Quotes of the Day:
“In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisors, but they have to win it, the people of Vietnam, against the communists.”
- President John Kennedy in a televised interview with Walter Cronkite on September 2, 1963.
"Nothing of real importance changes: modern history is not modern."
- Colin Gray
“By and large, strategy comes into play where there is actual or potential conflict, when interests collide and forms of resolution are required. This is why a strategy is much more than a plan. A plan supposes a sequence of events that allows one to move with confidence from one state of affairs to another. Strategy is required when others might frustrate one’s plans because they have different and possibly opposing interests and concerns.”
- Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History
1. Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Call With President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani
2. What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan
3. Irregular Warfare: A Case Study in CIA and US Army Special Forces Operations in Northern Iraq, 2002-03
4. U.S.-Australia-India-Japan Consultations (the “Quad”) Senior Officials Meeting
5. Security Alert: U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan
6. It might still be possible to save Afghanistan
7. How Has the Terrorism Threat Changed Twenty Years After 9/11?
8. Coffee Jolt Gets Pricier as Costs of Beans, Labor, Transport Rise
9. Peraton Receives Nearly $1B Award to Provide U.S. Government with Insight, Expertise, and Influence to Advance National Security Objectives
10. What Went Wrong With Afghanistan’s Defense Forces?
11. Blast from the past: Cold War artillery command in Germany resurrected and restructured
12. John Rizzo, C.I.A. Lawyer Who Sanctioned Waterboarding, Dies at 73
13. The grand illusion: Hiding the truth about the Afghanistan war’s ‘conclusion’
14. U.S. Asks Taliban to Spare Its Embassy in Coming Fight for Kabul
15. WHO Expert Says Chinese Officials Pushed Investigators to Reject Lab-Leak Theory
16. Honorable discharge, retirement as colonel, OK’d for Green Beret charged with assault, kidnapping
17. To Avoid Attack, U.S. Forces Are Spreading Out. But They’re Still Broadcasting Their Positions.
18. Taking on Russia and China means US Special Operations Command is rethinking how it fights the propaganda war
19. America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success
20. POGO Remembers Pierre Sprey, Pentagon Provocateur and Mentor
21. Analysis | Afghanistan’s rapid collapse is part of a long, slow U.S. defeat
22. The Danger of Shrinking American Naval Power
23. The Debacle in Afghanistan
24. Census data: US is diversifying, white population shrinking
25. BREAKING: Official denies report about U.S. asking Afghan president to resign
26. Op-ed: Political appointees are a problem for foreign policy
27. Biden’s Allies Defend Afghanistan Withdrawal Amid Taliban Surge
28. Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan
29. FDD | The Hidden Dangers of a Carbon-Neutral Military
1. Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Call With President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani
Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III's Call With President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani
Immediate Release
Aug. 12, 2021
On August 12, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with President of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani to stress the United States remains invested in the security and stability of Afghanistan in the face of violence by the Taliban.
Secretary Austin and Secretary Blinken informed President Ghani the United States is reducing our civilian footprint in Kabul in light of the evolving security situation, and will accelerate Special Immigration Visa (SIV) flights.
Secretary Austin also informed President Ghani the U.S. military would be temporarily deploying a number of troops to the region to facilitate the safe and orderly reduction of our civilian personnel.
The Secretaries both emphasized the United States remains committed to maintaining a strong diplomatic and security relationship with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
During the call, Secretary Austin, Secretary Blinken, and President Ghani exchanged views on the security environment in Afghanistan, efforts to curb violence, and ongoing diplomatic efforts. President Ghani shared his appreciation for the United States’ continued support to the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) and the Afghan people.
Secretary Austin reaffirmed that a unified Afghanistan and cohesive ANDSF is the linchpin of peace and security in the face of a heavy fighting season.
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2. What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan
Excerpts:
We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 incoherent wars, one year at a time, without a sense of direction. The U.S. military can and should be blamed for the collapse of security forces in Afghanistan—I hold us responsible. The current collapse keeps me up at night. In the military, the main effort gets the best resources and the best talent available. For more than 20 years, no matter what was reported, what we read in the headlines, efforts to build and train large-scale conventional security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have mostly been an aimless, ham-fisted acronym soup of trial and error that never became the true main effort, and we are to blame for that.
But we are not the only ones responsible. Someday we will ask young men and women to do this again—to fight a war overseas, to partner with local forces, to train them and build them up. Before we do, we owe it to those young people to ask the tough questions of how, and why, we all failed.
What We Got Wrong in Afghanistan
Military officers like me thought we were building a capable Afghan security force. What did we get wrong? Plenty.
Watching the rapid deterioration of the security situation in Afghanistan—the Taliban have captured a third of the country’s provincial capitals in the weeks since the U.S. military pulled its troops out—has evoked a feeling of déjà vu for me.
In 2005, I was an adviser to an Iraqi infantry battalion conducting counterinsurgency operations in and around Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of Iraq during one of the most violent periods in that conflict. It was difficult to have any hope at the time. I returned to Iraq in 2009, this time in Mosul, where my unit advised and supported two Iraqi-army divisions, one Iraqi-federal-police division, and thousands of local police officers. This time, I sensed more progress: Leaving Iraq in 2010, I felt we had done a great job, turning a corner and building a capable and competent security force. A year later, I found myself in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, recruiting and training Afghan police units and commandos. After nine months there, I again rotated home thinking we had done some good.
I would be proved wrong on both counts. In 2014, by then stationed at the Pentagon, I watched in dismay as the Iraqi divisions I’d helped train collapsed in a matter of days when faced with the Islamic State. Today, as the Taliban seizes terrain across Afghanistan, including in what was my area of operations, I cannot help but stop and reflect on my role. What did my colleagues and I get wrong? Plenty.
From the very beginning, nearly two decades ago, the American military’s effort to advise and mentor Iraqi and Afghan forces was treated like a pickup game—informal, ad hoc, and absent of strategy. We patched together small teams of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen, taught them some basic survival skills, and gave them an hour-long lesson in the local language before placing them with foreign units. We described them variously as MiTTs, BiTTs, SPTTs, AfPak Hands, OMLT, PRTs, VSO, AAB, SFAB, IAG, MNSTC-I, SFAATs—each new term a chapter in a book without a plot.
In most cases, these men and women courageously made it up as they went along. We borrowed untrained personnel from mostly administrative assignments and largely had them focus on tactical tasks, reporting progress in colorful bubble charts. Social media and public-affairs documents were replete with images of rifle ranges, obstacle courses, room clearing, and lots and lots of meetings (many of which were themselves about meetings) over chai. But from my tours in Iraq through to my time in Afghanistan, larger systemic problems were never truly addressed. We did not successfully build the Iraqi and Afghan forces as institutions. We failed to establish the necessary infrastructure that dealt effectively with military education, training, pay systems, career progression, personnel, accountability—all the things that make a professional security force. Rotating teams through tours of six months to a year, we could not resolve the vexing problems facing Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s armies and police: endemic corruption, plummeting morale, rampant drug use, abysmal maintenance, and inept logistics. We got really good at preparing platoons and companies to conduct raids and operate checkpoints, but little worked behind them. It is telling that today, the best forces in Afghanistan are the special-forces commandos, small teams that perform courageously and magnificently—but despite a supporting institution, not because of one.
If those were things we did poorly or insufficiently, there were other things we should not have done at all—namely, train police. We generally accepted that our ultimate goal of combatting insurgents or terrorists was to turn the fight over to domestic law enforcement. In other words, get to the point where the police could handle threats without fielding the army. (I remember, in Iraq, 2006 was supposed to be the “Year of the Police.” It would be hilarious if not for the incredible cost in blood and treasure—that year was a terrible and deadly one for police across Iraq.) But the United States does not have a national police force, so police training became a task that largely fell to the Army. In Iraq, I oversaw thousands of police, and in Afghanistan, I led a task force that vetted, selected, and fielded nearly 3,000 local police while supporting the Afghan National Police with warrant-based targeting of insurgents. I should make clear that I have zero law-enforcement experience, nor does most of the U.S. military, aside from some National Guard or Reserve troops. (We do have Military Police units, but they serve a unique operational role unlike any of the security forces we tried to build up.) We attempted to bridge this gap by hiring a handful of brave retired police officers and having them serve as technical advisers and trainers alongside U.S. Army troops, but even they could only focus on tactical tasks; they lacked the professional and personal experience to build national institutions and systems. We never had a chance to make policing work. The U.S. military could not overcome our national and institutional lack of experience.
Looking back, we also failed to properly institutionalize advising large-scale conventional forces until far too late. No one was encouraged to take on these duties, either: To keep moving up, officers such as myself had to rotate through “normal” command assignments as well. The Army tried to change the wording of promotion and selection boards, but the bureaucracy resisted; when we finally formally created Security Force Assistance Brigades in 2018, it was telling that none of the new outfit’s first key leaders had ever cut their teeth on these adviser teams.
Over these past 20 years, there have been many failings. We checked the box when it came to saying that we had trained our partners, spun a rosy narrative of progress, and perhaps prioritized the safety and well-being of our troops over the mission of buttressing partner capacity. (When our Afghan partners shot at us, killing our comrades in the now infamous “green on blue” incidents, we tightened up our security procedures but didn’t address the hard questions of why they were shooting at us in the first place.) We didn’t send the right people, prepare them well, or reward them afterward. We rotated strangers on tours of up to a year and expected them to build relationships, then replaced them. We were overly optimistic and largely made things up as we went along. We didn’t like oversight or tough questions from Washington, and no one really bothered to hold us accountable anyway. We had no capacity or experience with some of our tasks, and we stumbled.
Yet these failings—egregious as they were—make it easy to focus on the armed forces as a scapegoat. In fact, the military, our allies, and our Iraqi and Afghan partners were responding to a lack of coherent policy and strategy.
We invaded Afghanistan with righteous anger after 9/11, but then what? Why was the United States in Afghanistan for years afterward? What about our fraught relationship with Pakistan and its influence in Afghanistan? A coherent strategy to address these questions would have made my job easier on the ground. First and foremost, a clearly articulated end goal would have assured our Afghan partners and our allies from other nations (as well as our foes) of our determination. Instead of leaving the entire effort to the Department of Defense, a coordinated strategy with commensurate resources across government could have produced better results in multiple Afghan institutions. Further, 20 years ago, a commitment to law enforcement might have been very attractive to our allies, many of whom have their own national police force and a track record of success in performing such missions. Perhaps most crucial, a clear and forceful foreign policy regarding Pakistan, coupled with a commitment to supporting and employing a new Afghan army, would have provided much clarity and focus for our military.
We didn’t fight a 20-year war in Afghanistan; we fought 20 incoherent wars, one year at a time, without a sense of direction. The U.S. military can and should be blamed for the collapse of security forces in Afghanistan—I hold us responsible. The current collapse keeps me up at night. In the military, the main effort gets the best resources and the best talent available. For more than 20 years, no matter what was reported, what we read in the headlines, efforts to build and train large-scale conventional security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq have mostly been an aimless, ham-fisted acronym soup of trial and error that never became the true main effort, and we are to blame for that.
But we are not the only ones responsible. Someday we will ask young men and women to do this again—to fight a war overseas, to partner with local forces, to train them and build them up. Before we do, we owe it to those young people to ask the tough questions of how, and why, we all failed.
Mike Jason retired in 2019 as a U.S. Army colonel, after 24 years on active duty. He commanded combat units in Germany, Kosovo, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
3. Irregular Warfare: A Case Study in CIA and US Army Special Forces Operations in Northern Iraq, 2002-03
Irregular Warfare: A Case Study in CIA and US Army Special Forces Operations in Northern Iraq, 2002-03
August 12, 2021
Summary
Irregular warfare (IW) is increasingly common in the 21st century and the U.S. must learn from its successful experiences with it and apply those lessons to great power competition. For the past two decades the CIA and Army Special Forces have demonstrated how to leverage interagency relationships and apply complementary capabilities to achieve successful IW outcomes. The CIA/Army Special Forces partnership in Northern Iraq during the invasion of Iraq demonstrates the value of this interagency team and provides lessons and a model for the conduct of IW in the future.
4. U.S.-Australia-India-Japan Consultations (the “Quad”) Senior Officials Meeting
U.S.-Australia-India-Japan Consultations (the “Quad”) Senior Officials Meeting - United States Department of State
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Media Note
August 12, 2021
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Senior officials from the United States, Australia, India, and Japan met virtually as part of regular Quad consultations to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific region. This meeting seeks to build on and implement the historic discussions held between President Biden, Prime Minister Morrison, Prime Minister Modi, and Prime Minister Suga during the inaugural Quad Leaders’ Summit on March 12, 2021.
The four democracies acknowledged that global security and prosperity depends on the region remaining inclusive, resilient, and healthy. They discussed the importance of sustained international cooperation to end the COVID-19 pandemic in the Indo-Pacific and to promote economic recovery. The officials examined ways to advance ongoing cooperation on numerous topics of mutual interest, including strategic challenges confronting the region, countering disinformation, promoting democracy and human rights, strengthening international institutions including the United Nations and related organizations, and supporting countries vulnerable to coercive actions in the Indo-Pacific region.
The senior officials discussed the importance of peace and security in the Taiwan Strait, the ongoing crisis in Burma, and reaffirmed the Quad’s strong support for ASEAN centrality and the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific. They welcomed the opportunity to continue regular consultations at the ministerial, senior official, and working levels and to hold a second Leaders’ Summit this fall.
5. Security Alert: U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan
Security Alert: U.S. Embassy Kabul, Afghanistan | U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan
Location: Throughout Afghanistan
The U.S. Embassy urges U.S. citizens to leave Afghanistan immediately using available commercial flight options. If you cannot afford to purchase an airline ticket at this time, please contact the U.S. Embassy at KabulACS@state.gov for information regarding a repatriation loan. If you are a U.S. citizen and delaying your departure while you await an immigrant visa for a spouse or minor child, please contact us immediately. Given the security conditions and reduced staffing, the Embassy’s ability to assist U.S. citizens in Afghanistan is extremely limited even within Kabul. Please review, “What the Department of State Can and Can’t Do in a Crisis.”
The U.S. Embassy reminds U.S. citizens that on April 27, 2021, the Department of State ordered the departure from U.S. Embassy Kabul of U.S. government employees whose functions can be performed elsewhere due to increasing violence and threat reports in Kabul. The Travel Advisory for Afghanistan remains Level 4-Do Not Travel due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, armed conflict, and COVID-19. Domestic flights and ground transportation routes outside of Kabul are severely limited and subject to cancellation or closure.
U.S. citizens should enroll in the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) to receive security updates and ensure the Embassy can contact you in an emergency. In the event of a future official evacuation flight, the Embassy would notify U.S. citizens enrolled in STEP of available assistance. However, the Embassy reiterates that U.S. citizens should leave Afghanistan as soon as possible using available commercial transportation and not plan to rely on U.S. government flights.
Actions to take:
Assistance:
6. It might still be possible to save Afghanistan
Conclusion:
If it is really left to fend for itself, the government will indeed collapse. But America might yet be able to stave that off without reinstating a permanent garrison. It could deploy special forces on brief sorties to bolster the Afghan army, for instance. It could expand the use of carriers to provide air support, or lean on neighbouring countries to allow at least temporary access to American aircraft. Above all, Mr Biden could signal that he does not intend to abandon Afghanistan to its fate—an impression that is doing more than anything else to hasten the Taliban’s advance. Over the past 20 years America has not managed to turn Afghanistan into a flourishing democracy, but it can still stop it from reverting to a violent theocracy.
It might still be possible to save Afghanistan
But America is refusing to try
Aug 11th 2021
“A NEGATIVE outcome, a Taliban automatic military takeover, is not a foregone conclusion,” Mark Milley, America’s most senior soldier, intoned last month while reiterating America’s support for the embattled Afghan government. General Milley is right: such a takeover is not quite inevitable, despite the departure of American troops. But it is growing ever more likely by the day—in large part because America, whatever its generals say, is doing too little to help.
Ideally, America would not be withdrawing its forces at all. For several years, with only a few thousand troops who sustained few casualties, it had managed to maintain a stalemate between the Afghan government and the Taliban, thanks largely to air power. Yet last year, when Donald Trump was president, America struck a deal with the Taliban. In exchange for a promise from the militants not to harbour international terrorists, it undertook to withdraw from Afghanistan completely. Never mind that the insurgents refused any kind of ceasefire; never mind that they offered nothing more than indirect negotiations with the American-backed government in Kabul; Mr Trump wanted a quick end to the 20-year deployment, and President Joe Biden has stuck by that callous decision.
America’s rush for the exit has allowed the Taliban to drop the pretence of negotiations and redouble their campaign to remove the government by force. The insurgents did not control any of the 34 provincial capitals last week. They have since seized nine. Three of the country’s biggest cities, Herat, Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, are under attack. America no longer has any military aircraft based in Afghanistan able to repel such assaults. Instead, it is dispatching them from distant bases in the Gulf and carriers in the Arabian Sea—a much less effective arrangement. And many of the mechanics who were helping maintain the Afghan air force’s planes have left with the Americans, further reducing the government’s firepower.
That has led to a rout which, if it continues, will be a disaster. When the Taliban last ran the country, in the 1990s, they kept girls out of school, confined women to their homes and beat anyone who listened to music or wore the wrong clothes. They have not changed much since then. In areas they now control, they are murdering civil servants and NGO workers, and ordering families to hand over single women to “marry” their troops.
A revived Taliban emirate will not just abuse Afghans; it will spread misery around the region. Afghanistan is already the world’s biggest producer of heroin, a business the Taliban happily tax. It also exports millions of refugees, especially to neighbouring Pakistan and Iran. Extremist violence is another export. An offshoot of the Taliban killed tens of thousands of Pakistanis during a bloody terrorist campaign that took years to quell. America’s humiliation may be pleasing to some in the region, but the pleasure will be short-lived.
Yet instead of joining forces to curb the Taliban, regional powers are bickering and jostling for advantage. And instead of finding ways to help the Afghan government, America is backing away fast. On August 10th Mr Biden declared in effect that it was up to the Afghan army to fight for itself.
If it is really left to fend for itself, the government will indeed collapse. But America might yet be able to stave that off without reinstating a permanent garrison. It could deploy special forces on brief sorties to bolster the Afghan army, for instance. It could expand the use of carriers to provide air support, or lean on neighbouring countries to allow at least temporary access to American aircraft. Above all, Mr Biden could signal that he does not intend to abandon Afghanistan to its fate—an impression that is doing more than anything else to hasten the Taliban’s advance. Over the past 20 years America has not managed to turn Afghanistan into a flourishing democracy, but it can still stop it from reverting to a violent theocracy. ■
7. How Has the Terrorism Threat Changed Twenty Years After 9/11?
Excerpts:
What are the main terrorist threats to the United States today, and what lessons does the 9/11 response provide for combating them?
Sadly, the terrorist threat to the United States has shifted from a mostly external one—which it was for nearly two decades after 9/11—to an internal one, as the Capitol Hill riots of January 6, 2021, highlighted. But the ongoing threats posed by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have not disappeared.
However, the bitter partisan divisions that exist in the United States today could undermine the implementation of a coherent counterterrorism strategy. The unity, common purpose, and shared destiny that drew the country together after the 9/11 attacks no longer exist. In contrast, the current climate of political polarization could effectively paralyze the government in preparing for the next generation of threats.
How Has the Terrorism Threat Changed Twenty Years After 9/11?
The U.S. counterterrorism response to the September 11, 2001, attacks yielded some remarkable successes and disastrous failures in hunting al-Qaeda. The top terrorist threat today, though, is domestic rather than foreign.
How do al-Qaeda and its affiliates currently pose a threat to the United States and the rest of the world?
The al-Qaeda of today is nothing like it was on 9/11. Its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, is long dead. With the notable exceptions of Ayman al-Zawahiri, a surgeon turned terrorist and the movement’s current emir, and Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian army officer and al-Zawahiri’s most likely successor, every single senior al-Qaeda leader has been killed or captured. Seven of the movement’s top commanders have been eliminated since 2019. Today, al-Zawahiri himself is said to be in poor health.
But the ideology and motivation espoused by al-Qaeda is, unfortunately, as strong as ever. For instance, there are now four times as many Salafi-jihadi terrorist groups designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations than there were on 9/11. And the most recent report from the United Nations’ monitoring team [PDF] points to al-Qaeda’s unimpeded growth in Africa, entrenchment in Syria, and presence in at least fifteen Afghan provinces, as well as its continued close relations with the Taliban.
Americans also shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that al-Qaeda no longer wishes to attack the United States. The 2019 attack by a Saudi sleeper agent at a U.S. Navy air base in Pensacola, Florida, which killed three people and wounded eight others, was a reminder that al-Qaeda is still able to mount international terrorist operations by working through one of its dedicated, highly capable franchises—in this case, its Arabian Peninsula affiliate.
What were the greatest successes and failures of the U.S. counterterrorism response of the past twenty years?
The number one success was the government’s thwarting al-Qaeda’s every attempt to carry out another attack in the United States on the scale of 9/11—although the 2019 Pensacola shooting was an important warning against becoming too complacent.
The worst failure—beyond any doubt—was the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which diverted critical resources away from efforts to finish al-Qaeda off in South Asia during the best window of opportunity. The invasion also inadvertently set off the chain of events that led to the emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, an even more violent and unconstrained version of al-Qaeda. It took an eighty-three-country coalition some five years to defeat the threat posed by the Islamic State.
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During that period, the Islamic State executed and inspired deadly attacks on civilian targets in cities including Brussels, Nice, New York City, and Paris. The al-Qaeda splinter group also conducted the first successful terrorist attack in over a decade against a commercial aviation target, killing 259 people flying from Egypt to Russia. It also changed the nature of modern terrorism by pioneering the use of social media for recruitment, propaganda, and to encourage totally independent, lone-wolf attacks.
In the worst category, it must also be said that in the course of responding to the events of 9/11 and in seeking to defend the country from further attacks, the U.S. government abased some core American values and principles of justice. For instance, imprisoning people for decades without trial is something that the United States has always criticized nondemocratic governments for. Yet, several dozen detainees remain at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, many held indefinitely without charge. Similarly, the detainee abuse that occurred there, at CIA black sites, and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq tarnished the United States’ reputation and generated worldwide condemnation.
The U.S. national security apparatus transformed significantly post-9/11. What were the most significant changes?
The vast counterterrorism bureaucracy created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was the biggest and most enduring change. For instance, a 2010 Washington Post investigation revealed the existence of a vast counterterrorism archipelago of some 1,271 government entities and 1,931 private companies focused on counterterrorism. The war on terrorism also entailed increasing the number of people with top-secret security clearances to an estimated 854,000 and constructing more offices and secured facilities to accommodate them—an expansion equal to “almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.”
But in securing and protecting any country from terrorist attack, a perennial question is how much is enough. As the above data implies, the United States potentially overreacted to the 9/11 attacks by creating redundancies or granting sweeping powers to various agencies. At the same time, it is indisputable that U.S. counterterrorism measures have succeeded in preventing anything like 9/11 from occurring again. The challenge going forward, especially at a time of competing national security challenges and diminished fiscal resources, is finding and maintaining a prudent balance in guarding against the terrorist threat while attending to other, perhaps more pressing security priorities.
What are the main terrorist threats to the United States today, and what lessons does the 9/11 response provide for combating them?
Sadly, the terrorist threat to the United States has shifted from a mostly external one—which it was for nearly two decades after 9/11—to an internal one, as the Capitol Hill riots of January 6, 2021, highlighted. But the ongoing threats posed by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda have not disappeared.
However, the bitter partisan divisions that exist in the United States today could undermine the implementation of a coherent counterterrorism strategy. The unity, common purpose, and shared destiny that drew the country together after the 9/11 attacks no longer exist. In contrast, the current climate of political polarization could effectively paralyze the government in preparing for the next generation of threats.
8. Coffee Jolt Gets Pricier as Costs of Beans, Labor, Transport Rise
Now this is a national security issue.
Coffee Jolt Gets Pricier as Costs of Beans, Labor, Transport Rise
Cafes and retailers lift prices, while others try to hold the line; ’Consumers will be looking for more affordable options’
Coffee roasters and cafe operators are responding to poor harvests in major coffee-growing regions and logistics snarls that executives said have constrained bean supplies, delayed shipments and boosted costs. Companies are also raising wages to recruit and retain workers.
FairWave Holdings LLC, a Kansas City company that operates 20 cafes and sells packaged coffee, has raised menu prices and slowed hiring in response to escalating costs, executives said.
“In my 35-plus years of experience, this is one of the most rapidly rising cost environments that I’ve seen,” Dan Trott, the company’s chief executive said.
A worker dries coffee beans in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, where cold weather is hurting crop yield.
Photo: Igor Do Vale/Zuma Press
Nestlé, which produces Nescafé instant coffee as well as Starbucks-branded packaged coffee, said that while it has hedged coffee costs, it may raise prices as supply-chain costs are set to have a bigger impact in the second half of the year. NuZee Inc., a specialty coffee company that focuses on co-packing single-serve coffee, said it has enough coffee to last until the next quarter, but expects to pay higher prices once that inventory runs out
J.M. Smucker Co. , which owns Folgers and produces Dunkin’ ground coffee, said it is trying to trim costs in its supply chain and has raised prices too. “We are seeing inflationary costs impacting the entire fiscal year,” said Tucker Marshall, the company’s chief financial officer, on a June conference call.
In addition to coffee, Americans are paying more for many things—including hotel stays, other groceries and gasoline—as the economy rebounds from Covid-19’s impact over the past year. Companies are facing higher costs for labor, commodities and shipping, and they are passing them on to consumers in many cases. Consumer prices rose 5.4% in July from a year earlier, the same pace as in June, the highest 12-month rate since 2008, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
Coffee shops face escalating prices for beans, labor and other expenses.
Photo: Emilie Richardson/Bloomberg News
Supermarket sales of coffee have stayed high even as consumers go out more. Retail sales of coffee jumped from roughly $10 billion in 2019 to around $11 billion in 2020, according to market research firm IRI, and totaled almost $11 billion for the 52-week period ended July 11, the firm estimated. After major coffee chains’ sales dropped to about $30 billion in 2020 from around $34 billion in 2019, sales this year are on pace to approach 2019 levels, according to data from food-service consulting firm Technomic Inc.
Some coffee companies hope to take advantage of inflation to attract new customers. David Kovalevski, chief executive of instant coffee company Waka Coffee, said the coffee beans he buys from India and Colombia have gone up in price. Waka is trying to purchase coffee and other raw materials in bulk to negotiate lower prices and minimize freight costs, Mr. Kovalevski said.
Despite inflationary pressures, Waka hasn’t increased prices. Instead, Mr. Kovalevski said he hopes to lower prices and offer a cheaper alternative to other companies’ brews. “Consumers will be looking for more affordable options,” he said.
Defensive strategies have helped insulate some major buyers from rising coffee costs. Executives of Starbucks said last month that the company has more than one year’s worth of coffee on hand, with favorable prices locked in. JDE Peet’s NV, an Amsterdam-based coffee supplier, has hedged its own supplies this year, CEO Fabien Simon said last week.
Starbucks executives said the Seattle-based chain plans to promote premium beverages such as cold coffee to help compensate, and could lift prices in some areas, as the company faces higher labor and supply costs.
In Flushing, Mich., coffee shop chain Coffee Beanery has shielded itself from rising coffee prices by purchasing its supplies in advance, said Laurie Shaw, the company’s chief operating officer. But rising shipping and labor costs led the company to increase prices by an average of around 7%. As coffee costs have risen further, the company is considering another 10% increase, Ms. Shaw said.
Coffee companies say customers have been understanding of price increases because they are seeing higher costs everywhere.
Lisa Bee, chief executive of cafe chain Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, said that because buying a cup of coffee tends to be a minor expense, her customers haven’t minded the price hike. Sweetwaters sells specialty coffee and recently increased its prices by around 5% to 10%.
“Even if there is a 10%, 15%, even 20% increase, you’re not talking about a lot,” she said.
Corrections & Amplifications
NuZee Inc., a coffee co-packer, doesn’t work with Caribou Coffee. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that NuZee works with Caribou, and a photo caption incorrectly said that Caribou faced higher coffee prices once NuZee’s coffee inventory ran out. (Corrected on August 12, 2021)
9. Peraton Receives Nearly $1B Award to Provide U.S. Government with Insight, Expertise, and Influence to Advance National Security Objectives
$1 Billion for CENTCOM influence operations? What about EUCOM for Russia and INDOPACOM for China?
Or why do we not have organic resources within the military?
And then given Russia and China's global information operations (and their operations in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia) how are the CENTCOM activities synchronized with the other combatant commands as well as with State's Global Engagement Center (GEC)
And I learned a new acronym today: operational planning, implementation, and assessment services (OPIAS)
Peraton Receives Nearly $1B Award to Provide U.S. Government with Insight, Expertise, and Influence to Advance National Security Objectives
CHANTILLY, Va., Aug. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Peraton has been awarded a nearly $1 billion task order (TO) to provide the Department of Defense (DoD), U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) and its mission partners with operational planning, implementation, and assessment services (OPIAS) to achieve operational advantages in the information space and to counter threats to U.S. national security. The TO is worth up to $979 million over a five-year period.
Under OPIAS, Peraton will increase the ability of USCENTCOM and its mission partners to coordinate, collaborate, and fuse information related capabilities (IRC), and information operations (IO) through effective messaging. Peraton will also drive innovation to boost IO capabilities, helping the U.S. extend its competitive advantage to achieve national security objectives.
“Peraton is committed to successfully enhancing the information operations function of USCENTCOM and its mission partners,” said Tom Afferton, president, Cyber Mission sector. “Since 2016, Peraton has executed campaigns to promote regional security and stability. Our ability to provide the U.S. government with insight, expertise, and influence helps ensure the safety of Americans, our allies, and the more than 550 million people under USCENTCOM area of responsibility, spanning three continents and 20 nations.”
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“We are proud to continue our critical work advancing U.S. national security interests,” said Afferton. “OPIAS is another example of how Peraton is supporting our customers in accelerating the integration of cyber operations and information operations.”
Peraton has supported this work since 2016 under USCENTCOM’s Counter Threat Messaging Support Program (CTMSP). OPIAS represents a nearly 100 percent increase over the CTMSP TO in the work scheduled to be executed.
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About Peraton
Peraton drives missions of consequence spanning the globe and extending to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. As the world’s leading mission capability integrator and transformative enterprise IT provider, we deliver trusted and highly differentiated national security solutions and technologies that keep people safe and secure. Peraton serves as a valued partner to essential government agencies across the intelligence, space, cyber, defense, civilian, health, and state and local markets. Every day, our 22,000 employees do the can’t be done, solving the most daunting challenges facing our customers. Visit Peraton.com/News and follow Peraton on LinkedIn for news and updates.
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10. What Went Wrong With Afghanistan’s Defense Forces?
A sober assessment:
Military operations analyst Jonathan Schroden said, “What we have seen so far from the conventional parts of the ANDSF, not the commandos, is largely a lack of will and or ability to fight for very long.” The crux, Schroden said, was “if they don’t believe in what they are being asked to fight for or don’t want to, they are not going to.” He pointed out there is no penalty for desertion in Afghanistan, unlike in the United States.
What Went Wrong With Afghanistan’s Defense Forces?
Ten provincial capitals have fallen in a week, and Kabul is teetering.
Newly graduated Afghan National Army cadets march during their graduation ceremony at the Kabul Military Training Center in Kabul on Dec. 30, 2014. WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images
KABUL—Fighting forces dissolve in hot battle. The United States bombards insurgent positions to prevent the country from collapse. As the Taliban’s offensive risks becoming a rout, analysts and observers—as well as Afghans themselves—are asking, what went wrong with Afghanistan’s defense forces?
The United States and its allies have invested billions of dollars developing, arming and training Afghanistan’s Army, Air Force, Special Forces commandos and police. America alone has spent almost $83 billion on Afghanistan’s defense sector since 2001, when it led an invasion following the 9/11 attacks. NATO said it has donated more than $70 million in supplies to Afghanistan’s defense forces, including medical equipment and body armor, so far this year.
KABUL—Fighting forces dissolve in hot battle. The United States bombards insurgent positions to prevent the country from collapse. As the Taliban’s offensive risks becoming a rout, analysts and observers—as well as Afghans themselves—are asking, what went wrong with Afghanistan’s defense forces?
The United States and its allies have invested billions of dollars developing, arming and training Afghanistan’s Army, Air Force, Special Forces commandos and police. America alone has spent almost $83 billion on Afghanistan’s defense sector since 2001, when it led an invasion following the 9/11 attacks. NATO said it has donated more than $70 million in supplies to Afghanistan’s defense forces, including medical equipment and body armor, so far this year.
Yet in the past week, 10 provincial capitals have fallen in Afghanistan. According to security and regional sources, four of those capitals were effectively handed to the insurgents by national forces that refused to put up a fight. Experts are now predicting the national capital, Kabul, will come under attack as soon as next month.
There should have been plenty of time for the U.S.-funded political and military leadership to develop a strategy to defend the country. After all, international combat missions ended in 2014, after which much of the fighting was led by the Afghans.
As the speed and ferocity of the Taliban advance attests, though, that didn’t happen. Experts told Foreign Policy the fault lies not in the training or equipment provided to Afghanistan. Nor is it endemic: The country has long produced good fighting men and the special forces are as good as any. The reasons for the monumental failure, these experts say, stem from the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. The Ministries of Defense and Interior are notoriously corrupt, and the experts also cite widespread ineptitude, lack of leadership, and self-interest.
For example, sources say the Afghan police—who are militarized and fight from front line bases—have not been paid for months by the Ministry of Interior. Other sources say the same is true for the Ministry of Defense, despite electronic payments systems meant to eliminate skimming. In many areas, soldiers and police are not supplied with adequate food, water, ammunition, or arms. Supply lines are pilfered, with arms, ammunition, and other equipment sold onto the black market, and much of it reaching the insurgency. Many soldiers and police are posted far from their homes, and abandon positions to return to defend their families and property.
A former senior official with the Afghan intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, said attrition rates from the country’s security services were around 5,000 per month, against recruitment of 300 to 500, a ratio he said was “unsustainable.”
Ghani himself is a micro-manager and displays a paranoia that has led to poor decision-making aimed at centralizing and consolidating his control, sources close to him say. Officials as high up as the ministers of defense and interior, as well as district governors and police chiefs, are removed and changed at an alarming rate and are rarely localized, with no knowledge or roots in the regions. Massive sums are embezzled and laundered to the detriment of civic services, health, education, and security. The appointment Wednesday of Gen. Sami Sadat, who has been leading the fightback in Helmand province, to head the Afghan Army’s special operations command, was widely welcomed as a long-overdue and sensible move.
The president and his closest advisers are referred to as the “three-man republic” of Ghani, his national security adviser Hamdullah Mohib, and the head of the presidential administrative office, Fazal Mahmood Fazli. All have spent long periods abroad and, like many senior bureaucrats, hold second passports. Some in the president’s circle are not fluent in either of Afghanistan’s two official languages, Dari and Pashtu.
“The issue of legitimacy is very important,” said Enayat Najafizada, founder of the Institute of War and Peace Studies, a Kabul-based think tank. He noted the presidential elections that returned Ghani for a second term in 2020 were tainted with corruption, a point well made by Taliban propagandists.
“Legitimacy comes from the ballot, but then you have to deliver or people will turn on you. And that has not been done for five or six years. There has been a disconnect between the government and the Afghan people,” said Najafizada. “Policies and strategies are extremely discriminatory, divisive and narrow-minded. Ghani claims to know this country very well. Maybe in theory, but in practice he is a failure.”
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Six more Afghan provinces fell over the weekend, and Kabul fears the “country will fall apart.”
Experts say Afghanistan’s forces have the capability but lack the will to fight. Across the country, soldiers, police, provincial and rural officials, and citizens have said they will not fight to defend the Ghani government. Those who do fight, including local militias, say they are defending their families and property, and safeguarding their children’s future as they cannot trust the government to do so.
That view—capability without willingness—was reflected in comments made Tuesday by White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who said the Biden administration believed the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) have “the equipment, numbers, and training to fight back.” Gaining ground, Psaki said, will strengthen their position in peace talks with the Taliban, which resumed in the Qatari capital, Doha, on Wednesday. No progress has been made in a year of meetings. Pentagon spokesman Jack Kirby said Tuesday the issue is “leadership.”
Military operations analyst Jonathan Schroden said, “What we have seen so far from the conventional parts of the ANDSF, not the commandos, is largely a lack of will and or ability to fight for very long.” The crux, Schroden said, was “if they don’t believe in what they are being asked to fight for or don’t want to, they are not going to.” He pointed out there is no penalty for desertion in Afghanistan, unlike in the United States.
“Not all army units or check points have vanished,” Schroden said. “Many have tried to defend but they are running out of food and ammunition. [They’re] calling for resupply, reinforcements, and [] air strikes, and not getting them at all in some cases. So then they have to run.”
Large swaths of territory have fallen to the Taliban since May as the insurgents’ strategy has isolated the country by closing border crossings and encircling provincial capitals. The capital of Samangan province, Aybak; Farah, capital of the province of the same name; Pul-i-Khumri, capital of Baghlan; and Faizabad, capital of Badakhshan which borders Tajikistan, Pakistan and China, all fell on Monday and Tuesday without a fight.
The Taliban entered Mazar-i-Sharif, capital of Balkh, on Sunday, and have been inside Herat city, capital of Herat province, for two weeks. The collapse of these cities would hand the north and west of the country to the insurgency, said Najafizada, the think tank founder. The capture of Kunduz in the north gives the insurgents a run down to Kabul.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump struck a bilateral deal with the Taliban in February 2020 to end 20 years of U.S. engagement by pledging the group to conditions, including no attacks on U.S. forces, cutting ties with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and a general reduction in violence. None of these conditions have been kept. Nevertheless, U.S. President Joe Biden stuck to the deal and has said all U.S. troops will be out by Aug. 31.
Weeda Mehran, a conflict specialist at the University of Exeter, said the departure of U.S. troops, especially their overnight disappearance from Bagram Airfield, which had been the hub of their operations in Afghanistan, had been a huge blow to security forces’ morale.
“Kabul has been rather vague in how it intends to manage the war and ward off the Taliban. This lack of clarity combined with political fragmentation has led to speculation and an absence of political will to fight the insurgency, particularly in the north and west, amongst majority non-Pashtun population,” Mehran said. “This inevitably reinforces the Taliban’s narrative of a powerful force with an imminent victory in Afghanistan.”
Lynne O’Donnell is an Australian journalist and author. She was the Afghanistan bureau chief for Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press between 2009 and 2017.
11. Blast from the past: Cold War artillery command in Germany resurrected and restructured
Two issues in this article:
The exonerated War College Commandant.
The reactivation of the unit that formerly employed the Perhings in Europe.
Are we trying to send a message (or was this simply a result of the keepers of the lineage who said this was the next unit in the order to be reactivated?). Will those employing active measures begin putting out messages about this bringing in nuclear weapons (or perhaps a "Pershing 3" ) to try to create US-German and US-European friction?
Blast from the past: Cold War artillery command in Germany resurrected and restructured
An M270A Multiple Launch Rocket System crew from the Germany-based 1st Battalion, 6th Field Artillery Regiment, 41st Field Artillery Brigade fires practice rounds at a training area in Estonia in September 2020. Maj. Gen. Stephen Maranian has been named head of the new 56th Artillery Command, which will have responsibilities throughout Europe. Joe Bush/U.S. Army (Maj. Joseph Bush)
STUTTGART, Germany — A two-star general will lead a new European theater command in Germany that will oversee efforts to coordinate artillery and other advanced weaponry focused on hitting more distant targets.
U.S. Army Europe and Africa said Thursday that the unit was expected to be activated in October and will be based at Mainz-Kastel, near the Army’s four-star headquarters in Wiesbaden.
Maj. Gen. Stephen J. Maranian will head the Army’s 56th Artillery Command, a unit that operated in Germany during the Cold War, when it was responsible for operating the nuclear-capable Pershing weapons systems.
Maranian, who now serves as commandant at the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, was reinstated in July after being suspended in February in connection with an accusation of inappropriate touching. Investigators determined that there was no probable cause for the charge.
The new command is the latest step forward for an Army mission in Europe that has expanded in recent years over concerns about a more aggressive Russia.
Maj. Gen. Stephen Maranian, the commandant of the U.S. Army War College, has been named the head of the new 56th Artillery Command, which will have responsibilities throughout Europe. During the Cold War, it was a nuclear-capable artillery unit in Germany. (U.S. Army)
In April, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced during a visit in Berlin that the Pentagon was launching a new theater fires command, which also would incorporate a new multi-domain task force designed to integrate intelligence, cyber, electronic warfare and space capabilities at the tactical level.
The decision was an indication that President Joe Biden was moving away from a plan by his predecessor, Donald Trump, to sharply reduce the number of troops in Germany. The Trump plan for moving 12,000 troops out of Germany has been put on hold by Biden while the Pentagon conducts a global force posture review.
The new artillery command headed by Maranian and the multi-domain task force, which will be led by a one-star general, add about 500 soldiers and 750 family members to U.S. Army Garrison Wiesbaden.
The addition of a two-star command in Europe follows the reestablishment of the three-star V Corps, which continues to take shape. A forward command post in Poland will help manage Army operations up and down NATO’s eastern flank.
Like V Corps, an Army staple in Europe during the Cold War, the 56th Artillery Command also traces its lineage to a time when some 200,000 U.S. soldiers were based in Europe. Today, USAREUR-AF has about 32,000 soldiers based on the Continent.
From the 1960s to around 1991, the 56th Artillery Command had rocket units at numerous bases in Germany and a headquarters in Schwaebisch Gmuend in Baden-Wurttemberg.
John Vandiver
12. John Rizzo, C.I.A. Lawyer Who Sanctioned Waterboarding, Dies at 73
John Rizzo, C.I.A. Lawyer Who Sanctioned Waterboarding, Dies at 73
He defended the agency’s treatment of suspected terrorists, but he was later more reflective about it than most of his colleagues.
John Rizzo, the Central Intelligence Agency’s acting general counsel, on his way into a House Intelligence Committee hearing in 2008 to answer questions about the destruction of C.I.A. interrogation videotapes in 2005.
By
Aug. 12, 2021Updated 3:30 p.m. ET
John Rizzo, the reflective but resolute Central Intelligence Agency lawyer who sanctioned the secret detention and torture of suspected Islamic militants after the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, and who approved drone strikes that targeted terrorists abroad but that were also blamed for killing and wounding countless civilians, died on Aug. 6 at his home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. He was 73.
The cause was apparently a heart attack, his son, James W. Rizzo, said.
Mr. Rizzo, a 34-year C.I.A. veteran, presumed from the beginning that the morality and legality of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, starvation and other techniques, euphemistically described as enhanced interrogation, would later be second-guessed.
Preventively, he insisted on first getting the Justice Department to stipulate formally that no American laws or foreign treaties would be violated by the techniques, and that no one working for the C.I.A. would be subject to prosecution. The stipulation concluded that only pain linked to organ failure would constitute illegal torture.
Mr. Rizzo later recalled that in early 2002, after Abu Zubaydah became the first high-level Al Qaeda operative to be captured, he left his office, strolled around C.I.A. headquarters smoking a cigar and pondered the possibility of a second terrorist attack after which Mr. Zubaydah would “gleefully tell our interrogators, ‘Yes, I knew all about them, and you didn’t get me to talk.’
“There would be hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans dead on the streets again,” he told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in 2014. “And in the post-mortem investigations, it would all come out that the C.I.A. considered these techniques but was too risk-averse to carry them out, and that I was the guy who stopped them.
“I couldn’t live with the possibility of that someday happening,” he said.
“Sure, I thought about the morality of it,” he said in an interview with The Hill in 2015. “But as I say, the times were such that what I thought would have been equally immoral is if we just unilaterally dismissed the possibility of undertaking a program that could have potentially saved thousands more American lives.”
Mr. Rizzo never ducked responsibility; he once said he was “the legal architect of the proposed list of techniques and played the lead role in obtaining legal approval for their use.” But the backlash against the use of those techniques cost him a promotion.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
While Mr. Rizzo unfailingly defended the C.I.A., he distinguished himself from most of his colleagues by second-guessing some of what went on under his watch, including the enduring physical and psychological impact of torture.
“In hindsight, that should have come to the fore,” he told The New York Times in 2016. “I don’t think the long-term effects were ever explored in any real depth.”
He told the PBS program “Frontline” in 2011: “To me, the more intriguing question — and, I think, unknowable question — is, Could the same information have been elicited without the use of these extraordinarily controversial techniques? And, as I say, I think that is ultimately unknowable.” (He did at one point acknowledge a former F.B.I. interrogator’s conclusion that the techniques had no effect on their subjects.)
Mr. Rizzo never ducked responsibility; he once said he was “the legal architect of the proposed list of techniques and played the lead role in obtaining legal approval for their use.”
But the backlash cost him a promotion. For seven years he had held the titles of deputy counsel and then acting general counsel. But when President George W. Bush sought to elevate him to general counsel, congressional opposition forced him to withdraw the nomination. Mr. Rizzo continued to serve as acting counsel until he retired in 2009.
To protect agency employees, Mr. Rizzo sought annual reassurance from the attorney general that the interrogation techniques “did not ‘shock the conscience’ or violate international treaty obligations or violate U.S. domestic law,” Bill Harlow, a former spokesman for the agency, said by email.
“When the attorney general declined to do so in the spring of 2004,” he added, “the agency promptly suspended the program.”
Hina Shamsi, director of the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed Mr. Rizzo’s nomination and also sued psychologists who had shaped the interrogation program, said in an email, “Instead of adhering to law and ethics, his actions shamefully subverted them in an effort to provide legal cover for the Agency’s illegal and immoral actions.”
General Michael V. Hayden, a former C.I.A. director, wrote on The Cipher Brief this week that “many an operations officer would tell you that John walked them back from some of their more creative approaches to intelligence challenges, but there were many more who proceeded with the confidence that John, and more importantly the law, had their back.”
John Anthony Rizzo was born on Oct. 6, 1947, in Boston to Arthur and Frances (McLaughlin) Rizzo.
He graduated from Brown University in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School in 1972. After working for the Customs Service, he joined the C.I.A. in 1976 after a Senate investigation into abuses in intelligence gathering. He was 28 and, by his admission, “too starry-eyed.”
When he retired, he received the agency’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal. He became a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and senior counsel at the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson.
In addition to his son, from his marriage to Priscilla Walton Layton, which ended in divorce, he is survived by a stepdaughter, Stephanie Breed Darga; two sisters, Maria Marolda and Nancy Rizzo; a granddaughter; and a step-grandson. His wife, Sharon (Knight) Rizzo, died in April.
In a 2014 book, Mr. Rizzo suggested that President George W. Bush had been unaware of the interrogation techniques until 2006.
But Daniel J. Jones, who was the chief investigator for a Senate study of the detention and interrogation program, said in an email, “This contradicts the C.I.A.’s official public position (true to this day) and Bush’s memoir, which Rizzo calls out for being inaccurate.”
“Rizzo wrote that he viewed Bush’s lie as ‘admirable,’ and evidence that Bush was a ‘stand-up guy,’” Mr. Jones said. “I think that says it all: Rizzo viewed defending the C.I.A., even if that included misleading Congress and the American people, as patriotic and admirable.”
Mr. Rizzo said suspected terrorists were detained at secret “black sites” overseas only because the Defense Department had refused to house them on military bases.
“We brainstormed,” he told The Times in 2014. “Do we put them on ships? We considered a deserted island. It was born out of necessity. It wasn’t some diabolical plot.”
Mr. Rizzo was upset that he had not been consulted before videotapes of the interrogations were destroyed in 2005. He acknowledged that some interrogation tactics were “sadistic and terrifying,” but he said, without elaborating, that “there was another technique so gruesome that the Justice Department later stopped short of approving it.” That technique was later identified as a mock execution.
Although Mr. Rizzo was the most visible defender of the interrogation program — a nattily-attired public face of the spy agency — he was more introspective about it than many of his colleagues.
“I know what the first paragraph of my obituary is going to read,” he told The Hill. “‘John Rizzo, lead counsel, legally approved the torture programs.’” He conceded, though, that “if I had chosen to, I could have stopped them before they started.”
Barring another major terror attack, he said, “I can’t see any administration ever going down the road of anything like the interrogation program.” He added, “If there is another attack, then I’m confident the political winds will once again shift, and C.I.A. will be told to stop being so risk averse.”
Matt Apuzzo contributed reporting.
13. The grand illusion: Hiding the truth about the Afghanistan war’s ‘conclusion’
This book is going to be a very powerful critique and history.
The grand illusion: Hiding the truth about the Afghanistan war’s ‘conclusion’
President Barack Obama had promised to end the war, so on Dec. 28, 2014, U.S. and NATO officials held a ceremony at their headquarters in Kabul to mark the occasion. A multinational color guard paraded around. Music played. A four-star general gave a speech and solemnly furled the green flag of the U.S.-led international force that had flown since the beginning of the conflict.
In a statement, Obama called the day “a milestone for our country” and said the United States was safer and more secure after 13 years of war.
“Thanks to the extraordinary sacrifices of our men and women in uniform, our combat mission in Afghanistan is ending and the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion,” he declared.
Army Gen. John Campbell, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces, also hailed the purported end of the “combat mission” and embellished some of its achievements. Since the start of the war, he asserted falsely, life expectancy for the average Afghan had increased by 21 years.
“You times that by about 35 million Afghans represented here in the country, that gives you 741 million years of life,” he added, crediting U.S., NATO and Afghan forces for what sounded like a remarkable improvement. (A federal audit later discredited the figures as based on spurious data; life expectancy for Afghans had actually increased by about seven years, not 21.)
But for such a historical day, the military ceremony seemed strange and underwhelming. Obama issued his statement from Hawaii while he relaxed on vacation. The event took place in a gymnasium, where several dozen people sat on folding chairs. There was little mention of the enemy, let alone an instrument of surrender. Nobody cheered.
In fact, the war was nowhere near a conclusion, “responsible” or otherwise, and U.S. troops would fight and die in combat in Afghanistan for many years to come. The baldfaced claims to the contrary ranked among the most egregious deceptions and lies that U.S. leaders spread during two decades of warfare.
Obama had scaled back military operations over the previous three years, but he failed to pull the United States out of the quagmire. At the time of the ceremony, about 10,800 U.S. troops remained, a decrease of almost 90 percent from the surge of forces that he had sent to Afghanistan in his first term. Obama promised to withdraw the rest of the troops by the end of 2016, coinciding with the end of his term in office, save for a residual force at the U.S. Embassy.
He knew most Americans had lost patience. Only 38 percent of the public said the war had been worth fighting, according to a December 2014 Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Yet the president faced countervailing pressures to stay put from the Pentagon and hawks in Congress. Obama had tried a similar staged approach to end the war in Iraq, where the U.S. military ceased combat operations in 2010 and exited entirely a year later. But those moves soon backfired.
In the absence of U.S. troops, the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda offshoot — swept through the country and seized several major cities as the U.S.-trained Iraqi army put up scant resistance.
Obama wanted to avoid the same fate in Afghanistan, but he needed to buy more time for U.S. forces to build up the shaky Afghan army so it would not collapse like the Iraqi forces had. He also wanted to create leverage for the government in Kabul to persuade the Taliban to negotiate an end to the conflict.
To make it all work, Obama conjured up an illusion. He and his administration unveiled a messaging campaign to make Americans think that U.S. troops still in Afghanistan would stay out of the fight, with duties that relegated them to the sidelines.
This account is adapted from “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War,” a Washington Post book, which will be published Aug. 31 by Simon & Schuster. A narrative history of what went wrong in Afghanistan, the book is based on interviews with more than 1,000 people who played direct roles in the war, as well as thousands of pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
As the flag came down during the December 2014 ceremony in Kabul, Obama’s commanders emphasized that the Afghan army and police would take full responsibility for their country’s security from that point forward, with U.S. and NATO forces restricted to “noncombat” roles as trainers and advisers.
But the Pentagon carved out numerous exceptions that, in practice, made the distinctions almost meaningless. In the skies, U.S. fighters, bombers, helicopters and drones continued to fly air combat missions against Taliban forces. In 2015 and 2016, the U.S. military launched missiles and bombs on 2,284 occasions, a decline from previous years but still an average of more than three times a day.
On the ground, the Pentagon created another combat exception for troops carrying out “counterterrorism operations,” or raids on specific targets. Those rules of engagement permitted Special Operations forces to capture or kill members of al-Qaeda and “associated forces,” a vague term that could also apply to the Taliban or other insurgents.
The rules also allowed U.S. troops to come to the aid of Afghan forces to prevent the fall of a major city or in other circumstances. In other words, the U.S. military would continue to play an indispensable role and remain in the fight.
Still, after 13 years of lackluster results, many U.S. leaders harbored doubts about what they had really accomplished and whether Obama’s new approach could work any better than his previous one had.
An unnamed senior U.S. official who served as a civilian in Afghanistan told government interviewers it was fast becoming obvious that Obama’s surge strategy between 2009 and 2011 had been a mistake. Instead of flooding the country with 100,000 U.S. troops for 18 months, he said, it would have been better to send one-tenth the number — but leave them in Afghanistan until 2030.
“You can create stability with boots and money, but the question is, will it hold when you leave?” he said. “Given our desire to ramp up quickly and leave quickly, there was no reasonable threshold we could reach where we could leave behind good governance.”
To maintain the “end of combat” fantasy for Americans at home, the Pentagon continued to deliver upbeat reports from the front.
In February 2015, Ashton B. Carter, Obama’s fourth defense secretary, visited Afghanistan and repeated some of the same Pollyannaish lines that his predecessors had recited since the start of the war.
“A lot has changed here, so much of it for the better,” Carter said in Kabul at a news conference with Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan president. “Our priority now is to make sure this progress sticks.”
But during a stop at Kandahar Airfield, Carter briefly wandered off script and admitted that the Afghans had been inept until recently — contradicting the glossy assessments U.S. officials had presented to the public for more than a decade.
“It’s not that the Afghans aren’t good at fighting. They are. But just a few years ago there really was no Afghan National Security Force at all,” he said. “They’re getting on their feet now, and they’re beginning to do the things alone that we used to do for them.”
For a few months, the Obama administration’s tenuous plans seemed to hold. News from Afghanistan quieted down, and U.S. troops stayed out of the spotlight. But as the Afghan security forces labored to hold their own against the Taliban, Americans resumed paying with their lives.
In April 2015, Spec. John Dawson, a 22-year-old Army medic from the village of Whitinsville, Mass., died in an insider attack in Jalalabad. An Afghan soldier opened fire on coalition troops at a government compound, killing Dawson and wounding eight others.
Two months later, Krissie Davis, a 54-year-old civilian with the Defense Logistics Agency, died in a rocket attack on Bagram air base.
In August, 1st Sgt. Andrew McKenna, a 35-year-old Green Beret on his fifth deployment to Afghanistan, was killed in a firefight when Taliban fighters attacked a Special Operations camp in Kabul.
The insurgents blew their way past the gate with a car bomb, killed eight Afghan guards and critically wounded another U.S. soldier. McKenna was posthumously awarded the Silver Star — the military’s third-highest decoration for valor in combat — for helping to repel the attack while he was mortally wounded.
Nineteen days later, Air Force Capt. Matthew Roland, 27, and Staff Sgt. Forrest Sibley, 31, were killed in another insider attack at an Afghan police checkpoint in Helmand province. Roland was posthumously awarded the Silver Star for sacrificing his life to save other Special Operations forces in the ambush.
In late September, the illusion that U.S. troops were no longer serving in combat disappeared entirely.
After a long siege, insurgent forces seized Kunduz, Afghanistan’s sixth biggest city, about 200 miles north of Kabul. The fall of Kunduz shocked the country; it was the first time since 2001 that the Taliban controlled a major urban area. U.S. Special Forces teams rushed to Kunduz to help the Afghan army retake the city over several days of heavy fighting.
In the early-morning darkness of Oct. 3, 2015, a U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunship — with the call sign “Hammer” — repeatedly strafed a Kunduz hospital with cannon fire, killing 42 people. The hospital was run by the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders. In an attempt to safeguard the trauma center, the group had provided U.S. and Afghan forces with the GPS coordinates of the site several days earlier, so there was no excuse for the attack.
Obama and other U.S. officials apologized for the catastrophe. A U.S. military investigation subsequently blamed the “fog of war,” human error and equipment failures for what it called the “unintentional” destruction of the hospital. The Pentagon said 16 U.S. service members received administrative punishments for their role in the attack. None faced criminal charges.
But instead of curtailing U.S. military operations, Obama dug in deeper. Twelve days after the Kunduz debacle, he ordered a halt to the slow withdrawal of U.S. troops and extended their mission indefinitely to prevent the Taliban from overrunning more cities.
Breaking his promise to end the war, he said at least 5,500 troops would remain in Afghanistan after he left office in January 2017.
“I do not support the idea of endless war, and I have repeatedly argued against marching into open-ended military conflicts,” Obama announced from the Roosevelt Room in the White House. “Yet given what’s at stake in Afghanistan . . . I am firmly convinced that we should make this extra effort.”
Despite the enormous advantages that the Afghan military held in numbers, equipment and training, U.S. officials feared their allies would lose to the Taliban if the Americans left the battlefield. In a fleeting moment of candor, Obama conceded that “Afghan forces are still not as strong as they need to be.”
Yet to make the endless war more palatable to the public, Obama perpetuated the fiction that U.S. troops were only bystanders in the fight.
In his remarks from the Roosevelt Room, he again insisted the combat mission was “over,” though he qualified his statement slightly by specifying that Americans were not engaged in “major ground combat against the Taliban.”
To the troops, the distinction made no difference. To them, Afghanistan was a combat zone. They all carried weapons. They all earned combat pay. They were awarded combat decorations. More would die.
As 2015 drew to a close, the insurgency gained power and U.S. military leaders began to reveal some flashes of pessimism.
During a return visit to Afghanistan in December, Carter damned the Afghan security forces with faint praise. In remarks to U.S. troops at a base near Jalalabad, he said the Afghan army and police “are getting there” but suggested he had limited confidence in the Pentagon’s proxy force.
“If you’d have asked me to bet on it five years ago, I don’t know. I’d maybe give you even odds on it or something,” he said. “But it’s coming together.”
Three days later, on Dec. 21, a suicide bomber carrying explosives on a motorcycle killed six U.S. Air Force security personnel on foot patrol near Bagram. Among the fatalities: Maj. Adrianna Vorderbruggen, 36, an Air Force Academy graduate who had pushed for the 2011 repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” prohibition on openly gay service members.
Vorderbruggen was posthumously awarded three combat decorations: the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart and the Air Force Combat Action Medal. She left behind her wife, Heather, a military veteran, and their 4-year-old son, Jacob.
As the war entered its 15th year, the United States faced a new combatant in Afghanistan and the old fault lines began to shift.
The Islamic State, the fast-growing terrorist network in Iraq and Syria, expanded into Afghanistan. By early 2016, U.S. military officials estimated, the local affiliate of the group had between 1,000 and 3,000 fighters, mostly former members of the Taliban.
Their emergence widened and complicated the war. In January 2016, the White House approved new rules of engagement authorizing the Pentagon to attack the Islamic State in Afghanistan. That led to a surge of airstrikes against the group, which centered its operations in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border.
At that point, the U.S. military acknowledged that its original nemesis in the war — al-Qaeda — had all but disappeared from Afghanistan.
“By themselves, we don’t think that they pose a real threat, a real significant threat to the government of Afghanistan,” Army Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, a spokesman for U.S. forces, told reporters in May 2016. He offered what he called a SWAG — a military acronym for “scientific wild-ass guess” — that about 100 to 300 al-Qaeda personnel maintained “some kind of presence” in Afghanistan.
Five years after the death of Osama bin Laden, his network barely registered in the fight.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon placed the Taliban into a nebulous new category. It was still a hostile force but not necessarily the enemy.
Obama administration officials had concluded that the only way to end the war and to stabilize Afghanistan was for the Afghan government to negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban.
Previous attempts to start a reconciliation process had gone nowhere. U.S. officials wanted to try again and decided to treat the Taliban differently in hopes of persuading its leaders to come to the table.
As a result, the Pentagon imposed new rules of engagement under which U.S. forces could freely attack the Islamic State and the remnants of al-Qaeda. But they could fight the Taliban only in self-defense or if the Afghan security forces were on the verge of getting wiped out.
Even U.S. lawmakers were confused by the new approach. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in February 2016, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) pushed Campbell to explain.
“Is the Taliban an enemy of this country?” Graham asked.
“I didn’t hear the question,” Campbell replied.
“Is the Taliban an enemy of the United States?” Graham repeated.
Campbell stammered. “The Taliban, as far as helping al-Qaeda, and Haqqani, and other insurgent groups, the Taliban has been responsible for—”
Graham interrupted and asked multiple times whether the U.S. military was permitted to go on the offense and attack Taliban forces or kill its senior leaders.
“Sir, again, I don’t go into the rules-of-engagement authorities in open hearing,” Campbell said, ducking the questions. “What I would tell you is that our country has made the decision that we are not at war with the Taliban.”
But the Taliban was still very much at war with the United States and the Afghan government, and as far as the Taliban’s leaders were concerned, the fight was going well.
In 2016, insurgent forces overran Kunduz again, repeatedly bombed Kabul and seized control of most of Helmand province, the heart of Afghanistan’s lucrative opium-poppy belt.
In Washington, fears rose that the Afghan government was at risk of a political breakdown. Calling the situation “precarious,” Obama reversed himself again in July 2016.
Instead of drawing down to 5,500 troops as planned, he ordered more U.S. forces to stay in Afghanistan. By the time he left the White House in January 2017, about 8,400 troops remained.
The next month, Army Gen. John Nicholson Jr., Campbell’s successor as commanding general, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Asked whether the United States was winning or losing, he replied, “I believe we’re in a stalemate.”
In his testimony, however, Nicholson foreshadowed what was in store under the new president, Donald Trump. “Offensive capability is what will break the stalemate in Afghanistan,” Nicholson said.
In military jargon, that meant more troops and more weapons.
14. U.S. Asks Taliban to Spare Its Embassy in Coming Fight for Kabul
The title is very troubling.
I think if we evacuate our embassy many other missions with withdraw as well.
Excerpts:
It is not clear, however, whether an evacuation would include all of the embassy’s foreign personnel along with American citizens, and the fate of Afghan employees who would all but certainly be targeted by the Taliban for aiding the United States is of acute concern to senior officials, according to several people familiar with the discussions.
Officials also said the Biden administration is concerned that an evacuation of the American Embassy could create a domino effect that accelerates the departure of other diplomatic missions and international support — and, in turn, leads to the collapse of the Afghan government.
“I am quite sure that no one in our Foreign Service who’s involved in this effort is advocating closing down the embassy and evacuating,” Mr. Rubin said.
While decisions about the embassy’s security are on the horizon, he said, “there’s no reason to think that there’s an imminent security threat to our people.”
“The first thing is, obviously, the mission, and the mission is changing,” Mr. Rubin said. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to propose to walk away.”
U.S. Asks Taliban to Spare Its Embassy in Coming Fight for Kabul
The demand seeks to stave off an evacuation of the embassy by dangling aid to future Afghan governments — even one that includes the Taliban.
Starting in April, the United States Embassy in Afghanistan began sending home nonessential employees as security became more untenable in Kabul.Credit...Reuters
By
Aug. 12, 2021Updated 6:55 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — American negotiators are trying to extract assurances from the Taliban that they will not attack the U.S. Embassy in Kabul if the extremist group takes over the country’s government and ever wants to receive foreign aid, three American officials said.
The effort, led by Zalmay Khalilzad, the chief American envoy in talks with the Taliban, seeks to stave off a full evacuation of the embassy as they rapidly seize cities across Afghanistan. On Thursday, the State Department announced it was sending home an unspecified number of the 1,400 Americans stationed at the embassy and drawing down to what the agency’s spokesman, Ned Price, described as a “core diplomatic presence” in Kabul.
American diplomats are now trying to determine how soon they may need to fully evacuate the embassy should the Taliban prove to be more bent on destruction than a détente.
“Let me be very clear about this: The embassy remains open,” Mr. Price said on Thursday. “And we plan to continue our diplomatic work in Afghanistan.”
Mr. Price said the heightened pace of the Taliban’s rout, leading to increased violence and instability across Afghanistan, was of “grave concern.”
“So given the situation on the ground, this is a prudent step,” he said.
Five current and former officials described the mood inside the embassy as increasingly tense and worried, and diplomats at the State Department’s headquarters in Washington noted a sense of depression at the specter of closing it, nearly 20 years after U.S. Marines reclaimed the burned-out building in December 2001.
Several people gloomily revived a comparison that all wanted to avoid: the fall of Saigon in 1975, when Americans stationed at the U.S. Embassy were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter.
The fears underscore what was unfathomable just a few years ago, when thousands of American forces were in Afghanistan and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul hosted one of the largest diplomatic staffs in the world.
Mr. Khalilzad is hoping to convince Taliban leaders that the embassy must remain open, and secure, if the group hopes to receive American financial aid and other assistance as part of a future Afghan government. The Taliban leadership has said it wants to be seen as a legitimate steward of the country, and is seeking relations with other global powers, including Russia and China, in part to receive economic support.
Two officials confirmed Mr. Khalilzad’s efforts, which have not been previously reported, on the condition of anonymity to discuss the delicate negotiations. A third official said on Thursday that the Taliban would forfeit any legitimacy — and, in turn, foreign aid — if it attacked Kabul or took over Afghanistan’s government by force.
Other governments are also warning the Taliban that they will not receive aid if they overrun the Afghan government, given the rampage its fighters have waged across the country in recent days. On Thursday, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of Germany said Berlin would not give the Taliban any financial support if they ultimately rule Afghanistan with a hard-line Islamic law.
In other posts around the world, U.S. diplomats said they were closely watching the perilous situation in Kabul to see how the State Department would balance its longstanding commitment to stabilizing Afghanistan against protecting the Americans who remain there as military forces withdraw.
Ronald E. Neumann, who was the American ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, described a push and pull between the Pentagon and the State Department in similar situations, given the military’s responsibility for carrying out evacuations and diplomats’ duty to maintain American assistance and influence even in danger zones.
“If the military goes too early, it may be unnecessary, and it may cost you a lot politically,” said Mr. Neumann, who is now the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy in Washington. “If the diplomats wait too late, it looks like Saigon off the roof or the departure from Mogadishu after everything was already lost, and it puts the military people at risk. So there’s no guaranteed right side.”
Another senior U.S. official expressed alarm this week at the fall of the provincial capitals across Afghanistan, and said that if other cities follow, particularly Mazar-i-Sharif, the only major northern city still under government control, the situation could disintegrate quickly.
Officials in Washington and Kabul said the embassy was holding regular meetings of an emergency action committee, which is set up in every American diplomatic post to assess whether or how soon an evacuation may be necessary. The content of the meetings is classified because, in part, they review intelligence about specific attack scenarios.
Afghan security personnel assessing the damage in Kabul last week after a Taliban attack on the home of the acting defense minister.Credit...Reuters
Spokespeople from the State Department headquarters in Washington and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul would not discuss how often the committee was meeting, but other officials said its members were holding discussions daily.
The committee can only make recommendations, and it would be up to the embassy’s top-ranking diplomat — in this case, Ross Wilson, the chargé d’affaires in Kabul — to order an evacuation after consulting with senior officials in Washington. On Thursday, Mr. Wilson warned the Taliban that “attempts to monopolize power through violence, fear and war will only lead to international isolation.”
Starting in April, the embassy began sending home nonessential employees as security became more untenable in Kabul. Other staff members have been allowed to leave, without penalty to their careers, if they feel in danger.
One diplomat said a number of what he described as small military elements have recently been brought in to reinforce the embassy, which is inside what is probably already the most hardened compound in Kabul’s international zone, where diplomatic missions and the Afghan government are based.
At the same time, officials said, fewer diplomats are rotating into Kabul to replace colleagues who have left to further cull the number of Americans posted there. That has raised concerns in the American diplomatic corps that the embassy would have trouble recruiting staff for years to come.
“It’s a wrenching time,” said Eric Rubin, the president of the union that represents career foreign service officers and who is a former ambassador to Bulgaria. He said about one-quarter of the current U.S. diplomatic corps have been posted to either Afghanistan or Iraq over the last 20 years and remain emotionally invested in the war zones in which they worked.
“There was a lot of sacrifice,” Mr. Rubin said. “Everyone who served there for the most part served without their families, and under difficult conditions; at times under mortar fire. So it wasn’t easy.”
As recently as last month, senior officials at the embassy in Kabul voiced confidence that personnel there could be evacuated quickly if necessary, noting a sufficient number of commercial flights leaving from the capital’s international airport every day could accommodate the compound’s staff.
It is not clear, however, whether an evacuation would include all of the embassy’s foreign personnel along with American citizens, and the fate of Afghan employees who would all but certainly be targeted by the Taliban for aiding the United States is of acute concern to senior officials, according to several people familiar with the discussions.
Officials also said the Biden administration is concerned that an evacuation of the American Embassy could create a domino effect that accelerates the departure of other diplomatic missions and international support — and, in turn, leads to the collapse of the Afghan government.
“I am quite sure that no one in our Foreign Service who’s involved in this effort is advocating closing down the embassy and evacuating,” Mr. Rubin said.
While decisions about the embassy’s security are on the horizon, he said, “there’s no reason to think that there’s an imminent security threat to our people.”
“The first thing is, obviously, the mission, and the mission is changing,” Mr. Rubin said. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to propose to walk away.”
Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington, and Thomas Gibbons-Neff from Kabul, Afghanistan.
15. WHO Expert Says Chinese Officials Pushed Investigators to Reject Lab-Leak Theory
Excerpts:
China has argued that the virus did not start within its borders and instead has peddled other theories that the virus may have originated elsewhere.
Beijing has worked hard to control the narrative surrounding the virus, punishing citizen journalists who spoke out against the government’s explanation of events. The government has also controlled all research in the country into the origins of the virus, according to the Associated Press.
Last month, the head of the WHO said it was “premature” to rule out the possibility that the novel coronavirus leaked from a laboratory.
The WHO is “asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic,” director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on July 15.
He said there had been a “premature push” to rule out a lab-leak as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
The lab-leak hypothesis has received renewed attention in recent months after President Biden ordered the U.S. intelligence community to assess the likelihood of a leak in May.
WHO Expert Says Chinese Officials Pushed Investigators to Reject Lab-Leak Theory
Members of the World Health Organization team tasked with investigating the origins of the coronavirus sit in a car at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China, February 3, 2021. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO food safety and animal diseases expert who led the organization’s investigation into the origins of the novel coronavirus, says in a new documentary that Chinese colleagues influenced the presentation of the team’s findings.
In The Virus Mystery, airing Thursday night on Danish television, Ben Embarek says Chinese researchers in the group fought against connecting the origins of the pandemic to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in a report detailing the investigation.
“In the beginning, they didn’t want anything about the lab [in the report], because it was impossible, so there was no need to waste time on that,” Ben Embarek said. “We insisted on including it, because it was part of the whole issue about where the virus originated.”
The team, which included experts from ten countries, released a report in March saying the virus was likely spread from an animal to humans, calling a theory that the virus was released in a lab accident “extremely unlikely.” The researchers said they would not recommend further investigation.
In the new documentary, Ben Embarek says a discussion of whether to include the lab-leak theory in the report at all lasted until two days before the conclusion of the mission.
He said ultimately his Chinese counterpart agreed to discuss the lab-leak theory in the report “on the condition we didn’t recommend any specific studies to further that hypothesis.”
The documentarians asked Ben Embarek whether the report’s use of the phrase “extremely unlikely” was required by the Chinese researchers.
Ben Embarek said “it was the category we chose to put it in at the end, yes.”
However, he noted that was meant to say that the theory was not likely, but not impossible.
He added that one possibility was that a lab employee could have accidentally brought the virus to Wuhan after collecting samples in the field, which would be both a lab-leak theory and a hypothesis of direct infection from a bat, which was described as “likely” in the report.
“A lab employee infected in the field while collecting samples in a bat cave — such a scenario belongs both as a lab-leak hypothesis and as our first hypothesis of direct infection from bat to human. We’ve seen that hypothesis as a likely hypothesis,” Ben Embarek said.
He also suggested in comments during the interview that were not included in the documentary that there could have been “human error,” though the Chinese political system does not allow authorities to admit that.
“It probably means there’s a human error behind such an event, and they’re not very happy to admit that,” Ben Embarek said, the Danish channel TV2 reported on its website.“The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect,” he added. “Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?”
Ben Embarek walked back his comments in a statement to the saying the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage.
A WHO spokesperson similarly said the comment was mistranslated and noted that the interview happened “months ago.”
“There are no new elements nor [a] change of the position [that] all hypothesis are on the table and WHO works with member states on the next step,” the spokesperson said.
Health experts the world over have said that the novel coronavirus likely originated in Wuhan, China in November 2019. Scientists in recent months have questioned whether the virus originated at a live animal market in Wuhan or was the result of a lab accident at one of the city’s two laboratories — the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control — that had been studying coronaviruses that originated in bats.
China has argued that the virus did not start within its borders and instead has peddled other theories that the virus may have originated elsewhere.
Beijing has worked hard to control the narrative surrounding the virus, punishing citizen journalists who spoke out against the government’s explanation of events. The government has also controlled all research in the country into the origins of the virus, according to the Associated Press.
Last month, the head of the WHO said it was “premature” to rule out the possibility that the novel coronavirus leaked from a laboratory.
The WHO is “asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic,” director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference on July 15.
He said there had been a “premature push” to rule out a lab-leak as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
The lab-leak hypothesis has received renewed attention in recent months after President Biden ordered the U.S. intelligence community to assess the likelihood of a leak in May.
16. Honorable discharge, retirement as colonel, OK’d for Green Beret charged with assault, kidnapping
The only thing I can make of this is the Army must have made this decision so that the family would at a minimum receive half the colonel's pension and will probably receive all of it while he is in jail if they remain married. But if they divorce she should be eligible for have his pension.
But this is of course generating a lot of comments on social media with the comment that sums up the mostly negative views of this being: "different spanks for different ranks." There is a strong feeling that he is receiving special treatment and that an enlisted soldier would not have received similar treatment.
Honorable discharge, retirement as colonel, OK’d for Green Beret charged with assault, kidnapping
The former commander of 1st Special Forces Group, who is facing assault and kidnapping charges after an armed standoff with police, will be honorably discharged, keeping retirement pay commensurate with his current rank, according to a July 2 memo.
The memo documenting Col. Owen G. Ray’s discharge status was included among court records filed with the Pierce County Superior Court in Washington state, near his duty station of Joint Base Lewis McChord.
“The Army Grade Determination Review Board has reviewed the Retirement in Lieu of Elimination, based on misconduct and moral or professional dereliction,” reads the memo signed by Michael T. Mahoney, a deputy assistant secretary of the Army. “I approve his Retirement in Lieu of Elimination, and he will be placed on the Retired List in his current grade of 0-6 (Colonel).”
The 47-year-old Ray will be allowed to retire Sept. 30 with a separation code of “RNC,” meaning “unacceptable conduct,” though his characterization of service will be noted as “honorable.”
Ray’s defense attorney, Jared E. Ausserer, confirmed the criminal case is set for trial in mid-September. Prosecutors are arguing that Ray should be sentenced to seven years in prison, which Ausserer said is excessive.
“[Prosecutors] have been unwilling to acknowledge that the PTSD components of Col. Ray’s service have any impact on this case whatsoever, and they’re treating him very differently than a civilian,” Ausserer said. “I have multiple clients who are charged with very similar conduct who are getting misdemeanors.”
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“They always say ‘see something; say something,’ but the Army has to do something too,” said the Green Beret officer who filed the complaint.
Ausserer stressed that Ray served several decades with no history of similar actions, adding that the military’s decision to honorably discharge his client reflects that. Army officials did not respond to requests for comment prior to this article’s deadline.
Ray was suspended from his last Army assignment as the chief of staff for I Corps after he was arrested and charged by Pierce County prosecutors with two counts of felony harassment, one count of kidnapping, two counts of assault and one count of reckless endangerment.
The charges stemmed from an incident on the night of Dec. 27. Court documents allege that Ray hit his wife multiple times, grabbed a pistol and rifle from his gun locker and threatened to kill police if they attempted to arrest him. Two children woke up and witnessed the event.
State and local police, who responded to a domestic assault in progress call at Ray’s home, spent roughly two hours talking the armed soldier into surrendering.
“The defendant outlined his extensive training in combat,” reads a probable cause affidavit from that night. “He told law enforcement he was a 25-year veteran and spent most of his time in the 1st group special forces. He stated that he had killed a lot of people and he had no problem killing law enforcement if they made attempts to arrest him. The defendant was calm, coherent and articulate.”
Audio recordings of key portions of the incident were taken on the wife’s cell phone, Ausserer said, and those are being reviewed before trial. Ausserer expects the recording to show that the only person who Ray intended to hurt was himself, although the affidavit alleged Ray also threatened to kill his wife.
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Ray is currently being held on two counts of felony harassment, one count of kidnapping, two counts of assault and one count of reckless endangerment.
Prior to the Dec. 27 incident, concerns about Ray had already been raised in an inspector general complaint made by a fellow Green Beret officer who served under him at 1st Special Forces Group, according to a complaint obtained by Army Times early this year.
The complaint alleged that Ray overreacted on multiple occasions and would berate subordinates. However, the Army’s Special Forces Command IG office returned that complaint as “not substantiated” in June 2020.
One month later, Ray was elevated to be I Corps’ chief of staff, a coveted role that often leads to the general officer ranks. Before being suspended, though, Ray was not in a promotable status, according to I Corps.
While assigned to I Corps, Ray was not the subject of any other investigations, officials at the unit said previously.
Ray was released from jail on a $100,000 bond in mid-July, according to court documents.
His wife wrote in a victim statement to the court that her military protective order against Ray expires when he retires. She asked that a county protective order be extended to include the town in which she and her children live, even after Ray leaves the military.
Documents filed by Ray’s defense attorney had requested that he be allowed to travel throughout Washington state to attend Veterans Affairs facilities for treatment and visit with family other than those protected by the no-contact orders.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with comment from Col. Owen G. Ray’s defense attorney.
Kyle Rempfer is an editor and reporter whose investigations have covered combat operations, criminal cases, foreign military assistance and training accidents. Before entering journalism, Kyle served in U.S. Air Force Special Tactics and deployed in 2014 to Paktika Province, Afghanistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.
17. To Avoid Attack, U.S. Forces Are Spreading Out. But They’re Still Broadcasting Their Positions.
We love our data.
Excerpts:
The Pentagon hasn’t signaled that it’s about to dump its array of high-tech VHF and UHF comms in favor of shortwave. U.S. forces love data. And they prefer comms that can handle a lot of it.
But as U.S. troops refine their distributed-ops concepts, and Russian and Chinese countermeasures get more sophisticated, it surely is comforting to American planners that they at least have a back-up option. An old, reliable way of communicating ... without necessarily drawing a missile barrage.
To Avoid Attack, U.S. Forces Are Spreading Out. But They’re Still Broadcasting Their Positions.
Forbes · by David Axe · August 12, 2021
... [+]U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman John R. Wright
The U.S. armed forces are working hard to develop new methods of spreading out troops, planes and ships in order to make it harder for, say, Russian or Chinese forces to target them with long-range missiles.
But there’s a problem. As long as the U.S. military continues to rely on quick and voluminous information-sharing, its distributed operations could be vulnerable to electronic monitoring and disruption.
“Disruption” in this case also meaning “getting blown up.”
Fortunately for dispersed American forces, however, there’s at least one old-fashioned radio type that could help mitigate the missile risk.
The U.S. Air Force last month organized a trial run of a comms kit at a pop-up air base.
As part of Exercise Heavy Rain II from July 19 to 27, the 1st Combat Communications Squadron set up radios, data networks and navigation aids at a rough airfield in Grostenquin, France.
The comms airmen deployed to the outpost in stages. First, a small team flew in with a “fly-away kit” of basic radios. The team then guided in reinforcements carrying heavier gear. The whole time, German and French troops playing the role of the enemy jammed the squadron’s channels.
"The exercise was an excellent demonstration of how combat comm responds within contested and congested environments,” said Sgt. Sergio Huerta, a 1st CBCS supervisor.
“As an exercise planner, it was crucial that airmen learned the characteristics of [electromagnetic interference], how to mitigate or follow their primary, alternate, contingency and emergency communications plan and their spectrum interference reporting procedures."
A separate American exercise taking place around the same time on the other side of the world underscored the complexity—and potential vulnerability—of the comms systems U.S. forces have grown accustomed to.
As part of Operation Pacific Iron 21, dozens of USAF F-15E and F-22 fighters congregated at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam then spread out across several nearby rough airstrips to practice distributed ops.
The 36th Combat Communications Squadron from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho handled the comms. “The warfighters were able to harness ultra-high-frequency (UHF) and very-high-frequency (VHF) capabilities, as well as access secret and non-classified networks during the operation,” said Capt. Austin Sewell, a maintenance officer from the 389th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron.
In order to simulate the electromagnetic conditions American troops might face in combat, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command units jammed the UHF and VHF at the various airstrips involved in Pacific Iron 21.
The jamming underscored the importance of having lots of different radios, each backing up the others. “If something doesn't work, we have an alternative communication pathway to use,” said Lt. Col. Brant Reilly, the exercise lead at U.S. Pacific Air Forces.
Redundancy only addresses part of the problem for dispersed U.S. forces, however. Sure, you might thwart Chinese or Russian jamming by switching from satellite to terrestrial UHF/VHF and back. But that doesn’t stop the enemy from shooting a ballistic missile at the source of your transmissions.
Your comms can give you away. And that would render moot the wider effort to hide your forces by spreading them out.
The U.S. Marine Corps arguably was the first to appreciate the danger. “The high risk assumed by inside forces makes signature-management a paramount requirement for success,” Brian Kerg, a Marine Corps officer then serving as the fleet amphibious communications officer for U.S. Fleet Forces Command, wrote for The Center for International Maritime Security in Washington, D.C. last year.
Old-fashioned high-frequency transmissions—a.k.a., “shortwave”—are among the hardest to detect and track back to their source and the hardest to jam. As a bonus, HF equipment tends to be cheap, simple and reliable—and capable of transmitting over long distances owing to the tendency of an HF wave to bounce off the atmosphere.
One downside is that HF can’t move as much data as UHF and VHF can do.
And no one claims HF transmissions are impossible for a third party to pinpoint. “Even HF in normal operating modes is likely to be detected if the location and direction of propagation are being scanned by current [direction-finding] systems at the time of transmission,” Kerg wrote.
Kerg recommended scattered forces use HF radios as much as possible and get used to turning them on and off—and switching up their frequencies—in order to dodge enemy surveillance. That could be the best way for dispersed forces to continue talking while also avoiding detection and attack.
The Pentagon hasn’t signaled that it’s about to dump its array of high-tech VHF and UHF comms in favor of shortwave. U.S. forces love data. And they prefer comms that can handle a lot of it.
But as U.S. troops refine their distributed-ops concepts, and Russian and Chinese countermeasures get more sophisticated, it surely is comforting to American planners that they at least have a back-up option. An old, reliable way of communicating ... without necessarily drawing a missile barrage.
Forbes · by David Axe · August 12, 2021
18. Taking on Russia and China means US Special Operations Command is rethinking how it fights the propaganda war
Back to our roots. MG McClure would be pleased to see us go back to conducting psychological warfare (even if we still refuse to use the correct terminology).
Taking on Russia and China means US Special Operations Command is rethinking how it fights the propaganda war
US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center students speak to role players during the Psychological Operations Qualification Course, June 16, 2021.US Army/K. Kassens
- Information operations can have heightened impact in the modern era of mass communication.
- For the US military, US Special Operations Command handles most of those operations.
- But Pentagon and intelligence officials say the US's IO capabilities have atrophied compared to its main rivals: Russia and China.
10 Things in Politics: The latest in politics & the economy
Before any shots are fired in a major conflict, a war of words and ideas is already underway.
The modern era's unprecedented level of interconnectivity and the proliferation of communication methods, such as social media, has made that information battle fiercer than ever, and it will be crucial for the US as it competes with near-peer rivals China and Russia.
However, the US military has fallen behind in the information realm.
At a recent congressional hearing, Pentagon and Intelligence Community officials said the US has let its Information Operations (IO) atrophy compared to those of its competitors. Russia now poses the more serious IO threat, but China follows close behind.
Information operations
Sen. Amy Klobuchar displays an inaccurate Tweet about voting by text message during a hearing on Capitol Hill, October 31, 2017.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Disinformation, misinformation, and psychological operations are the main features of the propaganda and information realm.
Disinformation is the deliberate distribution of false information, such as social-media posts, to deceive the target audience.
During the 2016 presidential election, Russia's Internet Research Agency, which works very closely with the Russian intelligence services, disseminated thousands of pieces of fake information aimed at American voters.
Misinformation is the unintentional distribution of false information — for example, ordinary Americans spreading conspiracy theories on social media, believing them to be true.
Misinformation is very closely related to disinformation, and sometimes the former is fueled by the latter. Russian intelligence, for example, can plant fake stories in state-owned or controlled outlets, which unaware Americans may then distribute.
Misinformation and disinformation campaigns manipulate facts or omit contextual details to shape public perceptions. Misleading stories with a kernel of truth are often harder to debunk.
Propaganda is the distribution of arguments or narratives to influence a target audience.
Propaganda can be both true and false, and while it has a negative connotation, it can come through official channels, such as White House or Kremlin statements, or from seemingly ordinary sources, such as a tourist guide.
A battle for your mind
A Soviet propaganda poster with an Arab fighter using a rifle to repel American and British warships and the phrase "Stop the Aggressor" written in Russian, 1958.Nikolay Tereschenko/Digital Soviet Art/Getty Images
Russia has a long history information operations. Throughout the Cold War, the primary goal of Russian intelligence services, mainly the KGB, wasn't intelligence-gathering but to subvert the US and the West.
They did so with "active measures," which are similar to covert action. The goal was to drive wedges within and between Western countries, especially NATO members. Equally important was the effort to discredit the West in the eyes of the rest of the world, especially in Asia, Africa, and South America.
Russia fell into disarray after the Cold War, but Moscow has in recent years grown more focused and aggressive in its information operations directed at the US and the West.
Russia views information operations as a key warfare domain — it already sees itself as in conflict with the West in this regard — and its approach is now more holistic as it targets both the methods of communication, such as computers and networks, and the information itself.
China uses information operations to achieve more traditional goals, such as bolstering perceptions of the Chinese Communist Party and its policies and undermining foreign governments and their policies.
Like Russia, China wants to undercut social cohesion within the US and sow discord between Western countries. US Special Operations Command has already set up a task force to counter Chinese information operations in the Indo-Pacific region.
Information commandos
US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center students at Civil Affairs Specialist and Psychological Operations Specialist Graduation, December 18, 2019.US Army/K. Kassens
When it comes to US military information operations, it's SOCOM that does much of the work, mainly through two units: The Army's Psychological Operations Groups (4th and 8th) and the Civil Affairs Brigade (95th).
These aren't your door-kicking commandos but rather special operators with language and cultural training who identify local needs and perceptions and then work to influence them.
"PSYOP in the Army goes a long way back. We first established the capability right after World War I and have refined it ever since. PSYOP guys have deployed in all the conflicts and did some great 'peacetime' work in Europe during the Cold War," a retired special-operations PSYOP soldier told Insider.
Psychological operations are part of information operations and can occur in peacetime and during war. The US military divides them into three categories — White, Gray, and Black — depending on the target and operational and political considerations.
A illustrator creates illustrations for a leaflet that will be used to convey messages and information to civilians and enemy fighters, December 1, 2016.US Army
Such operations are also divided into phases of competition: 0 for shaping perceptions, 1 for deterring foes, 2 for seizing the initiative, 3 for dominating the enemy, 4 for stabilizing environments and populations, and 5 for enabling local civil authorities.
"What's great about PSYOP is their ability to satiate all appetites. We can target audiences in the tactical, operational, and strategic levels depending on the need. This gives PSYOP a great advantage as it's always relevant, and ever more so in phases 0, 1, 4, and 5 of competition — that is, before and after a war," said the retired PSYOP soldier, who requested anonymity to discuss operations.
What makes it hard to do effective IO is the time and effort required to train troops, special operators or not, to excel in the domain. To conduct or counter information operations, practitioners need native or near-native understanding of a culture and language, in addition to knowledge of psychology and behavioral science.
PSYOP used their skills very effectively against ISIS, even deploying a special leaflet that could play and listen for audio.
"To counter Chinese and Russian IO, we need to be aware of the threat and educate the public," the retired special-operations PSYOP soldier said. "Americans need to understand that this is a real, ongoing threat. Sometimes war doesn't mean gunfire and explosions."
Stavros Atlamazoglou is a defense journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
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19. America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success
Excerpts:
The history of the past 20 years suggests that the United States must pace itself. Overextension inevitably leads to frustration and the dissipation of limited resources. Yet outright withdrawal can jeopardize counterterrorism and regional security interests that are still important to American voters and to U.S. global strategy. So long as the jihadi threat persists in its current form, the United States needs a counterterrorism approach that allows it to avoid exhausting interventions and damaging retreats.
Finally, the United States has little choice but to play a very long game with respect to political reform. Without greater political inclusion and stability in the Muslim world, there will be no escaping the cycle of threats and response that has trapped the last three U.S. presidents. But as the United States learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking to dramatically accelerate the pace of change involves enormous risks and costs. The only reasonable approach is to promote constructive improvement at the margins, while recognizing that the primary impetus for reform must come from within Muslim societies themselves. This strategy requires patience, but as the history of the Cold War demonstrated, the United States has the capacity for more strategic patience than pundits sometimes give it credit for.
The medium-footprint strategy is not an ideal solution to the ongoing problem of jihadi terrorism. But there is no ideal solution. Perhaps the two most important lessons of the past 20 years are that all of the United States’ counterterrorism options are imperfect, and that as bad as things seem in the greater Middle East, they can always get worse. As the United States reaches a generational milestone in the war on terror, it should acknowledge what has gone wrong—but also preserve the strategy that has allowed it to get a fair amount right.
America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success
How a Flawed “War on Terror” Eventually Yielded the Right Approach
“War,” the late French prime minister Georges Clemenceau famously remarked, “is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.” That is a good way to think about the United States’ odyssey in the “war on terror.” For 20 years, Washington has struggled and mostly failed to reduce the overall level of global terrorism and to create a healthier political climate in the Muslim world. It has also endured slow, grinding quagmires and sharp, humiliating setbacks. Yet on the most fundamental level, the United States has achieved its strategic objective: it has prevented catastrophic attacks against the U.S. homeland, mainly by becoming extremely proficient at destroying terrorists’ sanctuaries and pulverizing their networks.
The United States has paid too high a price for this success. Yet that price has fallen dramatically over time as Washington has developed what is, on balance, a better counterterrorism approach. After conducting unsustainably expensive military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States underreached by pulling back from the broader Middle East too fast and allowing old threats to reemerge. But since around 2014, Washington has settled on a medium-footprint model based on modest investments, particularly in special operations forces and airpower, to support local forces that do most of the fighting and dying. When combined with nonmilitary tools such as intelligence cooperation, law enforcement efforts, and economic aid, this approach provides reasonably good protection at a reasonable price.
A medium-footprint strategy is no silver bullet. It offers only incremental and incomplete solutions to the political problems underlying extremist violence. It also necessitates tradeoffs with other priorities, such as competing with China, and is politically vulnerable because of its association with long, frustrating wars. Yet the experience of the past two decades suggests that the medium-footprint strategy is still the best of bad options available to the United States.
SUSTAINABLE COUNTERTERRORISM
The war on terror certainly hasn’t gone as U.S. policymakers would have liked. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, few would have predicted that the United States would spend two decades fighting in Afghanistan, only to leave with the Taliban on the march; that it would invade Iraq in 2003, withdraw in 2011, and a few years later send troops back to destroy a self-proclaimed caliphate that Washington’s earlier missteps had helped to produce; and that it would spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of lives in an endless global battle against terror.
On some dimensions, this effort can be simply described as a failure. Overall levels of global terrorism are higher now than they were in 2001. Depending on how one measures, the number of terrorist attacks and people killed by terrorists around the world each year is three to five times as high as it was in 2011, although few of the victims are Americans.
This failure reflects another: the United States has had relatively little success transforming the underlying political conditions in the greater Middle East and in parts of Africa. Across this expansive region, rapidly growing populations, lack of economic opportunity, and legacies of corruption and misrule have bred instability and repression. Mishandled U.S. interventions, especially in Iraq and Libya, have sometimes made the situation worse.
Despite these setbacks, the United States has achieved its most important goal in the war on terror: preventing major mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. homeland. Although Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, and the United Kingdom all suffered major terrorist attacks in the four years after 9/11 and Europe endured a slew of attacks between 2014 and 2017, the United States has suffered only around 100 fatalities at the hands of jihadi terrorists since 9/11—a tiny fraction of the number of Americans who were murdered by others in the last two decades.
The United States has achieved its most important goal in the war on terror: preventing major mass-casualty attacks on the U.S. homeland.
The United States has protected itself by blending aggressive law enforcement, intelligence, and diplomatic efforts with military operations against the most dangerous jihadi organizations. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and elsewhere, the United States has repeatedly disrupted or destroyed territorial safe havens carved out by the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), al Qaeda, and their offshoots and affiliates. It has also developed an unparalleled ability to decapitate terrorist organizations; decimate their ranks of financiers, facilitators, and operational-level commanders; and keep them under pressure and off balance.
By some estimates, U.S. forces and their international partners have killed or captured 80 percent of al Qaeda leaders and operatives in Afghanistan—even if new leaders have stepped into their place, at least until meeting their own demises as well. How exactly the United States has managed to prevent a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil over the last two decades remains a hotly debated question, but one answer, clearly, is that Washington has inflicted devastating losses on its enemies and forced them to focus more on surviving than thriving.
This success came at a much higher price than most policymakers initially expected—by a conservative estimate, some $4 trillion in direct and indirect costs, 7,000 U.S. military fatalities, and the diversion of government attention away from other foreign policy priorities. But the rate of expenditure has come down markedly in the last decade. Since 2015, the number of U.S. service members killed in combat has been in the low dozens or less each year, compared with the high hundreds at the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And whereas those wars once cost as much as $200 billion a year in all, the annual cost of the U.S. campaign against ISIS from 2014 to 2019 was just a few billion dollars. The entire U.S. military presence in the broader Middle East, which covers counterterrorism and other priorities such as deterring Iran, now runs between $50 billion and $60 billion annually—about a third of its peak levels during the latter Bush and early Obama years.
Just as important, the war on terror is no longer a bleeding strategic or diplomatic wound. And as Washington has scaled back its military presence in the broader Middle East, it has been able to focus more on other priorities. In short, the war on terror does not cost what it once did, mainly because the United States has found a more sustainable approach—one that emphasizes managing intractable problems rather than solving them or simply walking away.
MOWING THE GRASS
This strategy was born of trial and error. In the decade after 9/11, the United States found that heavy-footprint interventions such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan were a recipe for military and strategic exhaustion. But too light a counterterrorism footprint could invite catastrophic reversals. When the United States withdrew completely from Iraq in 2011 while also drawing down counterterrorism operations elsewhere, it created dangerous security vacuums. In particular, the pullout from Iraq, coupled with the chaos created by civil war in Syria, fueled the rise of ISIS, which conquered territory in Iraq and Syria and destabilized vast swaths of the Middle East.
The upshot was a medium-footprint strategy, meant to be both aggressive and limited. This strategy involved the direct use of U.S. military power—especially special operations forces, drones, and manned airpower—against ISIS and other prominent terror groups. But it wielded these and other tools (such as training and advisory missions, intelligence, and logistics) primarily to empower local forces that could clear and hold terrain.
In the struggle against ISIS, for example, the Iraqi security forces, Baghdad’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service, and a motley crew of Kurdish and Arab allies in Syria provided the vast majority of the ground forces that fought on the American side. The Pentagon simultaneously adopted a similar approach in Afghanistan, using a combination of direct military action and support for government forces to target al Qaeda (and, later, ISIS) while keeping the Taliban in check.
The medium-footprint strategy was more sustainable and effective than anything Washington had tried before.
This approach allowed the United States to maintain the regional military footholds needed to keep pressure on extremist groups and outsource the heaviest human and military costs to partners and allies. It also leveraged unique U.S. advantages, such as drones and special operations forces, to enable much larger military campaigns. And it dialed back unrealistic political expectations for host countries, promising only marginal improvements, such as empowering less sectarian leaders in Iraq, as potential down payments on deeper reform once conditions stabilized. On the whole, the medium-footprint strategy was more sustainable and effective than anything Washington had tried before.
It also had plenty of problems, of course. In Afghanistan, the strategy could not break the stalemate with the Taliban: at best, it kept pressure on al Qaeda and ISIS and prevented the Taliban from defeating the government. In Syria, the U.S. approach could not solve the underlying problems posed by a vicious civil war. Nor could it spur the dramatic improvements in political stability and effective governance that would have allowed the United States to safely disengage from contested areas. The medium-footprint approach is akin to what Israeli leaders call “mowing the grass”—it delivers results only if repeated indefinitely.
That need for persistence has come to seem more burdensome over time, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan confirmed. The pull of the Indo-Pacific has grown stronger as U.S.-Chinese competition has intensified. Because the initial costs of the war on terror were so high, moreover, it has become difficult to sustain even much-reduced military commitments without provoking charges of perpetuating pointless “forever wars.” The experience of witnessing a largely futile troop surge in Afghanistan in 2009 appears to have weighed on Biden’s decision to terminate a less onerous military mission there today, just as the tragic early years in Iraq seemed to influence President Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from that country in 2011.
PLAYING THE LONG GAME
These competing priorities and costs of persistence are real, but they are not reasons for Washington to abandon its current counterterrorism approach. For one thing, the tradeoff between counterterrorism and great-power competition is neither zero-sum nor unmanageable. The military commitments required to sustain progress in the counterterrorism fight are relatively modest. They typically involve a few thousand troops in a given country, most of whom do not see ground combat on a regular basis, supported by airpower capable of delivering thousands of strikes a year in certain circumstances. These troop and resource commitments do not meaningfully detract from the United States’ ability to project power into Asia, and the broader U.S. military presence in the Middle East actually provides leverage over China, giving Washington the ability to choke off Beijing’s energy supplies in the event of war and thereby bolstering deterrence.
Moreover, the United States needs a minimum level of stability in the greater Middle East—and a minimum level of safety from terrorist threats—to focus properly on the challenge from China and Russia. Without these, it risks the dreaded “yo-yo effect,” whereby withdrawal leads to surging threats that then require renewed intervention at a higher price. That is a formula for failure in counterterrorism and great-power competition alike.
The history of the past 20 years suggests that the United States must pace itself. Overextension inevitably leads to frustration and the dissipation of limited resources. Yet outright withdrawal can jeopardize counterterrorism and regional security interests that are still important to American voters and to U.S. global strategy. So long as the jihadi threat persists in its current form, the United States needs a counterterrorism approach that allows it to avoid exhausting interventions and damaging retreats.
Finally, the United States has little choice but to play a very long game with respect to political reform. Without greater political inclusion and stability in the Muslim world, there will be no escaping the cycle of threats and response that has trapped the last three U.S. presidents. But as the United States learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeking to dramatically accelerate the pace of change involves enormous risks and costs. The only reasonable approach is to promote constructive improvement at the margins, while recognizing that the primary impetus for reform must come from within Muslim societies themselves. This strategy requires patience, but as the history of the Cold War demonstrated, the United States has the capacity for more strategic patience than pundits sometimes give it credit for.
The medium-footprint strategy is not an ideal solution to the ongoing problem of jihadi terrorism. But there is no ideal solution. Perhaps the two most important lessons of the past 20 years are that all of the United States’ counterterrorism options are imperfect, and that as bad as things seem in the greater Middle East, they can always get worse. As the United States reaches a generational milestone in the war on terror, it should acknowledge what has gone wrong—but also preserve the strategy that has allowed it to get a fair amount right.
20. POGO Remembers Pierre Sprey, Pentagon Provocateur and Mentor
His life (like that of John Boyd) provides many interesting lessons for defense. This obituary is also an interesting history.
POGO Remembers Pierre Sprey, Pentagon Provocateur and Mentor
Generals feared Pierre Sprey. The more corporate-minded mistakenly viewed him as an enemy, when in fact there was no more effective ally for the warfighters. But fear him they did — which provoked some to extraordinary lengths to malign and discredit him. Fortunately, Pierre Sprey proved to be made of sterner stuff than them. He persevered for 60 years, dogged in his efforts to make sure the troops serving in the U.S. military had the right weapons to meet the battlefield challenges they faced.
Every time a pilot takes off in an F-16 or a soldier is saved when an A-10 sweeps an enemy position with a burst of 30mm rounds, Pierre Sprey’s contributions to our national defense are on display. The world lost this towering man when he died peacefully in his Maryland home on August 4, 2021.
Pierre earned the terror he inspired in the Pentagon brass through his hard work, piercing intellect, and unmatched integrity.
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He led a life full of adventures and accomplishments, the complete listing of which would require an entire book to detail in full. He was born in France in 1937, and he fled to the United States with his family to escape the advancing Nazis. His abilities as a mathematician prompted Yale to accept him at the age of 14. There, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering and a minor in French literature. He went on to earn a master’s degree in operations research and mathematical statistics from Cornell. In between, he worked through the ranks at Grumman, where he started out pounding rivets and eventually became a lead statistics analyst.
Pierre earned the terror he inspired in the Pentagon brass through his hard work, piercing intellect, and unmatched integrity.
At Grumman, his abilities gained the attention of then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Robert Valtz, who in 1966 brought Pierre into the Pentagon’s systems analysis office as one of Robert McNamara’s “Whiz Kids.” In this role, Pierre earned the perpetual enmity of the Air Force when he conducted a year-long analysis of its plans to fight a Soviet attack through Western Europe. He found that the Air Force’s strategy to use tactical aircraft to bomb widely dispersed and camouflaged targets far behind the front lines, much like the fruitless strategic bombing missions of World War II, would do little to blunt a determined Soviet advance. His study concluded that the Air Force should instead build a fleet of specialized attack aircraft to work closely with NATO ground forces and concentrate all available combat power on the exposed enemy at the end of its logistics train.
His conclusions flew in the face of decades of airpower theory and threatened the very identity of the Air Force. Because the first goal of any bureaucracy is self-preservation, Air Force leaders did all they could to discredit the study and Pierre. The Air Force brass made one of their greatest mistakes in this effort when they sent their leading aerial tactics expert, then-Major John Boyd, to speak with Pierre to explain why he was wrong.
Their plan backfired. Boyd and Sprey quickly discovered they were kindred spirits and formed a partnership whose influence has now outlasted both of them. The two men, along with friends like Tom Christie, Chuck Spinney, Everest Riccioni, Chuck Myers, and Harry Hillaker, became the “Fighter Mafia.” Their work, often behind the scenes and against the official positions of the Air Force leadership, produced the F-16 and F-18 aircraft, which still form the backbone of the United States fighter fleets.
Left to right: Chuck Myers, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, Everest Riccioni, Tom Christie, and Winslow Wheeler. (Photo courtesy of James Stevenson.)
Pierre’s study led to another consequential partnership in the Pentagon. A staff officer working for the Air Force chief of staff reached out to Pierre to help design the aircraft to fill the close air support role the study called for. Colonel Avery Kay had been tasked with the program, but he found little support through the official procurement channels. Kay and Sprey became the leaders of the A-X program that ultimately produced the A-10.
One challenge Pierre and the other Pentagon reformers had difficulty overcoming was directing public attention to the issues they raised. They expected journalists to be crusaders exposing wasteful defense spending and ineffective weapons programs. In the age of the big three news networks and two major national newspapers, they ultimately decided they needed another outlet.
In 1981, the reformers teamed up with the journalist Dina Rasor to form the Project on Military Procurement to expose “waste, fraud, and fat” in the defense budget. According to Rasor, Pierre played a significant role in the organization’s early success.
“He was willing to take a big chance on a woman who had no military background but was willing to learn, and I understood the media and knew how they could get some traction. Pierre could explain to me how something like the Maverick missile worked, and I could then go out and tell the true story,” Rasor said.
His influence helped to set the Project on Military Procurement — now the Project On Government Oversight — apart from other national security related organizations. Rather than fighting mainly for straight cuts in the Pentagon budget, he helped show how doing so could improve military effectiveness and safety by producing simpler, and therefore superior, weapons.
Pierre eventually grew increasingly frustrated with the machinations of the Pentagon and retired from his consultancy work in 1986 to pursue his passion for music. He started his music business, Mapleshade, in 1986 to produce recordings and some of the finest audio equipment in the world.
But he never stopped caring about the troops and Pentagon missteps. Right up until his final hours, he freely gave of his time to anyone willing to carry on the fight he began, as I was privileged to discover.
The first time I met him, it took every ounce of willpower I possessed to keep from exclaiming, “Holy shit! You’re Pierre Sprey!” This happened in Washington on a cold and rainy Thursday afternoon in January 2015. Adrenaline already coursed through my veins because I was walking into my first job interview in more than a decade, having spent the intervening years cloistered in the Marine Corps. When I received the invitation to interview for a position with the Project On Government Oversight, I had only been told the time and location. No one had said anything to me that a figure legendary in American defense circles would be there to see if I really did know my stuff.
A requirement of the job posting I had responded to two weeks earlier said the candidate must have “a working knowledge of ‘military reform’ as explained by John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, and Chuck Spinney.” Like all Marine officers, I first heard the name of John Boyd at the Basic School. I later read Robert Coram’s biography of Colonel Boyd and learned about how he struck fear in the hearts of generals and policymakers with his friends and collaborators, including Pierre Sprey. Fascinated by their antics, I spent a considerable amount of time studying all I could find about their work. I became an admirer.
Pierre Sprey and Dan Grazier (Photo: Dan Grazier / POGO)
So my surprise to suddenly find myself standing inside a small conference room in front of Pierre that winter day was real. Another of Boyd’s friends, Chuck Spinney, and the author and movie producer Andrew Cockburn were also in the room along with the POGO staff, setting the scene for the most interesting job interview I ever experienced. The formal part, with the sort of questions usually asked in that situation, lasted for perhaps 20 minutes. We then spent the better part of two hours trading stories.
They wanted to learn about my experiences in the Marine Corps and how that sparked my interest in military reform. Pierre and Chuck amused us with tales of their work inside the Pentagon, their collaboration with John Boyd, and the ways they were able to make things happen by leveraging their understanding of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.
That day began one of most interesting and consequential friendships I will ever have. Pierre and I worked together regularly for the last six years. Hardly a week went by when we did not speak on the phone about either a current project of mine or one of our joint ventures. Often our conversations could range across subjects. One minute we would be talking about the shortcomings of the F-35, the next minute we would be talking about the importance of keeping your speaker wires off of the carpet and attaching them directly to the terminals (the sound quality will increase 5%, he told me).
While most people know him for his military work and his expertise about airplanes, Pierre Sprey was a true polymath. He once spent an hour on the phone telling me about the work of the 19th century French political cartoonist Honoré Daumier. We arrived at that conversational tangent after a discussion of Otto von Bismarck and the Franco-Prussian War. Most of our conversations would unfold in such a manner and rarely did they end before I had added at least one new book to my Amazon wish list. If I live to be 100, I will probably still be reading Pierre-recommended titles.
Few things appeared to give Pierre more joy in life than a good caper. Whenever he got together with his friends in the Fort Myer’s officers’ club, they would often retell stories of their adventures and roar with laughter as if they had never heard the stories before.
I had the opportunity to team up with Pierre to pull off one of his most highly visible escapades. When Colonel Kay, the Air Force father of the A-10, died in late 2015, his friends and family decided a fitting tribute would be to have A-10s fly over his Arlington National Cemetery burial service. Pierre found out what it would take to make that happen and I arranged for the publicity.
A-10 Thunderbolt II (Photo: U.S. Air Force)
This happened at a time when the Air Force leadership were mounting their strongest efforts yet to retire the entire A-10 program. Colonel Kay’s friends worried that if the Air Force brass knew anyone had specifically requested an A-10 flyover, they would deny it rather than give the A-10 a moment in the spotlight. So Pierre had Colonel Kay’s family request a flyover, an honor he earned due to his rank, and Air Force public affairs approved. Leaders at the Pentagon didn’t know that an A-10 squadron was in on the plan. When the flyover tasking order went out to units, the A-10 squadron immediately answered the call and put on a memorable display over Washington. As the caisson bearing Colonel Kay’s casket approached the burial site, all of us in attendance looked to the south over the Pentagon and saw four A-10s passing directly over the building. As they passed over the cemetery, one pulled up in the missing man formation honoring the Air Force officer who had cared enough about the troops on the ground to risk his career to create an aircraft program built specifically to protect them.
Looking back on the moment today, the flyover served as an excellent tribute to Pierre in life. He watched with justifiable pride as those four magnificent aircraft buzzed the building he fought with so much over the years.
Pierre never stopped in his quest to ensure the troops were well served by the Pentagon, and the American people had the most effective military force possible. My colleague Mandy Smithberger and I met with him the day before he died to talk about some upcoming projects. I spent about two hours with him that evening, talking about several issues that remain unresolved today. Until the very end, he maintained the boundless enthusiasm about the subjects dearest to him.
He attracted his fair share of detractors over the years. Truth-tellers always do. Members in good standing with the military-industrial-Congressional complex fear his influence to this very day, as evidenced by the obvious and easily disprovable lies on his Wikipedia entry about the significance of his contributions to the A-10 and the F-16.
I don’t know how history will ultimately remember Pierre Sprey. He deserves an honest treatment that accurately describes his contributions while focusing on his towering intellect, his unbreakable good character, and his general good humor.
Pierre can rest peacefully knowing that he inspired a new generation of people in government, the military, and in civil society who will carry on the good work he began.
What I do know for certain is that my life will be a lot less interesting now that my friend Pierre is gone. Never again will I answer the phone and hear an enthusiastic, “Hey Dan!” to be followed by a discussion of airplanes, history, art, and anything else that piqued his interest.
Pierre can rest peacefully knowing that he inspired a new generation of people in government, the military, and in civil society who will carry on the good work he began. And those people who rightly feared Pierre Sprey should not rest too comfortably now that he is gone. His spirit survives in his friends, and it’s our job to ensure the Pentagon does what is right, which would be fitting tribute — equivalent to an A-10 flyover.
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Dan Grazier is the Jack Shanahan Military Fellow at the Center for Defense Information at POGO.
21. Analysis | Afghanistan’s rapid collapse is part of a long, slow U.S. defeat
A sad commentary but there is much blame to go all around.
Less than half a decade after the invasion, Bush administration officials were invoking analogies to the Vietnam War, as it became clear that the Taliban still posed a threat. “The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail,” one administration official later told government interviewers. “Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005.”
Yet, wrote Whitlock, “the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war.”
Almost a decade later, at the end of 2014, Obama attempted to hail the end of the American military mission in the country after years of counterinsurgency, declaring in a statement that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.” But U.S. officials knew that there was little end in sight and the Obama administration, Whitlock reported, “conjured up an illusion.” It communicated to Americans that U.S. forces were only remaining in “noncombat” roles. “But the Pentagon carved out numerous exceptions that, in practice, made the distinctions almost meaningless,” wrote Whitlock.
Then came Trump, who loudly called for an end to costly U.S. military entanglements abroad. But he authorized an intensification of aerial bombing campaigns against Islamist militant targets that, according to one study, saw Afghan civilian casualties increase by about 330 percent.
Biden, a veteran of the Obama years, now owns his own moment in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, a tragedy many years in the making.
Analysis | Afghanistan’s rapid collapse is part of a long, slow U.S. defeat
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To many watching now, the collapse seems so sudden. In the space of a few blistering summer months, Taliban forces have swept across much of Afghanistan. One after the other, provincial centers across the country’s north and west are being captured by the insurgents as government resistance melts away. When the militants on Thursday seized the city of Ghazni, it was the 10th provincial capital to fall in a week. Then, in what would be a stunning blow to the beleaguered government of President Ashraf Ghani, the Associated Press reported that Taliban forces also took over the major cities of Herat and Kandahar. A U.S. official told my colleagues that was not yet clear, though it was possible the cities could fall soon.
Now, with Kabul in its crosshairs, the Taliban finds itself in arguably its most powerful position since 2001, before it was ousted from power by the U.S.-led invasion. Reports are already coming in from areas under Taliban control of militants carrying out attacks on civilians and forcing young women into marriages. Meanwhile, the Afghan military — built through years of U.S. training and significant financial support — is reeling and demoralized. In city after city, soldiers surrendered or deserted their posts. In some instances, the Taliban drove off with U.S. military equipment, including weapons and vehicles.
U.S. officials reportedly contemplated relocating their embassy closer to the airport and urged American citizens in the country to leave immediately. Thousands of additional U.S. troops will be temporarily dispatched to secure staff for a potential evacuation. The Biden administration is desperately trying to rally disparate regional actors, from Afghanistan’s neighbors to the European Union to Russia and China, to present a united diplomatic front amid talks with Taliban envoys in Qatar. But the militants’ leverage is only growing as the echoes of Saigon 1975 ring all the louder in Kabul 2021.
According to U.S. intelligence assessments, the rapid disintegration of the Afghan security forces means a possible Taliban capture of Kabul itself could be a matter of months, perhaps even weeks. The success of the Taliban offensive has coincided with the withdrawal of the last remaining detachments of U.S. and NATO troops in the country, announced by President Biden this year. The White House had initially timed the pullout to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, which were plotted by al-Qaeda militants given sanctuary by Afghanistan’s then-Taliban government.
With the Taliban once more ascendant, Biden presides over a grim symmetry. In early July, the president scoffed at the possibility of the Taliban “overrunning everything” and pinned his hopes on a mediated political settlement between Afghanistan’s warring parties. More hawkish critics argued that the United States needed to maintain a deterrent threat against the resurgent Taliban. Their opponents countered that the enduring instability in the country even after two decades of U.S. occupation was evidence enough of a mission that needed to end. For weeks, the White House has defended its decision to wind down the U.S. troop presence — a goal also pursued by former president Donald Trump and supported by a majority of Americans, according to recent polling — as a necessary move whose time has come.
“Look, we spent over a trillion dollars over 20 years,” Biden told reporters recently at the White House, “We trained and equipped, with modern equipment, over 300,000 Afghan forces. And Afghan leaders have to come together.”
It’s possible that the relatively small numbers of foreign forces left in the country could have done little to thwart the Taliban’s current advance, regardless of the declared withdrawal. For Biden, the country’s predicament was the source of mounting impatience. But for countless Afghans, including a burgeoning population of internally displaced people, the situation has become all the more hopeless.
The hurried evacuations of Western diplomats from the Afghan capital accentuated the sense of crisis. “The international community should absolutely prioritize the security of its diplomats,” said Michael Kugelman, a South Asia scholar at the Wilson Center, to my colleagues. “But let’s be clear: Its departure from Afghanistan would send a sobering signal that the world is resigned to leaving Afghans to their fate.”
But the writing has been on the wall for a long time. As my colleague Craig Whitlock has revealed with his award-winning reporting on a cache of internal U.S. government documents scrutinizing the failures of the American war-making and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, successive U.S. administrations recognized that the Taliban were not going to be easily vanquished, that the Afghan state was weak and riddled with corruption, and that muddling through without a coherent strategy was still preferable to admitting defeat.
“The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades,” Whitlock explained. “They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”
Less than half a decade after the invasion, Bush administration officials were invoking analogies to the Vietnam War, as it became clear that the Taliban still posed a threat. “The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail,” one administration official later told government interviewers. “Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005.”
Yet, wrote Whitlock, “the Bush administration suppressed the internal warnings and put a shine on the war.”
Almost a decade later, at the end of 2014, Obama attempted to hail the end of the American military mission in the country after years of counterinsurgency, declaring in a statement that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.” But U.S. officials knew that there was little end in sight and the Obama administration, Whitlock reported, “conjured up an illusion.” It communicated to Americans that U.S. forces were only remaining in “noncombat” roles. “But the Pentagon carved out numerous exceptions that, in practice, made the distinctions almost meaningless,” wrote Whitlock.
Then came Trump, who loudly called for an end to costly U.S. military entanglements abroad. But he authorized an intensification of aerial bombing campaigns against Islamist militant targets that, according to one study, saw Afghan civilian casualties increase by about 330 percent.
Biden, a veteran of the Obama years, now owns his own moment in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, a tragedy many years in the making.
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22. The Danger of Shrinking American Naval Power
We face so many challenges around the world.
The Danger of Shrinking American Naval Power
China may invade Taiwan within six years, admirals warn. Is the U.S. ready?
Adm. Davidson’s assessment is the clearest articulation of contemporary strategic realities by a major government or military official in the past decade. China is showing its ambitions, increasing its assertiveness in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and ratcheting up military pressure against Taiwan. The Chinese strategic tradition prizes both patience and decisive action when the balance of forces appears favorable.
The implication of Adm. Davidson’s assessment—and a similar one offered this spring by his successor, Adm. John Aquilino —is that any major reduction in U.S. combat strength, particularly naval power, will tempt the Chinese Communist Party to strike.
This assessment should inform the Navy’s recently announced “divest to invest” plan. The Navy will “divest” from older, larger platforms such as the Ticonderoga-class cruiser and reduce its large surface combatant force, including Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, by around one-third.
In turn, the Navy will “invest” in smaller, more numerous platforms, specifically a new Constellation-class frigate and a variety of unmanned surface combatants and undersea vehicles. The Navy will also speed up production of its Virginia-class submarines, the most modern in the fleet, and develop a yet-to-be-defined new submarine class. The Navy hopes “divest to invest” will make the fleet more distributed, more survivable and more lethal.
A more modern fleet is central to any U.S. deterrence or war-fighting strategy. But the “divest to invest” strategy is dangerous, for at least three reasons.
First, there is no guarantee that the Navy will reap any of the savings it expects. Washington’s budget battles will intensify in the coming five years, after trillions in emergency Covid spending. A Navy that voluntarily cuts its outlays will be at the mercy of partisan politics.
The Air Force and Army will be competing for dollars to fund their own efforts. The Navy has failed to produce a 30-year shipbuilding plan that justifies any strategy. Ever since the Trump administration identified great-power competition, particularly with China, as its primary focus, the Army has sought to justify its role in a Pacific conflict. The air and land branches will siphon off these dollars if they make a better case than the sea service does.
Second, it is unclear whether the defense industrial base can execute the “investment” portion of the Navy’s plan quickly enough to avoid a major drop in fleet numbers. The Navy plans to shrink its large surface combatants to about 60 ships from 90, retiring cruisers and likely cutting back on building destroyers.
Meanwhile, the Navy says it will build 15 Constellation-class frigates by 2026 and support them with unmanned ships and perhaps a modified littoral combat ship, which is designed to operate in shallow waters in support of sea control operations. These would be deployed close to the First Island Chain, within the range of China’s arsenal of land-, air- and sea-based missiles intended to deny U.S. forces access to the region.
The shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine won the contracts for the first three Constellation-class frigates. Fincantieri built littoral combat ships at a pace of about one a year—and that ship was half the size of the new frigate. Even if Austal USA, another shipbuilder, receives frigate contracts, and both builders keep up the pace, the Navy would receive only eight to 10 frigates by 2026, not 15.
The picture is no better on unmanned vehicles. The Navy last year received funding for only two of 10 planned large unmanned surface vehicles, the first in the fleet. The Navy’s unmanned aerial refueling tanker, the MQ-25, has been in the works for years but is still awaiting its maiden deployment in the fall. There’s no reason to think other unmanned vehicles will reach the fleet more quickly.
In other words, the Navy is on track to divest by 2024 to 2026—but the investments may not arrive until one to five years later. The U.S. could be very vulnerable in this gap. Will the People’s Liberation Army sit by watching American military modernization before it acts?
The Navy should instead maintain its surface fleet, extending the life of the cruisers and integrating more-advanced, longer-range systems into its missile-launch cells. The Navy can also build—or buy from allies—many small, highly lethal combatants and unmanned platforms. This will require a 30% annual bump to the Navy’s shipbuilding budget every year for the foreseeable future. That may sound expensive, but an additional $6 to $8 billion next year is a fraction of the overall Pentagon budget and a rounding error in President Biden’s infrastructure package.
Maintaining the fleet at its current size of about 300 ships throughout the 2020s will allow the defense industrial base to catch up to the demands of great power competition. Accelerating submarine construction—building three Virginia-class attack subs a year—must also be a priority. Surface ships, whether large or small, manned or unmanned, will be far more vulnerable to Chinese military capabilities than undersea forces.
America’s most senior naval officers have warned of a Chinese attack against Taiwan in the near future. “Divest to invest” is an invitation to attack.
Mr. Cropsey is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower. He served as a naval officer and was a deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
23. The Debacle in Afghanistan
More than just Biden and Trump.
The Debacle in Afghanistan
Biden and Trump share responsibility for the looming defeat.
By The Editorial Board
Updated Aug. 12, 2021 7:55 pm ET
Taliban militants patrol after taking control of the Governor's house and Ghazni city, in Afghanistan, Aug. 12.
PHOTO: NAWID TANHA/SHUTTERSTOCK
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Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates famously wrote that President Biden has been on the wrong side of every major foreign-policy issue in his long career. The world is getting another example as Mr. Biden’s hell-bent, ill-planned withdrawal from Afghanistan is turning into a strategic defeat and moral debacle.
The Taliban march to Kabul continues with the fall of more provincial capitals each day. The last count was 12 capitals, including Ghazni City on the road between the major cities of Kandahar and Kabul. Reinforcing Afghan forces defending Kandahar will become harder if the road is blocked.
The Afghan government is trying to mount a counterattack, and President Ashraf Ghani has sacked another army chief. But the Taliban now controls at least eight entire provinces, according to the Long War Journal, and its reach includes areas in the north that the Taliban didn’t control when it ruled the country before 9/11. The city of Herat also fell Thursday, and Kandahar could be next.
Many Afghan troops are fighting bravely, but they lack the air support that has been their main military advantage. Mr. Biden blundered in withdrawing all U.S. air power from the country, including private contractors who assist the Afghan air force in maintaining helicopters and planes. The contractors are now literally having to assist via Zoom calls, while the U.S. military flies too few sorties from the Persian Gulf region to slow the Taliban.
The White House has failed to understand what’s happening, with leaks saying the Administration is surprised by the Taliban assault. Surprised? The military warned Mr. Biden and so did U.S. intelligence. The Taliban began this offensive on May 1, two weeks after Mr. Biden announced his withdrawal, aiming for the symbolic date of Sept. 11.
The Pentagon said Thursday it is sending 3,000 troops back into the country to protect the withdrawal of U.S. Embassy personnel, as well as the evacuation of Afghan translators who assisted the U.S. This is necessary but one more sign that the White House had no plan for helping our Afghan allies.
The White House dispatched diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad to warn the jihadists not to take the country by force. Mr. Khalilzad struck the “peace” deal during the Trump Administration that the Taliban failed to honor. The U.S. is also pleading with China and Russia to intercede with the Taliban.
Someone also dispatched White House press secretary Jen Psaki to the briefing room to say that “if the Taliban claim to want international legitimacy, these actions are not going to get them the legitimacy they seek. . . . They could choose to devote the same energy to the peace process as they are to their military campaign. We strongly urge them to do so.” Strongly urging should do the trick.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump issued a statement absolving himself of all responsibility, though he cut the bad deal with the Taliban and set the 2021 withdrawal date. “I personally had discussions with top Taliban leaders whereby they understood what they are doing now would not have been acceptable,” Mr. Trump said. “It would have been a much different and much more successful withdrawal, and the Taliban understood that better than anyone.”
That’s not what Mr. Trump said in the spring when he praised the withdrawal and claimed credit. Both men were so determined to get political credit for bringing the troops home that they failed to face the consequences. The military offered a way to keep a minimal force in the country, providing air and other support to Afghan troops. Mr. Biden refused that advice and bet on retreat.
Many Americans may not care now what happens in Afghanistan. But as in Vietnam, the abandonment of our allies will have significant costs. When the world’s rogues sense that a superpower lacks the will to support its friends, they soon look for other ways to take advantage.
Appeared in the August 13, 2021, print edition.
24.
24. Census data: US is diversifying, white population shrinking
There is no turning your back on the data. America is changing.
Census data: US is diversifying, white population shrinking
AP · by MIKE SCHNEIDER · August 13, 2021
No racial or ethnic group dominates for those under age 18, and white people declined in numbers for the first time on record in the overall U.S. population as the Hispanic and Asian populations boomed this past decade, according to the 2020 census data.
The figures released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau offered the most detailed portrait yet of how the country has changed since 2010 and will also be instrumental in redrawing the nation’s political maps.
The numbers are sure to set off an intense partisan battle over representation at a time of deep national division and fights over voting rights. The numbers could help determine control of the House in the 2022 elections and provide an electoral edge for years to come.
The data also will shape how $1.5 trillion in annual federal spending is distributed.
The data offered a mirror not only into the demographic changes of the past decade, but also a glimpse of the future. To that end, they showed there is now no majority racial or ethnic group for people younger than 18, as the share of non-Hispanic whites in the age group dropped from 53.5% to 47.3% over the decade.
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The share of children in the U.S. declined because of falling birth rates, while the share of adults grew, driven by aging baby boomers. Adults over 18 made up more than three-quarters of the population in 2020, or 258.3 million people, an increase of more than 10% from 2010. However, the population of children under age 18 dropped from 74.2 million in 2010 to 73.1 million in 2020.
“If not for Hispanics, Asians, people of two or more races, those are the only groups underage that are growing,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program. “A lot of these young minorities are important for our future growth, not only for the child population but for our future labor force.”
The Asian and Hispanic populations burgeoned from 2010 to 2020, respectively increasing by around a third and almost a quarter over the decade. The Asian population reached 24 million people in 2020, and the Hispanic population hit 62.1 million people.
The Hispanic boom accounted for almost half of the overall U.S. population growth, which was the slowest since the Great Depression. By comparison, the non-Hispanic growth rate over the decade was 4.3%. The Hispanic share of the U.S. population grew to 18.7% of the U.S. population, up from 16.3% in 2010.
“The 2020 Census confirmed what we have known for years — the future of the country is Latino,” said Arturo Vargas, CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund.
The share of the white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, the lowest on record, driven by falling birthrates among white women compared with Hispanic and Asian women. The number of non-Hispanic white people shrank from 196 million in 2010 to 191 million.
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White people continue to be the most prevalent racial or ethnic group, though that changed in California, where Hispanics became the largest racial or ethnic group, growing from 37.6% to 39.4% over the decade, while the share of white people dropped from 40.1% to 34.7%. California, the nation’s most populous state, joined Hawaii, New Mexico and the District of Columbia as a place where non-Hispanic white people are no longer the dominant group.
“The U.S. population is much more multiracial and much more racially and ethnically diverse than what we have measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, a Census Bureau official.
Some demographers cautioned that the white population was not shrinking as much as shifting to multiracial identities. The number of people who identified as belonging to two or more races more than tripled from 9 million people in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020. They now account for 10% of the U.S. population.
People who identify as a race other than white, Black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander — either alone or in combination with one of those races — jumped to 49.9 million people, surpassing the Black population of 46.9 million people as the nation’s second-largest racial group, according to the Census Bureau.
But demographers said that may have to do with Hispanic uncertainty about how to answer the race question on the census form, as well as changes the Census Bureau made in processing responses and how it asked about race and ethnicity in order to better reflect the nation’s diversity.
The data release offers states the first chance to redraw their political districts in a process that is expected to be particularly brutish since control over Congress and statehouses is at stake.
It also provides the first opportunity to see, on a limited basis, how well the Census Bureau fulfilled its goal of counting every U.S. resident during what many consider the most difficult once-a-decade census in recent memory. Communities of color have been undercounted in past censuses. The agency likely will not know how good a job it did until next year, when it releases a survey showing undercounts and overcounts.
“The data we are releasing today meet our high quality data standards,” acting Census Bureau Director Ron Jarmin said.
___
AP · by MIKE SCHNEIDER · August 13, 2021
25. BREAKING: Official denies report about U.S. asking Afghan president to resign
What an obvious case of attemtping active measures/disinformation.
The report comes from a tweet from Camelia Entekhabifard. Below is the only report I have seen on this (other than an email alert a friend forwarded) but the State Department had to respond. It seems that State has quashed this and the mainstream media did not bite on the disinformation.
CameliaEntekhabifard
@CameliaFard
Independent Persian Editor in Chief. Author. Regional affairs columnist, News commentator کاملیا انتخابی فرد نویسنده و سردبیر ایندیپندنت فارسی
BREAKING: Official denies report about U.S. asking Afghan president to resign
Caption
Credit: Jafar Khan
By Robert Burns and Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press
Updated 14 hours ago
U.S. to send troops to help evacuate embassy staff in Afghanistan
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin are calling on Afghan President Ashraf Ghani to resign and allow formation of a transitional government, according to reporter Camelia Entekhabifard.
CameliaEntekhabifard
@CameliaFard
·
15h
News breaking: A reliable source says that tonight, in a telephone conversation with Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, the US Secretary of State & Secretary of Defense asked him to resign in order to allow a ceasefire & the formation of a transitional government. #Afghanistan
@indypersian
A senior U.S. State Department official denied that report, according to Christina Ruffini.
With security rapidly deteriorating in Afghanistan, the United States is sending additional troops into the country to help evacuate some personnel from the embassy in Kabul, a U.S. official said Thursday.
The troops will provide ground and air support for the processing and security of Americans being sent to the Kabul airport, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a plan not yet made public.
The move suggests a lack of confidence by the Biden administration in the Afghan government’s ability to provide sufficient diplomatic security in the capital as the Taliban mounts an offensive that has rapidly conquered key cities in recent days.
The Pentagon had kept about 650 troops in Afghanistan to support U.S. diplomatic security, including at the airport. The official said an unspecified additional number of troops, as well as aircraft, are to be brought in to assist with the embassy drawdown.
Afghan government forces are collapsing even faster than U.S. military leaders thought possible just a few months ago when President Joe Biden ordered a full withdrawal. But there’s little appetite at the White House, the Pentagon or among the American public for trying to stop the rout and it probably is too late to do so.
Caption
Biden has made clear he has no intention of reversing the decision he made last spring, even as the outcome seems to point toward a Taliban takeover. With most U.S. troops now gone and the Taliban accelerating their battlefield gains, American military leaders are not pressing him to change his mind. They know that the only significant option would be for the president to restart the war he already decided to end.
The Taliban, who ruled the country from 1996 until U.S. forces invaded after the 9/11 attacks, captured three more provincial capitals Wednesday and another two on Thursday, the 10th and 11th the insurgents have taken in a weeklong sweep that has given them effective control of about two-thirds of the country. The insurgents have no air force and are outnumbered by U.S.-trained Afghan defense forces, but they have captured territory, including the country’s third-largest city, Herat, with stunning speed.
In a new warning to Americans in Afghanistan, the second it has issued since Saturday, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Thursday again urged U.S. citizens to leave immediately. The advisory was released amid increasing discussions in Washington about further reducing already limited staff at the embassy.
John Kirby, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said the Afghans still have time to save themselves from final defeat.
“No potential outcome has to be inevitable, including the fall of Kabul,” Kirby told reporters. “It doesn’t have to be that way. It really depends on what kind of political and military leadership the Afghans can muster to turn this around.”
Biden made a similar point a day earlier, telling reporters that U.S. troops had done all they could over the past 20 years to assist the Afghans.
“They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” he said.
The United States continues to support the Afghan military with limited airstrikes, but those have not made a strategic difference thus far and are scheduled to end when the U.S. formally ends its role in the war on Aug. 31. Biden could continue airstrikes beyond that date, but given his firm stance on ending the war, that seems unlikely.
“My suspicion, my strong suspicion, is that the 31st of August timeline’s going to hold,” said Carter Malkasian, who advised U.S. military leaders in Afghanistan and Washington.
Senior U.S. military officials had cautioned Biden that a full U.S. withdrawal could lead to a Taliban takeover, but the president decided in April that continuing the war was a waste. He said Tuesday that his decision holds, even amid talk that the Taliban could soon be within reach of Kabul, threatening the security of U.S. and other foreign diplomats.
The most recent American military assessment, taking into account the Taliban’s latest gains, says Kabul could be under insurgent pressure by September and that the country could fall entirely to Taliban control within a couple of months, according to a defense official who discussed the internal analysis Wednesday on condition of anonymity.
Officials said there has been no decision or order for an evacuation of American diplomatic personnel from Afghanistan. But one official said it is now time for serious conversations about whether the U.S. military should begin to move assets into the region to be ready in case the State Department calls for a sudden evacuation.
Kirby declined to discuss any evacuation planning, but one congressional official said a recent National Security Council meeting had discussed preliminary planning for a potential evacuation of the U.S. Embassy but came to no conclusions.
Any such plan would involve identifying U.S. troops, aircraft and other assets that may have to operate from within Afghanistan or nearby areas. The U.S. already has warships in the region, including the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier and the USS Iwo Jima amphibious ready group with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit aboard.
Military officials watching the deteriorating situation said that so far the Taliban haven’t taken steps to threaten Kabul. But it isn’t clear if the Taliban will wait until they have gained control of the bulk of the country before attempting to seize the capital.
Military commanders have long warned that it would be a significant challenge for the Afghan military to hold off the Taliban through the end of the year. In early May, shortly after Biden announced his withdrawal decision, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he foresaw “some really dramatic, bad possible outcomes” in a worst-case scenario. He held out hope that the government would unify and hold off the Taliban, and said the outcome could clarify by the end of the summer.
The security of the U.S. diplomatic corps has been talked about for months, even before the Taliban’s battlefield blitz. The military has long had various planning options for evacuating personnel from Afghanistan. Those options would largely be determined by the White House and the State Department.
A key component of the options would be whether the U.S. military would have unfettered access to the Kabul international airport, allowing personnel to be flown systematically out of the capital. In a grimmer environment, American forces might have to fight their way in and out if the Taliban have infiltrated the city.
The U.S. also would have to determine who would be evacuated: just American embassy personnel and the U.S. military, or also other embassies, American citizens, and Afghans who worked with the U.S. In that last category are former interpreters and those who face retaliation from the Taliban. The U.S. has already started pulling out hundreds of those Afghans who assisted troops during the war.
Senior defense leaders have been talking and meeting daily, laying out their grim assessments of the security situation in Afghanistan. Officials pointed to the fall of Baghlan Province as a worrisome bellwether, because it provides the Taliban with a base and route to Kabul from the north.
Rich Barak of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed to this report.
26. Op-ed: Political appointees are a problem for foreign policy
Excerpts:
Getting a new administration up to speed will always be a challenge, but this doesn’t have to be one of them. The answer is relying more on nonpartisan career diplomats who can continue serving from one administration to the next.
Giving fewer diplomatic posts to political supporters and big donors would stagger more of the Senate confirmation process throughout each administration, leaving less of a gap with each new president. Having continuity and stability in place in most of our diplomatic relationships would create more space for America’s new political leadership to focus on the biggest challenges. This would have the added benefit of more professional leadership in our foreign policy too, which would undoubtedly make it more effective and reduce our default tendency to put the military in the lead.
Or here’s a radical idea. We could treat diplomacy like the challenging and essential profession that it is and stop handing out ambassadorships to big donors altogether. After all, no other developed nation does. Perhaps this is an area in which America shouldn’t aim to be so exceptional.
Op-ed: Political appointees are a problem for foreign policy
By Elizabeth Shackelford Chicago Tribune4 min
President Joe Biden arrives at Delaware Air National Guard Base in New Castle, Delaware, on Aug. 6, 2021.
Seven months in, the Biden administration is struggling to fill hundreds of leadership positions. To be fair, it’s been busy with a pandemic, economic crisis and assault on our democracy. So, too, has the Senate, which is responsible for confirming about 1,200 of these appointments. While President Joe Biden is lagging behind most administrations in recent history, this time-consuming task challenges every presidency.
The lag in confirmations impedes many government agencies, but its impact on foreign policy is particularly detrimental. Of 256 State Department positions requiring confirmation, 98 today are staffed by career officials who stayed on from the last administration, leaving 158 for Biden to fill. As of Wednesday, only 10 have been confirmed, with 65 not even nominated yet.
Most of those empty seats are ambassadors, the president’s highest-ranking representative to a country or international organization. In each case, the United States is funding an entire embassy or mission, with employees numbering from a handful to several thousand, whose leadership, direction and influence are severely diminished, for several months to years.
We’re not just talking about Fiji either. China, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and South Korea are just a few of those empty seats. These aren’t places where our relationship should be on autopilot.
The number of State Department positions requiring Senate confirmation dwarfs any other. Even the Defense Department, which employs 10 times as many civilians in addition to 2 million military personnel, only has 62 positions requiring Senate confirmation. Only 22 of those are still awaiting nomination.
Of course, it doesn’t make sense to fill our military with political actors. Appointing political generals was abandoned after the Civil War for good reason.
But why is the State Department treated differently? America hands out dozens of top diplomatic positions to donors and supporters with no diplomatic experience, while political appointments in the Defense Department are reserved for experienced national security professionals. It’s no wonder diplomacy so often takes a backseat to the military in America’s international engagements.
Much has been written about how embarrassing this can be. While this reached a peak under President Donald Trump, it is nothing new. President Barack Obama, too, was criticized for appointing some uniquely unqualified ambassadors.
The gaffes get news coverage, but the bigger problem is the volume of top diplomatic positions that get caught up in the political game. It undermines our credibility and impedes diplomatic efforts across the globe.
The acting ambassador, known as the chargé d’affaires, might be an experienced former ambassador, or a deputy in over his or her head. Either way, that official doesn’t have the same authority as an ambassador. Diplomacy is an old and distinguished sport in which titles and protocols matter. Officials and other diplomats know the difference between a placeholder and the president’s official representative.
I saw this as a diplomat in Somalia. When we were led by an ambassador, America was clearly the lead voice in the room, the first to be called for advice, whether by the Somali government or United Nations leadership. After our ambassador left, the position remained unfilled for over a year, and our influence plummeted. That matters for promoting U.S. national security priorities, and that was only one country. Multiply that vacancy’s impact by dozens.
Several factors feed into these empty seats. The volume of turnover with each new presidency makes a backlog almost inevitable, and Senate confirmation takes time. In today’s hyperpartisan atmosphere, nothing is easy, and the new Senate must triage not only confirmations but also the slog of priority legislation.
Occasionally appointments are controversial for policy reasons, but most obstacles involve senators using control over appointments as leverage, or simply a failure to prioritize confirmations over other Senate business.
Getting a new administration up to speed will always be a challenge, but this doesn’t have to be one of them. The answer is relying more on nonpartisan career diplomats who can continue serving from one administration to the next.
Giving fewer diplomatic posts to political supporters and big donors would stagger more of the Senate confirmation process throughout each administration, leaving less of a gap with each new president. Having continuity and stability in place in most of our diplomatic relationships would create more space for America’s new political leadership to focus on the biggest challenges. This would have the added benefit of more professional leadership in our foreign policy too, which would undoubtedly make it more effective and reduce our default tendency to put the military in the lead.
Or here’s a radical idea. We could treat diplomacy like the challenging and essential profession that it is and stop handing out ambassadorships to big donors altogether. After all, no other developed nation does. Perhaps this is an area in which America shouldn’t aim to be so exceptional.
Elizabeth Shackelford is a senior fellow on U.S. foreign policy with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”
27. Biden’s Allies Defend Afghanistan Withdrawal Amid Taliban Surge
Biden’s Allies Defend Afghanistan Withdrawal Amid Taliban Surge
“Another fifty years wouldn’t change anything,” said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Even as the Taliban captures large swaths of Afghanistan more quickly than predicted, some on the left are defending President Joe Biden’s order to pull out all American troops.
The Taliban on Thursday took control of Herat, Afghanistan's third-largest city, the latest win in an offensive that has seen the group take control of 12 provincial capitals. Though the intelligence community predicted in June that the Taliban could overrun Kabul within six to 12 months after the American departure on Aug. 31, officials now expect the Taliban will seize the capital within the next 90 days, the Washington Post reported.
In response, the Pentagon is sending 3,000 troops to Kabul to make sure the airport is safe to quickly evacuate U.S. embassy staff and Afghans who worked with American troops over the last two decades.
But rather than arguing for redeploying troops to the country to halt the Taliban’s surge in the long-term, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., instead made the case that the fall of many districts to the group is actually proof that the United States should stick with its plan to withdraw all troops by the end of the month.
“The complete, utter failure of the Afghan National Army, absent our hand holding, to defend their country is a blistering indictment of a failed 20-year strategy predicated on the belief that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars could create an effective, democratic central government in a nation that never had one,” said Murphy, a top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and supporter of the Biden administration’s foreign policy.
“Staying one more year in Afghanistan means we stay forever, because if twenty years of laborious training and equipping of the Afghan security forces had this little impact on their ability to fight, then another fifty years wouldn’t change anything,” he continued in remarks on the Senate floor.
The Biden administration has shown no appetite to reverse course, even as the violence grows and former officials have called on the White House to send troops back into the country. On Tuesday, Biden told reporters that it’s up to the Afghans to fight the Taliban for control of their country, while emphasizing that the United States would continue to provide financial support to the Afghan military.
“They’ve got to fight for themselves, fight for their nation,” he said. “I do not regret my decision.”
In deeply divided Washington, it’s an argument that has drawn bipartisan support.
“What’s happening in Afghanistan now would’ve happened if we got out 10 yrs ago & would happen if we stayed 10 more yrs,” tweeted Joe Walsh, a former Republican member of Congress from Illinois and 2020 presidential candidate. “After 20 yrs, the country will fall to the Taliban within 30 days.”
Other Republicans, however, are using the Taliban’s gains as a political talking point against the president. They say Biden’s decision to pull out by September is what started all of the chaos in Afghanistan, even though the initial decision to withdraw was made by former President Donald Trump.
“We all saw this coming, we all tried to warn President Biden away from this decision—but unfortunately, what we predicted is coming to pass,” Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., said in a statement. “Deploying additional military personnel to support this effort—something that wouldn’t have been necessary if President Biden had listened to what I’ve been saying all along—is the right thing to do now to stanch some of the pain and bloodshed President Biden’s decision has caused.”
28. Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan
Conclusion:
Why Biden chose one path in Iraq and another in Afghanistan isn't clear. But what is clear is that a predictable debacle is now unfolding under Biden's watch in Afghanistan.
Biden deserves blame for the debacle in Afghanistan
CNN · by Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen has reported from Afghanistan since 1993. His new book is, "The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden." The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN)A group of religious warriors, riding on captured American military vehicles, vanquish a US-trained military, which relinquishes much of its power without a fight.
Sound familiar?
That's what happened in Iraq after the US withdrawal of troops from the country at the end of 2011. Within three years, an army of ISIS fighters was only a few miles from the gates of Baghdad and had taken many of the significant cities in Iraq.
It was then-Vice President Joe Biden who had negotiated the Obama administration's drawdown from Iraq.
In 2014, after ISIS began ethnic cleansing in Iraq and murdering American journalists and aid workers, then-President Barack Obama reversed that decision and sent additional military support -- upping the troop presence to 2,900.
Read More
Now Biden is presiding over a debacle entirely of his own making in Afghanistan -- and one that has unfolded more swiftly than even the most dire prognostications.
Since Biden announced a total US withdrawal in April, the Taliban have taken over more than one-third of the 34 provincial capitals in Afghanistan, and they now control more than half of the country's some 400 districts.
The Taliban have also seized control of much of northern Afghanistan, far from their traditional strongholds in the south and east of the country, demonstrating a well-thought-out military strategy. In fact, the Taliban now control the key cities of Herat and Ghanzi, the latter of which is less than 100 miles from Kabul and is located on the most important road in the country -- the Kabul to Kandahar highway.
Reporter presses Pentagon spokesperson on Afghanistan mission 02:07
The US State Department is urging all US citizens to leave the country "immediately," and the Pentagon announced it will send an additional 3,000 troops to assist in US diplomats' departures and evacuations. Meanwhile, the US government is also considering moving its embassy to Kabul airport. Apparently, the Biden administration doesn't want a replay of the iconic images of the hasty evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon in 1975.
Just as ISIS had done in Iraq, the Taliban is also attacking prisons across Afghanistan and releasing fighters who are joining the insurgency. The Afghan government has said most of these inmates, however, are criminals -- sentenced for offenses ranging from drug smuggling to armed robbery.
The Taliban 'peace' fantasy
For Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the key US negotiator with the Taliban, and academics like Professor Barnett Rubin at New York University, both of whom promoted the fantasy that the Taliban would seek a genuine negotiated peace deal with the Afghan government, a harsh reality is setting in. The chances of such a deal are next to none.
Khalilzad traveled to Doha this week where he has led "peace" negotiations with the Taliban for the past three years "to help formulate a joint international response to the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan."
Good luck with that. During the last rounds of negotiations that started under the Trump administration, Khalilzad entered into agreements with the Taliban that stated in exchange for a total US withdrawal, they would break with al Qaeda and enter into genuine peace talks with the Afghan government. The Taliban have reneged on those agreements, according to the United Nations and the Afghan government.
What do the Taliban's gains really mean? Foreign policy expert explains 02:44
Meanwhile, Khalilzad agreed to pressure the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners, several of whom simply rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released. It's hard to recall a more failed and counterproductive diplomatic effort. Maybe British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's attempt to reach a lasting peace agreement with Adolf Hitler in 1938 in Munich on the cusp of World War II?
The withdrawal date of US troops from Afghanistan was initially supposed to be September 11, 2021, but the Biden administration seems to have realized that removing all troops on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, which was masterminded by al Qaeda from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, would not be a PR triumph, and so the new date for the completion of the US withdrawal is August 31.
Nonetheless, when the 20th anniversary is memorialized at the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the US, the Taliban will surely be celebrating their great victory in Afghanistan.
According to reporting by CNN, one US intelligence assessment estimates that the Afghan capital Kabul may be fully surrounded by the Taliban come September 11 -- and that it could fall shortly after that.
A global jihadist victory
For the global jihadist movement, the victory of the Taliban will be as significant as ISIS victories were in Iraq and Syria. Just as they did after those ISIS victories, many thousands of foreign fighters are likely to pour into Afghanistan to join the victorious "holy warriors" and receive military training.
There they will join the 10,000 foreign fighters that are already based in Afghanistan from 20 foreign jihadist groups, including al Qaeda and ISIS, according to Afghanistan's ambassador to the UN, Ghulam M. Isacza.
Was the complete American withdrawal necessary? Of course not. In Iraq, around 2,500 US troops remain in the country -- the same number that were in Afghanistan at the beginning of this year. In July, Biden announced an agreement with the Iraqi government that effectively relabeled the American troops in Iraq as "non-combat" service personnel, while still leaving them in place. Biden could have taken a similar approach in Afghanistan. He didn't.
Why Biden chose one path in Iraq and another in Afghanistan isn't clear. But what is clear is that a predictable debacle is now unfolding under Biden's watch in Afghanistan.
CNN · by Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
29. FDD | The Hidden Dangers of a Carbon-Neutral Military
Conclusion:
Transferring from a diversified U.S. energy mix to one concentrated on electricity will create many new threats to the United States, including its military. This is especially important to consider in the context of competition with China, which will have an immense advantage in this new energy era. These new threats warrant a wider public discussion before the Pentagon flips the switch.
FDD | The Hidden Dangers of a Carbon-Neutral Military
If the U.S. military goes electric, it could be good for the planet—and bad for national security.
Alan Howard
U.S. Naval Postgraduate School
Dr. Brenda Shaffer
Senior Advisor for Energy
fdd.org · by Dr. Brenda Shaffer Senior Advisor for Energy · August 12, 2021
Washington has encouraged the electrification of wide swathes of the U.S. economy as a way to encourage greater use of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions. The U.S. Defense Department, the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. federal government, is now considering pursuing its own wide-scale electrification. Such a step would have profound strategic effects that should cause policymakers to proceed far more cautiously.
In recent months, the Pentagon has launched studies to examine increased use of electricity by the military, including in battle for vehicles, tanks, ships, and planes. The Pentagon has even studied the deployment of small nuclear reactors in the battle space to provide power. NATO is also promoting increased electrification of its allied militaries. According to NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, “it makes little sense to have more and more electric vehicles on our streets while our armed forces still rely only on fossil fuels.”
What Stoltenberg said sounds intuitive but may not be true. Each time a military makes a major change to its energy system, it inevitably has immense geopolitical implications. When former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the decision to transfer the main source of fuel for the British Royal Navy from coal to oil, he understood the decision had significant strategic implications. Fueled by oil, the British Royal Navy could cover larger distances without refueling and at quicker speed. Yet, through this decision, London would be dependent largely on foreign-produced oil versus homegrown coal.
Today, the United States’ energy mix is well diversified: oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydropower, biofuels, wind energy, and solar energy. Diversification is a key element of any energy security policy and a cornerstone of a system’s resilience. By relying more heavily on electricity and by regulating electricity generation in ways that phase out fossil fuels, the number of major energy sources widely consumed in the United States will inevitably shrink to a less diversified mix.
It will also make the United States more reliant on foreign actors. The bulk of energy supplies currently consumed in the United States are homegrown. The United States can supply all its oil, natural gas, and coal needs as well as uranium for nuclear power. The policy to rely more on electricity means the United States will need to import minerals necessary for electricity systems. The bulk of these minerals are found in China and countries where China is the dominant player in their economies and infrastructure. Fossil fuels, by contrast, are ample and found in diverse places around the globe. There no longer is a geopolitical race to put flags on oil or gas fields since there is enough for all.
The broader renewable energy economy’s dependence on limited rare earths and other minerals is likely to unleash a great game for minerals that is already requiring the U.S. government’s attention. To reduce dependency on imported minerals, Washington is considering granting incentives for domestic mining of these needed materials. Thus, the United States may soon go from mining coal to mining lithium, substituting one environmental threat with another.
The U.S. energy system’s increasing concentration on electricity production also drastically raises the likelihood of cyberattacks. The more interconnected an energy system is, the more vulnerable it is to severe cyberthreats. Moreover, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants—though emitting little to no carbon—have potentially catastrophic cyber vulnerabilities that entail not only the loss of power production but also plant exploitation, which could lead to massive flooding or radioactive exposure.
The United States should be strategizing about ways to combat these vulnerabilities. For it to jump headlong into contributing to those vulnerabilities by de-diversifying its own energy mix would be a disastrous folly.
And this is before even considering the specific vulnerabilities posed by an electrified military battlefield. The more the U.S. military’s equipment, infrastructure, and personnel depend on electricity, the more vulnerable it will be to cyberattacks from foreign militaries. The United States’ adversaries have substantial proven capabilities in cyberspace, some superior to the United States’ abilities. Greater use of electricity in the battlefield will also increase U.S. troops’ exposure to foreign surveillance.
The issue of supply lines will also be complicated by electrification. Almost all of the energy used by the U.S. military today is procured from commercial entities and delivered along civilian pipelines and transportation. This already complicates missions in regions far away from the United States and NATO countries, where access to fuel from friendly countries can be limited. However, access to electricity in battle will be even more challenging as power lines are only efficient over short distances. The risks are high for finding oneself too far from a friendly state. Moreover, those electricity lines, if they exist, will become easy targets of U.S. adversaries.
The time needed to charge batteries versus fueling with liquid fuels will also create an additional constraint on the military. Although planes and land vehicles can be refueled within minutes, charging their batteries could take hours.
Finally, the electrification of the United States may bring many positive effects—but it’s also worth scrutinizing its ultimate environmental impact before extending the transition to all sectors of the economy. Electricity systems require significant amounts of materials and minerals that are mined, and the main sources of these minerals are found in countries where mining practices cause significant environmental damage and are powered by electricity produced by coal or heavy oil. The mining process is likely to wipe out many of the potential environmental benefits of the energy transition to electricity.
Transferring from a diversified U.S. energy mix to one concentrated on electricity will create many new threats to the United States, including its military. This is especially important to consider in the context of competition with China, which will have an immense advantage in this new energy era. These new threats warrant a wider public discussion before the Pentagon flips the switch.
Alan Howard is a faculty member at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and is writing a textbook on Operational Energy for the U.S. Department of Defense. Brenda Shaffer is a faculty member at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and is writing a textbook on Operational Energy for the U.S. Department of Defense. Follow her on Twitter @ProfBShaffer. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Dr. Brenda Shaffer Senior Advisor for Energy · August 12, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
