group advised. “There is talk about an Afghan Resistance as well as getting people out across the border. That will take shape over the next few months. As much as we hope for this, you need to think about surviving with the Taliban starting THIS WEEKEND.”
“Right now, do not count on Americans to save you.”
defenseone.com · by Tara Copp




13. 90 retired generals and admirals call for Austin and Milley to resign

The usual suspects? 

90 retired generals and admirals call for Austin and Milley to resign

90 retired generals and admirals call for Austin and Milley to resign immediately over the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal
  • Ninety retired military generals and admirals are demanding Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley resign
  • Calls for resignation 'based on negligence in performing their duties primarily involving events surrounding the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan'
  • Also said if Milley and Austin advised against withdrawal, they should have resigned if Biden didn't take their direction in protest of his leadership
  • Letter's signatories include Admiral John Poindexter, who served as President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser 
  • House Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former top White House physician to Presidents Obama and Trump, is also a signatory to the letter
  • Jackson has previously called into question Biden's cognitive fitness for the job and demanded that he take a test similar to the one given to Trump 
  • Comes after a Marine Lieutenant Colonel resigned after speaking out against his leadership for not pushing back against Biden's decisions in Afghanistan 
  • The Pentagon announced Monday the last U.S. troops left Kabul
PUBLISHED: 20:57 EDT, 30 August 2021 | UPDATED: 08:52 EDT, 31 August 2021
Daily Mail · by Katelyn Caralle, U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.com · August 31, 2021
Dozens of retired generals and admirals are demanding that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley resign over the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
'The retired Flag Officers signing this letter are calling for the resignation and retirement of the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) based on negligence in performing their duties primarily involving events surrounding the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan,' 90 retired top-ranking military officials wrote in an open letter released Monday.
They all proposed what they, as former U.S. military decision makers, felt should have happened in the withdrawal, including not rushing the withdrawal and not abandoning the Bagram Air Base.
More specifically, they said Milley and Austin should have advised Biden against the withdrawal.
'As principal military advisors to the CINC (Commander in Chief)/President, the SECDEF and CJCS should have recommended against this dangerous withdrawal in the strongest possible terms,' they wrote.
'If they did not do everything within their authority to stop the hasty withdrawal, they should resign,' the letter demands.
They also said that if Milley and Austin did advise against this, they should have resigned if Biden didn't take their direction to show their disapproval and to not have to carry out the mission that ended up with lives lost of 13 U.S. service members.

An open letter signed by 90 retired military generals and admirals calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley over the botched Afghanistan withdrawal




The group said if Austin and Milley did advise Biden against the withdrawal – and he still went forward with it – they should have resigned in protest
'[I]f they did do everything within their ability to persuade the CINC/President to not hastily exit the country without ensuring the safety of our citizens and Afghans loyal to America, then they should have resigned in protest as a matter of conscience and public statement.'
In a ISIS-K suicide bombing near the Kabul airport on Thursday, 13 U.S. troops were killed.
Biden took responsibility for their deaths, claiming everything that has happened in the withdrawal has been his doing.


Maj. Gen. Joe Arbuckle, one of the signatories, served in Vietnam and later commanded the US Army Industrial Operations Command (IOC) at Rock Island, Illinois
'The hasty retreat has left initial estimates at ~15,000 Americans stranded in dangerous areas controlled by a brutal enemy along with ~25,000 Afghan citizens who supported American forces,' the 90 retired generals and admirals wrote.
The letter comes as Joe Biden faces his own calls to resign or be impeached as those from all political backgrounds have criticized the president for his handling of the withdrawal.
Biden is expected to make remarks Tuesday afternoon lauding the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon announced on Monday afternoon that all U.S. forces left Afghanistan – a day before the August 31 deadline for a total troop withdrawal.
The letter is from the group Flag Officers 4 Freedom - the same organization that released a similar statement in May accusing Biden of stealing the election.
The May letter, which was signed by more than 120 retired generals and admirals, also questioned Biden's fitness for the presidency.
The letter echoes former President Donald Trump's claims of widespread election fraud – which have not been borne out in the courts.
'Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the "will of the people" our Constitutional Republic is lost,' the letter from retired officers says.
'The FBI and Supreme Court must act swiftly when election irregularities are surfaced and not ignore them as was done in 2020,' they wrote.
Both anti-Biden letters included prominent signatories, including Vice Adm. John Poindexter and current House Rep. Ronny Jackson.
Poindexter served as national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan. He was also convicted in the Iran-Contra Affair.


Scores of former military officers signed the letter, including Gen. William Boykin (left) and John Poindexter (right). Poindexter served as President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser

One of the letter's signatories is House Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Republican from Texas. Before entering politics, Jackson was the top White House physician during the Trump and Obama presidencies. He has been vocal in recent months about his doubts as to Biden's cognitive fitness for the job of president

Also signing on was Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who lost the Republican primary in 2020 to challenge Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, and is planning another Senate run
Before entering politics, Jackson was the top White House physician during the Trump and Obama presidencies.
He has been vocal in recent months about his doubts as to Biden's cognitive fitness for the job of president.
Also signing on was Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, who lost the Republican primary in 2020 to challenge Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, and is planning another Senate run.
Another signer, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, made headlines for comments criticized as anti-Muslim.
In remarks to a Christian congregation, Boykin said of a Somali warlord: 'I knew that my God was bigger than his.'
Another signatory, Maj. Gen. Joe Arbuckle, served in Vietnam and later commanded the US Army Industrial Operations Command (IOC) at Rock Island, Illinois.
Last week, a Marine battalion commander resigned after he was relieved of his duties for speaking out against decisions made by his superiors in the Afghanistan exit.
Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Scheller published a new video online on Sunday addressing his resignation just days after he went viral for another video calling out his superiors for not 'raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, 'We messed this up.''
Scheller's original video criticized Austin and Milley for leaving the Bagram Air Base before all Americans and their allies had the chance to be evacuated.
It came after 11 Marines were killed along with two other U.S. troops and more than 90 Afghans in the suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Thursday.

Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller published a new video online on Sunday addressing his resignation just days after he went viral for calling out his superiors
Sheller acknowledged in the new 10-minute video titled 'Your Move' that he sacrificed a cushy pension by leaving the Marines for posting his comments against his chain of command.
It's virtually unheard of for an active duty Marine commander to publicly rip ranking military leaders.
'I just want to clarify my legal status. I have been relieved of my command but I am still a United States Marine. Currently I am not pending legal action,' Scheller said in the new video, which ended his 17-year military career.
Scheller said the Marines want 'to hide me away' for three years until his service ended and not send him to a board of inquiry, which could have separated him on 'other than honorable' conditions.
The Marine revealed that he was resigning after he felt challenged to do so when he read a comment on his LinkedIn from retired Marine Colonel Thomas K. Hobbs.
'If Scheller was truly honorable, he would have resigned his commission in protest after stating what he did,' wrote Hobbs, who Scheller said he loved 'like a father.'
Scheller said: 'You didn't say 'is' as in challenging me, you said 'was' as if you assumed I wouldn't do it.'
Daily Mail · by Katelyn Caralle, U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.com · August 31, 2021

14. For Biden, ‘forever war’ isn’t over, just entering a new, perilous phase

Excerpts:

Bremmer said withdrawing the final U.S. troops from Afghanistan may ultimately give Biden the ability to move on from the troubled region, especially from an American public that — at least in theory — largely agreed with his decision to bring American service members home.
“Not to be too crude about it, but it’s kind of the end of when Americans pay serious attention because we no longer have troops on the ground and we will have basically gotten out every American that wants to get out,” Bremmer said.
Still, Republicans are eager to tie Biden to what they describe as a disastrous exit from the country. Rhodes said he expects Biden’s political opponents to take the confluence of crises facing the administration — from the still-raging pandemic to the “scary images in Afghanistan” — and “just kind of paint a narrative over the course of the next year of the scariest version of reality that they try to blame on Biden, even though most of it is out of his control.”
Pletka offered an even more stark assessment: “If people are right — and I think they are — this is an inflection point for the Biden presidency, the prism through which we judge all of his actions,” she wrote. “Ill-considered, ideologically rigid, mindless of the implications for the United States. If Biden is lucky, he will be Jimmy Carter. Unlucky, and he will have invited another 9/11.”
For Biden, ‘forever war’ isn’t over, just entering a new, perilous phase
The Washington Post · by Ashley ParkerToday at 8:41 p.m. EDT · August 31, 2021
The withdrawal of the final U.S. troops from Afghanistan on Monday marks the end of the U.S. military’s 20-year mission in Afghanistan.
But for President Biden, the end of the “forever war” is more of an inflection point than an actual conclusion. The departure of forces kicks off a new phase of the United States’s entanglement in Afghanistan that could also prove perilous — and no less challenging for American leadership than the previous two decades.
Biden and his team now have to grapple with deep skepticism over whether the Taliban, which now rules Afghanistan, will keep its promises for a peaceful transition. It pledged not to seek revenge on the Afghans who worked with and aided Americans during the conflict, and to respect the rights of women — at least within the framework of the group’s interpretation of Islamic law. But many foreign policy experts and even Biden allies remain mistrustful of what, exactly, that means.
National security threats remain, such as whether a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will again become a haven for terrorists eager to attack the United States.
And Biden and his team are facing a humanitarian crisis in the form of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees. As of Saturday, more than 117,000 people — the majority Afghan citizens — had been evacuated from Afghanistan, but they now face an uncertain future, including in the United States, where the response to resettlement has ranged from welcoming to wary to hostile.
The administration will also face questions about whether the United States did enough to ensure Americans and eligible Afghans were actually able to leave the country in the final days of the drawdown and transition to Taliban rule.
In a news conference Monday to announce the official completion of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the U.S. Central Command chief, told reporters that the number of American citizens left behind in Afghanistan is in the “very low hundreds.”
But he also acknowledged what he described as “a lot of heartbreak associated with this departure.”
“We did not get everybody out that we wanted to get out,” McKenzie said. “But I think if we’d stayed another 10 days we wouldn’t have gotten everybody out that we wanted to get out, and there still would have been people who would have been disappointed with that. It’s a — it’s a tough situation.”
Biden issued a statement Monday thanking troops and officers who oversaw the final withdrawal “with no further loss of American lives.”
“The Taliban has made commitments on safe passage and the world will hold them to their commitments,” Biden said in the statement, noting a U.N. resolution passed earlier in the afternoon to urge the Taliban to follow through on promises to allow Afghans to depart the country.
Biden plans to deliver remarks Tuesday regarding the end of the conflict.
The challenges his administration now face are both logistical and political. The chaotic withdrawal — including the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing in Kabul last Thursday — has already threatened to undermine Biden’s core message of restoring calm and competency to governing, and Democrats are increasingly fearful of backlash further eroding their midterm election prospects. Some House Democrats have even begun privately discussing whether Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan should be fired over the recent mayhem in Afghanistan.
Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to former president Barack Obama, said the Biden administration is facing two pressing issues — the potential humanitarian crisis for the people of Afghanistan, and the counterterrorism threat in a region that has long been a safe haven for terrorists and where the United States now will have far less on-the-ground intelligence-gathering capabilities.
“In Afghanistan, they simultaneously have to make the case that it was right to end the war while demonstrating that they can also manage the aftermath in terms of counterterrorism and humanitarian challenges,” Rhodes said. “It’s not just enough to have ended the war. You need to show you are managing the aftermath.”
Danielle Pletka, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said the administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan leaves “endless unanswered questions.”
“What about those left behind? What about the presence of terrorist groups in Afghanistan? What are we going to do about the resistance to the Taliban? Support?” Pletka wrote, in response to emailed questions. “It will be up to the Taliban to dictate what happens next; they’re in the driver seat. The one thing we know is their track record: terrorists will find a welcome home where they recorded a victory against the United States.”
The Biden administration has regularly stressed how many people have been evacuated from Afghanistan so far, and on Monday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki again highlighted the evacuation numbers, noting that more than 120,000 people already have been evacuated, including 6,000 Americans and their families since mid-August.
Psaki also said that despite some setbacks — such as probably leaving some U.S. military equipment behind, where it will fall into Taliban hands — the administration is optimistic that it can still help influence the Taliban’s behavior.
“We have an enormous amount of leverage, including access to the global marketplace, which is not a small piece of leverage to the Taliban, who are now overseeing large swaths of Afghanistan,” Psaki said.
Still, the tumultuous weeks leading up to Tuesday’s final withdrawal deadline underscore the looming headaches for the Biden administration. Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban far more quickly than U.S. intelligence anticipated, providing initial images of chaos and fear from city’s airport that were broadcast across the world.
On Thursday, a suicide bomber killed at least 170 people, including 13 U.S. service members, in an attack at the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate.
And a U.S. military strike Sunday on a vehicle a mile from the Kabul airport that posed an “imminent” Islamic State threat killed civilians, as well, including children, according to officials in Afghanistan.
Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, a global risk consultancy, said next Saturday’s 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks also could provide the Taliban with a propaganda opportunity — and the Biden administration with the sort of problematic images they are hoping to avoid. The Taliban are likely, Bremmer suggested, to “be parading equipment that is American through the capital city and flying a Taliban flag on the embassy.”
“The Taliban have just won everything they could possibly win,” Bremmer said. “That’s not good for the U.S.”
There’s also the question of whether the Taliban can become an effective government, said retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, former U.S. ambassador to NATO.
“We don’t really have a Taliban government — we have the remains of the Taliban insurgency,” he said. “It’s one thing to overthrow a government and another thing to govern.”
Bremmer said withdrawing the final U.S. troops from Afghanistan may ultimately give Biden the ability to move on from the troubled region, especially from an American public that — at least in theory — largely agreed with his decision to bring American service members home.
“Not to be too crude about it, but it’s kind of the end of when Americans pay serious attention because we no longer have troops on the ground and we will have basically gotten out every American that wants to get out,” Bremmer said.
Still, Republicans are eager to tie Biden to what they describe as a disastrous exit from the country. Rhodes said he expects Biden’s political opponents to take the confluence of crises facing the administration — from the still-raging pandemic to the “scary images in Afghanistan” — and “just kind of paint a narrative over the course of the next year of the scariest version of reality that they try to blame on Biden, even though most of it is out of his control.”
Pletka offered an even more stark assessment: “If people are right — and I think they are — this is an inflection point for the Biden presidency, the prism through which we judge all of his actions,” she wrote. “Ill-considered, ideologically rigid, mindless of the implications for the United States. If Biden is lucky, he will be Jimmy Carter. Unlucky, and he will have invited another 9/11.”

Anne Gearan contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Ashley ParkerToday at 8:41 p.m. EDT · August 31, 2021



15. Inside the Final Hours at Kabul Airport

MG Donahue's photo will be the iconic one used to mark the end of our war in Afghanistan. Please go to the link to view it if it does not come through in the message: https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/08/inside-final-hours-kabul-airport/184975/

Inside the Final Hours at Kabul Airport
Alone on the airfield after hundreds of other U.S. troops had left, five handpicked joint tactical exfiltration crews blew up the last remaining defenses and took off in the dark.
defenseone.com · by Tara Copp
The final hours of the 20-year war in Afghanistan were some of the most dangerous.
“The security perimeter was steadily collapsing around the planes” at Hamid Karzai International Airport, a defense official said on the condition they not be named.
The emergency airlift operation that began Aug. 14 had become the largest ever executed by the U.S. military, with more than half of the U.S. Air Force’s fleet of 222 C-17 Globemaster IIIs took part. As the clock ticked toward Aug. 31, just five airlifters remained on the ground in Kabul, manned by handpicked joint tactical exfiltration crews who were taking care of the last tasks on the ground.
Each crew had a checklist, point-by-point steps everyone had to follow. They messaged each other on mIRC chat to confirm all people were accounted for and each step completed.
Earlier, U.S. forces had disabled all the aircraft, vehicles, and artillery that they would abandon at the airport. Left behind, but inoperable, were 70 MRAPs, 27 Humvees, and 73 aircraft.
“Those aircraft will never fly again,” Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told reporters by videoconference. “When we go out, they'll never be able to be operated by anyone. Most of them were non-mission-capable to begin with, but certainly they'll never be able to be flown again.”
But they’d left intact several C-RAMs. Those artillery countermeasures had protected the airfield from incoming ISIS-K fired rockets less than 24 hours before, and were the last assets to be disabled.
“They were left operational until the last minute,” the defense official said. “Then forces went around to these assets and took a thermite bomb to them.”
The planes would take off without that protection.
Acting ambassador Ross Wilson, the top U.S. diplomat in Afghanistan, and Army Gen. Chris Donohue, commander of the 82nd Airborne, on the last plane of the five. They were the last U.S. officials to leave Afghanistan. Donohue was the last U.S. service member to board.
“Donahue, one of the last things he did before leaving, was talk to the Taliban commander he’d been coordinating with…about the time we were gonna leave just to let them know that we were leaving,” McKenzie said.
Minutes later the last order on the mIRC chat checklist was directed: “Flush the force.”
With that message, the five Globemasters taxied and completed take-off in under 10 minutes.
At precisely 11:59 p.m. Aug. 30 Kabul time, the final C-17 got off the ground, McKenzie said.
Before the aircraft departed, Donohue sent a final message over mIRC chat: “Job well done, I’m proud of you all.”
An hour later, McKenzie appeared on the big video screen of the Pentagon’s press briefing room.
“Every single U.S. service member is now out of Afghanistan,” he said.
defenseone.com · by Tara Copp



16. A Required Course for Americans: Strategic Failure 101


From one of the most outspoken critics of the US military.

A Required Course for Americans: Strategic Failure 101 | The American Conservative
The American Conservative · by Douglas Macgregor
The last convoy of U.S. troops left Iraq under cover of darkness on December 18, 2011. To keep the U.S. military withdrawal secret from insurgents—or Iraqi security officers secretly aligned with militias—U.S. interpreters called local tribal and government leaders the day before to reassure them that business would continue as usual.
In an eerie repetition of the withdrawal from Iraq, on July 5, 2021, American forces left Afghanistan’s Bagram Airfield in the dead of night without informing the Afghan military leadership. Within hours, local Afghans looted the airfield.
Today, Americans are watching as another army created, equipped, and trained by the U.S. military in Afghanistan is melting away under assault by jihadist Islamist groups that fight not for religion or ideology, but against the American and allied military presence—what the Taliban view as foreign occupation or oppression.
Meanwhile, the return on America’s colossal investment of blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan can be calculated. It’s zero. Iraq is effectively a satellite state of greater Iran. Afghanistan may well be the world’s largest narco-state since it is responsible for about 90 percent of global heroin production. Why did these things happen?
At least one explanation is the exclusive control of the Defense and State Departments since 2001 by civilian appointees who psychologically embraced America’s “unipolar moment,” when the American rules-based, liberal international order became truly ascendant. As Professor Stephen Walt explains in The Hell of Good Intentions, after 9/11 Washington’s elites provisioned U.S. foreign policy with the military means to pursue global military-political hegemony.
It is impossible to know whether any of the top political leaders, including three presidents, would have listened to anyone in uniform who counseled restraint, or a radically different approach to interventions than what occurred. Still, early on, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accurately assessed the problem in Afghanistan, telling senior military leaders in April 2002, “We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave. Help!”
All that can be said with certainty is that between 2001 and 2021, none of the senior officers expressed opposition to the policies of intervention and occupation strongly enough to warrant their removal. None felt compelled to leave the service and take their opposing views to the public forum.
When it became clear that the collective strategies and tactics in Afghanistan and Iraq were failing, not only General David Petraeus, but most of America’s senior military leaders chose to prevaricate and distort facts in public to show progress when there was none. How many American lives might have been saved had someone only told the truth will never be known.
There is no getting around it. America’s senior civilian and military leaders (together with their supporting service bureaucracies) are fundamentally incapable of developing or implementing effective military strategy.
Americans may ask, “So what? After all, we’ve muddled through this long. We’ll do better in the future.” But history teaches that when there is no accountability, there is no performance. If the people at the top do not change, then nothing in practice—where policy and power meet reality—will change.
How long should presidents, secretaries of defense, and service secretaries wait to remove senior officers for failing to perform, make progress, and achieve assigned tasks? Between 1942 and the spring of 1945, General George Marshall fired 32 corps and division commanders. It was not personal. It was necessary because, Marshall insisted, the officers had not performed to expectation. In the U.S. Navy, after Pearl Harbor every submarine skipper was replaced in the first 18 months of the Second World War.
Are reliefs inevitable in wartime? Is the selection process inherently flawed? Yes, in many ways it is. The behavior of most senior officers can be explained by an unofficial system of patronage and nepotism that promotes officers to senior rank who are “safe hands,” “good guys,” not troublesome people who are inclined to rock the boat. Simply promoting more non-white officers to senior rank without regard to their demonstrated character, competence, and intelligence won’t change this condition.
As a result, finding senior officers who are competent practitioners of war—officers who will communicate to their civilian bosses the truth of what is really happening and what actions may be required—is difficult. Promotion to three and four stars is usually determined by politics, not competence. In other words, presidents get the generals and admirals they want.
In his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites, Chris Hayes describes the real strategic problem confronting Americans, “When people come to view all formal authority as fraudulent, good governance becomes impossible, and a vicious cycle of official misconduct and low expectations kicks in.” Well, it’s happened. Low expectations of competence and character in the military’s senior ranks have kicked in.
The question is how much longer will this condition linger? Sir Winston Churchill raised the same question in the summer of 1940, telling the chief of the Imperial General Staff, “We cannot afford to confine Army appointments to persons who have excited no hostile comment in their careers… This is a time to try men of force and vision.”
Short of war, there isn’t much change in the military. However, when defense budgets tank—and they will—new leaders with “force and vision” will be needed to make the tough decisions that reductions in strength and spending will require. Right now, the pickings are slim.
Douglas Macgregor, Col. (ret.) is a senior fellow with The American Conservative, the former advisor to the secretary of Defense in the Trump administration, a decorated combat veteran, and the author of five books.
The American Conservative · by Douglas Macgregor



17.  House defense bill targets Chinese influence operations

Can legislation be an effective tool for defending against influence operations? (yes, if the resources and authorities are correct, sufficient, and effectively implemented).

House defense bill targets Chinese influence operations
washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

Congress is seeking regular U.S. government reports outlining Chinese influence operations targeting the United States and its allies.
A provision of the House version of the fiscal 2022 defense authorization bill calls on the PentagonState Department and American intelligence agencies to detail Chinese influence campaigns targeting U.S. military alliances and partnerships.
The reports would assess the Chinese government’s objectives for conducting influence operations and efforts by the Pentagon and the State Department to counter those operations, according to a version of the authorization bill made public Monday.
The language is included in the bill that seeks $744 billion for defense.
China is engaged in large-scale influence operations that seek to promote Beijing’s propaganda themes and policies. Its global disinformation campaign seeks to blame the U.S. Army for the coronavirus pandemic. The campaign includes daily reports in domestic Chinese state-run media and overseas propaganda outlets.
Scientists have confirmed that the pandemic began in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, and a U.S. intelligence report made public last week said the virus began either from a laboratory mishap in Wuhan or from a natural zoonotic leap from an animal to humans.
Chinese influence activities have gone largely unchallenged by the U.S. government despite the creation several years ago of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, a unit in charge of countering foreign influence campaigns.
Exposure of nefarious Chinese influence operations in Australia, including the outing of a member of parliament linked to the Chinese military, led to new restrictions on Chinese activities in that nation.
Most of China’s influence activities are conducted under the direction of a Chinese Communist Party organ called the United Front Work Department. The activities are carried out by Chinese state media, diplomats and intelligence personnel.
The Senate version of the authorization bill has not been made public. A summary of the Senate version states that it will modify the Pentagon’s annual report on the Chinese military.
Both versions, however, would reauthorize the Pentagon to produce annual reports on China’s military.
To become effective, the House language on Chinese influence operations must survive a House-Senate conference committee that would reconcile the two versions after passage by both legislative bodies.
The House bill would mandate reports that assess Chinese influence operations and publicize a list of all Chinese state and nonstate organizations involved in the operations.
The reports also would identify tactics, techniques and procedures used in previous influence operations.
Additionally, the reports would assess the impact of Chinese influence campaigns, including the views of senior Chinese government officials on the effectiveness of the operations.
The government also would be required under the bill to identify all U.S. military allies and partners that are targeted by the Chinese campaigns, both past and anticipated in the future.
The legislation also calls on the federal government to recommend authorities and activities for the Pentagon and the State Department to develop a strategy to counter the influence operations.
Other China-related elements of the House bill would require the federal government to report on Chinese activities in Latin America and the Caribbean; tighten security of printed circuit boards that could be penetrated electronically by Chinese agents; and state congressional support for the defense of Taiwan.
Both the House and Senate bills would fund the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a $6.2 billion effort to bolster defenses in Asia.

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz


18. DoD planned to spend billions on Afghan security forces. This group has a suggestion for those funds


I am disappointed in this proposal from the Global SOF Foundation. Yes intelligence and continued CT operations are important. We seem to want to just continue the 20 year old paradigm but now just over the horizon (thus requiring more funding for equipment. But these can be best facilitated in a denied area by working through, with, and by indigenous forces. What about repurposing and training the former Afghna Commandos and Special Forces?


DoD planned to spend billions on Afghan security forces. This group has a suggestion for those funds
militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · August 27, 2021
Congress is poised to divvy up billions of dollars previously planned to support Afghan security forces to other military priorities in the wake of the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, but some advocates are pushing to keep that cash flowing overseas to maintain anti-terrorism work.
Officials from the Global SOF Foundation, a Florida-based organization advocating for special operations forces around the world, on Friday sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee asking that nearly $3 billion in money planned for the now-defunct Afghan military to be redirected instead to intelligence assets and operations in the region.
“[They] will now be even more necessary to battle an emboldened global terrorist threat,” the group wrote in their petition.
“The bottom line is that more over-the-horizon operations will require resources currently not allocated. US SOCOM and the intelligence community do not have sufficient funding to meet these new challenges. We must ensure that threat organizations that wish us harm cannot reconstitute, and we must preclude them from proliferating terrorism.”
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Troops at the Kabul airport are changing up their tactics to stay safe in their final days in Afghanistan.
The push comes less than a week before the House Armed Services Committee is expected to debate the Afghan military funding in their annual defense authorization bill mark-up.
Senate Armed Services Committee members approved their draft of the defense budget policy measure earlier this summer, with about $3.3 billion for Afghan military and security forces included.
However, that was before the fall of the democratic government in Afghanistan earlier this month and the effective dissolution of the Afghan military.
In a draft of the House Armed Services Committee’s initial NDAA language obtained ahead of next week’s official release, Democratic committee leaders are proposing retaining only about $350 million of that money to complete outstanding contracts with defense firms, and re-assigning the other nearly $3 billion to other, non-Afghanistan priorities.
Just how many committee members will go along with that plan remains to be seen.
Several lawmakers in recent days have called for investment in new military operations in the region to counter terrorist threats such as ISIS-K, the group which claimed responsibility for an attack at the Kabul airport on Thursday that killed 13 U.S. service members and, according to the Associated Press, at least 169 Afghan civilians.
Republicans in the House have also repeatedly attacked the planned $715 billion in defense spending outlined in the initial defense authorization plan, saying it falls short of military needs around the globe.
RELATED

Twelve service members were killed in an attack by ISIS-K fighters, Pentagon officials said.
The Global SOF Foundation letter notes that since all U.S. troops are scheduled to leave Afghanistan by Aug. 31, American intelligence agencies will require “significant air assets and will require very tight response timelines” to respond to terrorist threats in the region.
That will require more equipment, personnel and money, they noted.
The money issues surrounding the Afghan security forces are likely to come under more scrutiny in the weeks ahead, as Congress debates both the defense authorization bill and the president’s request for the fiscal 2022 Defense Department budget.
The House Armed Services Committee debate on the authorization bill is set to begin Wednesday morning and last late into the night. Staff said they expect a host of amendments related to Afghanistan oversight and military support to be offered during the session.
About Leo Shane III
Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.


19. Dueling Dyads: Conceptualizing Proxy Wars in Strategic Competition

An important and timely essay from Frank Hoffman and Andrew Orner.

And for a challenge see if you can find the link to a slide presentation I gave to USSOCOM about 7 or 8 years go on UW and Counter UW.


Dueling Dyads: Conceptualizing Proxy Wars in Strategic Competition - Foreign Policy Research Institute
fpri.org · by Frank G. Hoffman and Andrew Orner
Strategic competition with the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China has become the new orienting challenge for the U.S. national security community. While many officials and writers envision strategic competition across many domains, the increased likelihood of proxy wars in strategic competition does not gain much purchase in the strategic planning documents of the U.S. government, including the recent Biden administration’s Interim National Strategic Guidance. Both the 2017 National Security Strategy and the supporting 2018 National Defense Strategy acknowledged that the United States faces a re-emergent period of strategic competition from both China and Russia. The Biden administration appears to embrace the competitive nature of the relationship between democratic states and authoritarian rivals, and the necessity of military modernization, but does not address the range of malign methods that the competition could lead to. In response to the strategies, the U.S. military is adapting from protracted counter-terrorism missions to deterring large-scale, conventional wars. This is a natural reflex for the Pentagon, yet strategic competition does not automatically generate symmetric and conventional contests.
As Aaron Stein and Ryan Fishel recently observed, “The U.S. military will need to resist the urge to conflate direct, head-to-head conflict with great-power competition. Napoleonic, linear conceptions of war may be less relevant between large, nuclear-armed states in the 21st century.” Proxy wars, an area of increasing study and rigor in the academic community, represent an indirect and non-Westphalian mode of conflict that is increasingly relevant in future conflict.
The purpose of this article is to explore the character of proxy wars in the context of the emerging strategic environment. It offers insights into the array of forms that proxy wars can take, identifies shortfalls in how such conflicts are currently conceptualized, and offers recommendations to update U.S. military doctrine to prepare for this more prevalent and likely form of armed conflict in this century.
Types of Relationships in Proxy Wars
Proxy wars reflect a wide range of relationships between Principals and their supported Clients. The latter can be state or non-state actor(s). The Principal will select the type of support that it desires to offer based on its assessment of its own strategic interests and the alignment of its interests with those of the Client. A number of other factors will come into consideration as well. Overall, the character of a Principal-Client relationship is based upon an assessment by the Principal of:
  • Alignment of Interests. There is often a mismatch between Principal and Client in terms of interests and goals.
  • Capabilities of the Client. Usually, the agent is weaker than desired, and thus requires support of some type.
  • Degree of Risk Tolerance. The Principal is taking risk in delegating the achievement of an interest to a second party and needs to measure that risk.
  • Leverage/Conditionality. Whether or not the Principal can achieve some control over the client is described as leverage or the ability to withhold support assets as a condition of ensuring compliance with the Principal’s agenda and aims.
  • Deniability/Covert. The Principal must decide how covert it desires the proxy relationship to be and how much plausible deniability it requires.
These factors are sometimes mutually reinforcing, but they need not be so. For example, as the capabilities of a Client increase, a Principal’s leverage decreases over the supported client. As the Client increases its capabilities, it may expand its objectives and resist a political settlement that satisfies the other parties in the conflict. The interaction between these factors can bring to the fore some of the drawbacks of using proxies dealt with later in this article.
Degree of Proxy Relationship or “Proxiness”
A number of potential frameworks to examine the range of Principal and Client relationships in proxy wars have been offered. Here, we offer a simpler and linear continuum that incorporates projected aspects of the strategic context that are relevant to U.S. policymakers. For this work, the Principal-Client relationship is conceived as a continuum with various attributes of delegation, risk, and resource application. We offer a continuum of such relationships, ranging from simple materiel assistance to indirect violent support via surrogate forces:
  • Security Assistance. Support to the Client is limited to the provision of weapons and materiel. (Ex: U.S. weapons support to Mujahadeen fighters in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union.)
  • Advise/Train. Support to the Client extends beyond financial or military equipment, but is limited to strategic advice, intelligence, campaign planning, and training. The latter can be done in the Client state but does not include participation in field operations. (Ex: U.S. training to Cuban counter-revolutionary forces.)
  • Advise/Assist. Limited augmentation of the Client by the Principal in an advisory capacity to include observation and guidance during field operations but not active fighting. Could include situations where military officers are actively engaged with the direction of field operations. (Ex: U.S. support to El Salvadoran government against pro-Soviet revolutionary group, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN))
  • Limited Partnership. Overt augmentation of the Client by military forces of the Principal in actual field operations, usually limited to air cover, medical evacuation, and indirect fires. (Ex: U.S. special forces conducting operations with Kurdish militias in Syria in the Counter-ISIS campaign.)
  • Surrogate. Direct use of, or augmentation of, fighting forces from the Principal that is masked for deniability, usually provided by covert forces, special contingents (Flying Tigers or “Russian volunteers”), or commercial sources such as Private Military Companies (PMC). A surrogate may be used by itself as the primary actor supported by the Principal or as an auxiliary or augmentation to a Client. (Ex: Russian pilots flying combat missions during the Korean War.)
This continuum offers a range of options that have different degrees of sponsorship/affiliation, different levels of opacity and risk, and different costs to the sponsor state. We find the surrogate option to be increasingly likely given that it generally offers a more competent and controllable actor with better alignment/incentives for a Principal than less organized local forces. Given the increased use of PMCs by China and Russia, we believe this continuum captures the range of proxy relationships that can be anticipated or employed. The Russian PMC known as the Wagner Group is only one of several units that appear to operate as a subsidiary of the Kremlin or its intelligence agencies. Likewise, China has expanded its security options with 20 international PMCs employing over 3,000 personnel in Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan.
Some recent scholarship argues that technologies like cyber/computer network attacks or drones represent a new wrinkle to the proxy war arsenal. These analysts have expanded the concept of surrogates to include technologies not actors. There is a logic to this since many actors are using these technologies indirectly for the same political objectives as proxy forces, and with the same intent of masking their role and minimizing risk. But they are not actors and remain employed—overtly or covertly—under the control of the Principal state or by its delegated Client. This article centers on the actors and uses of surrogates as a specific subset within the proxy war history.
Conceptualizing the Entire Proxy Set
While often conceived of as a binary relationship, the potential for multiple sponsors and/or Clients is possible. The scholarship around proxy wars emphasizes a two-party relationship , the one between the so-called Principal (external actor) and the Client (proxy actor). However, more study should be given to the entire suite of actors actually involved, particularly in great power competition. Generally, it involves a four-way relationship between the two major external actors, and their respective proxies or target states. The literature is often silent on the Principal’s ultimate competitor, the other strategic competitor. To understand the context of the entire game, one has to appreciate all the players and take a systemic view of the political and proxy relationships at play. Instead of a single Principal-Client dyad, we have to consider the larger context in strategic competition with major powers (dueling dyads) and potentially multiple proxies or what might be termed polymorphic proxy fights.
Limits of Proxy War
One of the tensions and paradoxes of proxy sponsorship is that the stronger and more effective a group becomes, the greater its ability to stay independent or at least express more of its own agency against the Principal’s interests. There is both some promise and clear reservations about the use of proxy forces:
Proxy wars tend to be long and difficult to win—to the disappointment of policymakers expecting cheap and easy solutions to regional security challenges. Sponsors and proxies inevitably encounter principal-agent problems. Sponsors must be ruthless; the point is to get proxies to fight and die for the sponsor’s objectives. Proxies, in turn, try to maneuver sponsors to assume greater risk and commit more resources while pursuing their own more parochial agendas.
Efforts by a proxy to draw their sponsor further into the conflict could lead to escalation. With greater sponsor support, proxies might demonstrate a form of moral hazard wherein they will remain wedded to violence underwritten by the coercive power of their sponsor. The divergence of objectives between proxies and sponsors can continue into the post-conflict period. A proxy force once organized, armed, and trained does not disappear once a war ends. Instead, as was demonstrated in Afghanistan by formerly U.S.-backed Mujahadeen fighters turned Taliban and al Qaeda insurgents, a former proxy can evolve and inflict serious damage on its erstwhile sponsor. While the allure for policymakers of an indirect “limited” proxy war is dampened by these pathologies, the use of proxies remains attractive in many situations for its presumed low costs compared to a direct and overt military intervention. Yet, they are not a silver bullet and have been described as a medicine that is best when not “over-prescribed.”
Proxies in U.S. Joint and Service Doctrine
While proxy wars are recognized as a recurring phenomenon present since at least the Peloponnesian Wars, there is limited U.S. Joint Doctrine on the subject. The term “proxy” is not contained in the official doctrinal dictionary—as it is a term that connotes active subordination of potential proxy partners—so euphemisms, such as “Building Partner Capacity,” are often used. Joint doctrine in the United States uses the term “Unconventional Warfare (UW)” to describe the development and employment of proxy forces. The Defense Department’s definition of UW states that it consists of “operations and activities that are conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.” This definition comports with the binary and narrow conceptualization of UW, that is when the United States is supporting a resistance movement inside a state. This captures the creation of indigenous forces well, as in supporting an insurgency. But the definition falls short in recognizing the larger challenge posed in proxy conflict and offers no room for operations conducted to counter/limit a proxy force supported by a major external actor. Given the risk for escalation, such an approach would have to be carefully designed. Appropriate policy and doctrine are needed to assist in framing and planning this type of operation.
The shortcomings in U.S. doctrine have been noted previously by the Special Forces community. In 2014, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command published a thoughtful white paper, entitled “Counter-Unconventional Warfare,” capturing this gap. It highlighted the hole in the current U.S. approach by defining counter-UW operations as seeking to “decrease the sponsor’s capacity to employ unconventional warfare to achieve strategic aims.” This offers a lot of additional value when examining proxy wars where both of the protagonists have the support of a major power as a sponsor. Moreover, this expansion holistically addresses the strategic context in which U.S. support to a state or resistance movement is provided.
In 2015, the Joint Staff issued an updated doctrine for UW. The document, consistent with Army doctrinal publications, offers valuable considerations to frame joint operations in support of a resistance movement. Moreover, it provides useful advice for military interaction with both governmental and nongovernmental agencies and multinational forces. But the doctrine is framed around historical practices and needs refreshing to better support future U.S. engagement in UW missions for strategic competition. Congress has recognized this need and tasked the U.S. defense establishment with developing a strategy to offset foreign UW efforts in the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act. Rather than a generic strategy, as a good first step, we recommend that U.S. military reconceive and expand the understanding of UW and extend its doctrine and educational programs to include those situations where support to the opposing state or proxy from its sponsor state is eliminated or reduced.
We propose an expansion of Unconventional Warfare beyond the current definition to better capture counter-UW:
Activities conducted by military forces to enable a State, resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow another actor by operating through or with the supported actor’s forces. UW may also include military and other activity designed to minimize support from an external state, which is directed against a supported actor’s sponsor.
This definition is offered for consideration into new Joint Doctrine.
Operations in Iraq and Syria have awakened U.S. military leaders to the shortcomings in the prevailing conception of UW and the lack of Joint Doctrine. General Joseph Votel, when he led U.S. and coalition operations in Iraq against ISIS, conceived of the mission with an evolution of the traditional U.S. formulation that UW is operationalized “by, with and through” (BWT) local forces. The “by” means working with indigenous actors on the ground who carry out operations by themselves without putting U.S. forces at risk. The “through” is meant to convey the option to operate through surrogates (private military contractors or front organizations) to conceal U.S. involvement or minimize risk to U.S. military forces or agents. The “with” covers those situations when U.S. elements are in the field working directly with the supported party inside the operational area. The evolving role of Special Operations Forces (SOF) in applying enablers, including intelligence, precision fires, and logistics SOF, has expanded the meaning of the “with” component of this operational approach.
General Votel’s conception is somewhat more limited than the traditional definition of the approach, as it confined BWT to supporting local forces with U.S. enablers (precision fires) and through U.S. legal authorities. More importantly, General Votel, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, found that current doctrine to guide his activities was lacking.
This could be done by expanding BWT to BWTA to include Against, to account for counter-UW against external sponsors, especially major powers to diminish or block their effectiveness. The historical precedent for this could be when the United States mined Haiphong harbor to block the provision of external support from its sponsors. Other cases may include efforts to interdict arms shipments from Iran to violent semi-state actors like Hezbollah.
In sum, an era of great power competition will undoubtedly spawn a number of proxy fights and see the continued proliferation of surrogates. These surrogates may be large and well-funded PMCs with high-tech capabilities, or quasi-government maritime militias at sea undercutting well-established rules of the road in international waters. While the Pentagon focuses on conventional scenarios in the principal theaters, off of Taiwan and the Baltics, our competitors are more likely to continue building upon their history of indirect approaches. The combination of mercenaries and masked Russian soldiers (or “little green men”) used by Russia in the ongoing proxy war in eastern Ukraine exemplifies what we can expect from Russia in the future. Likewise, China’s use of PMCs and its various armed law enforcement activities can be anticipated to undermine U.S. credibility and its alliance architecture in Asia and beyond. Policymakers and military planners need to study the evolution of unconventional warfare and update U.S. doctrine to prepare for the greater prevalence of this mode of war and its potential protracted and polymorphic character.
The views expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the position of the Department of Defense, other institutions with which they are affiliated, or the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

Frank G. Hoffman serves on the Board of Advisors at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and currently is serving at the National Defense University as a Distinguished Research Fellow with the Institute for National Strategic Studies.

Andrew Orner is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies Political Science and Economics. In Summer 2021 he worked as an intern at the Center for Strategic Research at the National Defense University and participated in the Hertog War Studies Program.
fpri.org · by Frank G. Hoffman


20. Afghan Resistance Smashes Taliban; Kills 85 & Captures 7 In Afghanistan's Andarab
This report of course requires vetting.

Who is assessing the resistance potential?

Last Updated: 30th August, 2021 19:07 IST
Afghan Resistance Smashes Taliban; Kills 85 & Captures 7 In Afghanistan's Andarab
As the resistance force continues to fight fiercely in the Panjshir valley, and nearby areas, reports suggested that over 100 Taliban fighters were killed
Written By

IMAGE: Facebook/AhmadMassoud/PTI

As the resistance force continues to fight fiercely in the Panjshir valley and nearby areas, reports suggested that over 85 terrorists have been killed while seven others have been captured. In the battle in the Pul-e-Hesar district of Andarab, the resistance forces forced the terrorist group to retreat from several parts of the district, leaving behind dozens of their vehicles, arms and ammunition.
The resistance force said in a statement," We have killed 85 Talibs, and taken into custody 7 others. This is the exact number."
The development comes a couple of days after 'caretaker' President Amrullah Saleh asserted that the Taliban rule in the country 'won't last long.' Saleh, who is currently in Panjshir with Ahmad Massoud, supporting the anti-Taliban resistance said that the Taliban's Islamic Emirates was unacceptable to the people of Afghanistan and that the unacceptability will lead to a 'deep military crisis' for the Taliban, not just in Panjshir but other parts of the country as well. 
Resistance forces adamant on autonomy in negotiations
Meanwhile, in the ongoing negotiations between the Taliban and the resistance force, the unacceptability of the rule of Taliban's Islamic Emirates has been put forth, and autonomy for Afghanistan, and the country's national flag hoisted are sought. Talking about the points, Amrullah Saleh had vividly stated, "If they don't agree to these conditions and choose to take the military path, then we too are prepared."
It is pertinent to mention here that the resistance force has already started preparing to face the Taliban militarily. The resistance forces are recruiting young fighters from Kapisa, Parwan, and other provinces who are being trained by commanders of the Afghan Army in the Saricha area of Panjshir. They are being taught how to use arms and ammunition. 
"We must get ready to defend our country. We are now under the invasion of fascist forces. We must find ways to fight them," an official from the training camp said to Republic Media Network, underling that they are forming new brigades."  Since in the past Taliban used to say that we used to work for the Americans, now we are standing for our own nation. We are now defending our own motherland," the officials of the resistance forces further said. 
Taliban takes over Afghanistan
After months of offensive, the Taliban took over Kabul on August 15 after major cities like Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, and Lashkar Gah fell without resistance. This was followed by a withdrawal of US and NATO troops after 20 years from war-torn Afghanistan. As the Taliban breached Kabul, Ashraf Ghani, the democratically elected President fled from the country with some other officials.
Soon after the terrorist group took over Kabul, chaos erupted as thousands have swarmed Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport in a bid to flee from the Taliban's rule. US President Joe Biden has defended his decision of withdrawing troops from the war-torn country. The Taliban is now in talks with ex-Presidents Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah for a 'peaceful power transition'. Evacuation of Afghans and other nationals is underway from Kabul airport which is under US troops' control.










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

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

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

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