Quotes of the Day:
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
- Aldous Huxley
"Wars are fought one battle at a time.
Battles, you win one bullet at a time."
-The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
"Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans, the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces, the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field, and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities."
-Sun Tzu ( from best to worst: attack Strategy, Alliances, Fielded Forces, Siege Cities)
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Late August
2. ‘I demand accountability’: Marine battalion commander calls out senior leaders for Afghanistan failures
3. Marine commander who demanded ‘accountability’ for Afghanistan failures is relieved of his duties
4. US intelligence community review does not determine origin of Covid-19
5. As U.S. Troops Searched Afghans, a Bomber in the Crowd Moved In
6. Afghanistan and the big flaw in US counterinsurgency doctrine
7. To Honor the Fallen, Americans Must Learn the Right Lesson from Afghanistan
8. Operation Pineapple Express Saw Special Ops Vets Lead The Rescue Of Hundreds Of Afghans
9. He was a baby on 9/11. Now he’s one of the last casualties of America’s longest war.
10. The Campfire v. the Podium: the Persuasive Power of Storytelling
11. Lawmakers Probe State Dept Decision to Scuttle Plan for Crisis Response Bureau Months Before Afghan Catastrophe
12. Opinion | What ISIS-K Means for Afghanistan
13. 'Food fight': Lawmakers jockey for $6B in funding after Afghan military's collapse
14. Conservatives are backing Afghanistan's resistance movement
15. U.S. Holds Talks With Taliban Over Post-Aug. 31 Presence in Afghanistan
16. FDD | What We Know—and Don’t Know—About ISIS-K
17. Intervention: Unlearned Lessons, or the Gripes of a Professional
18. An army of veterans and volunteers organizes online to evacuate Afghans, from thousands of miles away
19. Spirit of America and Afghanistan emergency update
20. Most Americans say the declining share of White people in the U.S. is neither good nor bad for society
21. A heavily fortified C.I.A. base in Kabul has been destroyed.
22. The Taliban’s vast propaganda machine has a new target
23. A Family Remembers The 1st U.S. Soldier Killed In The War In Afghanistan
24. Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Late August
August 27, 2021 | FDD Tracker: August 11 – August 27, 2021
Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: Late August
Trend Overview
Edited by Jonathan Schanzer
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Two times per month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch. These past two weeks have been exceedingly difficult for the Biden administration, as the Taliban have retaken Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal. The White House is now in damage-control mode, and its foreign policy is under fire across the board. This is reflected here with only one portfolio trending positive (Russia) and a few more trending neutral. Will the president’s foreign policies rebound? Check back in two weeks to find out.
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
Trending Very Negative
2. ‘I demand accountability’: Marine battalion commander calls out senior leaders for Afghanistan failures
A pretty bold video.
Excerpt:
“The reason people are so upset on social media right now is not because the Marine on the battlefield let someone down,” Scheller says. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down. And none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’ ”
‘I demand accountability’: Marine battalion commander calls out senior leaders for Afghanistan failures
In a screenshot from a video posted to Facebook, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, a Marine battalion commander, calls for accountability for senior military and civilian leaders for failures in Afghanistan, hours after a blast in Kabul killed 13 U.S. troops. (Facebook/Stuart Scheller)
A Marine officer who filmed a viral video says that he’s risking his career of nearly two decades to call out senior military and civilian leaders for failures in Afghanistan.
Lt. Col. Stu Scheller posted the video on social media hours after a blast in Kabul killed 13 U.S. troops. He appears in uniform and responds directly to Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger's letter to troops and veterans asking whether the nearly 20-year-long war in Afghanistan was worth it.
“The reason people are so upset on social media right now is not because the Marine on the battlefield let someone down,” Scheller says. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down. And none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’ ”
The video garnered more than 70,000 views and 6,000 shares in its first 10 hours on Facebook and LinkedIn, spurring both praise and criticism in the more than 1,000 comments.
It's the latest in a spate of calls from veterans and others demanding that senior officials answer for mistakes over the course of the war, especially in its final months. Some have blamed the precipitous U.S. withdrawal for undermining the Afghan government and allowing the Taliban to seize the country.
Critics have also likened the Afghanistan failure to the Islamic State group's sweep through Syria and Iraq in 2014, during President Joe Biden's term as vice president and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's leadership of U.S. Central Command.
An officer who commands the Advanced Infantry Training Battalion at Camp Lejeune, N.C., Scheller is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to a biography posted on his command’s website. It states that he started his career in 2005 with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, which is one of the units deployed to Kabul’s airport to support the U.S. airlift.
At least 10 Marines and a Navy corpsman were among the U.S. troops killed in the attack Thursday that was claimed by the Islamic State group. About 169 Afghans were killed, two officials told The Associated Press on Friday, though a final count is expected to take more time. Scores of others were wounded, along with at least 18 U.S. troops.
Scheller says he knows one the people killed in the blast, but he declines to name the person until the family had been notified.
“Not making this video because it’s potentially an emotional time,” he says. “Making it because I have a growing discontent and contempt for … perceived ineptitude at the foreign policy level.”
Scheller cites remarks Austin gave earlier this year suggesting that the Afghan security forces could withstand a Taliban advance. He also notes that two Marine generals are supposed to be advising the president: Berger, in his position on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CENTCOM boss Gen. Frank McKenzie, though he does not name McKenzie.
Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller called for accountability from senior military and civilian leaders for failures in Afghanistan, in a video he posted on social media platforms. (U.S. Marine Corps)
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be ... in Afghanistan forever,” Scheller says. “But I am saying, ‘Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic air base, before we evacuate everyone? Did anyone do that?’”
A Marine of his rank and position would be fired immediately over “the simplest live-fire incident” or equal opportunity complaint, he says. He then suggests that the lives lost over the past 20 years could all be for naught if high-level political and military leaders don't take responsibility for their actions.
“Potentially all those people did die in vain if we don’t have senior leaders that own up and raise their hand and say, ‘We did not do this well in the end,’ ” he says. “Without that, we just keep repeating the same mistakes.”
Scheller participated in the noncombatant evacuation of American citizens from Beirut in 2006 and deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, the following year.
Beginning in 2010, he spent a year in Afghanistan, where he led a team in Paktika and Ghazni provinces that destroyed explosives caches and sought to prevent attacks with improvised explosive devices.
“Obviously new generation Marine Corps,” LinkedIn user Erik Watson, whose profile lists five years as a Marine officer, wrote in response to Scheller. “There are proper channels [to voice concerns] and if it is not addressed to your satisfaction, so sorry so sad, keep it moving. Submit resignation ASAP.”
But others defended Scheller. Facebook user Craig Lowell called his video “probably the most incredible act of leadership I’ve ever seen.”
It's definitely out of the ordinary but almost certainly violates military rules, said Jim Golby, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a 20-year Army veteran.
“I’m not sure the last time I’ve seen an active-duty battalion commander openly and directly challenge senior military officers, including the Commandant of the Marine Corps, in this way,” he said.
Scheller echoes what many are feeling, but the video could be used to sow division in the ranks, Golby said, and in the end likely does more harm than good.
Scheller has no plans to resign, he said in a comment, though in the video he says his critique could cut his career short, “if I have the courage to post it.”
“I think what you believe can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk,” he says. “I think it gives me some moral high ground to demand the same honesty, integrity, accountability from my senior leaders.”
“I’ve been fighting for 17 years,” he continues. “I’m willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, ‘I demand accountability.’”
___
Scheller isn't the only Marine having serious misgivings about the way the U.S. military has handled its pullout from Afghanistan.
On Friday, Retired Marine Corps 1st Sgt. John Bennett released a video in which he first offered his condolences to the families and loved ones of the U.S. service members who died in Thursday's suicide bombing. He then added that the loss of life was unnecessary, and Bennett laid the blame “squarely on Joe Biden and his failing administration.”
Bennett offered up plenty more strongly-worded sentiments in his six minute video.
Chad Garland
Chad is a Marine Corps veteran who covers the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and sometimes elsewhere for Stars and Stripes. An Illinois native who’s reported for news outlets in Washington, D.C., Arizona, Oregon and California, he’s an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University.
3. Marine commander who demanded ‘accountability’ for Afghanistan failures is relieved of his duties
Perhap he wanted a fast exit from the Corps.
But maybe he should have heeded the advice of Ambrose Bierce: "Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret." (for those who missed Friday's quote of the day)
Marine commander who demanded ‘accountability’ for Afghanistan failures is relieved of his duties
In a screenshot from a video posted to Facebook, Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, a Marine battalion commander, calls for accountability for senior military and civilian leaders for failures in Afghanistan, hours after a blast in Kabul killed 13 U.S. troops. (Facebook/Stuart Scheller)
“My chain of command is doing exactly what I would do…if I were in their shoes,” Lt. Col. Stu Scheller wrote in identical Facebook and LinkedIn posts announcing his dismissal from command of the Advanced Infantry Training Battalion at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
Marine leaders can address their disagreements with the chain of command through proper channels, not social media, said Maj. Jim Stenger, a Marine Corps spokesman, in an emailed statement confirming that Scheller had been relieved by Col. David Emmel, commanding officer of the School of Infantry-East.
“This is obviously an emotional time for a lot of Marines, and we encourage anyone struggling right now to seek counseling or talk to a fellow Marine,” Stenger said.
Scheller posted the video critique on social media Thursday, hours after a blast in Kabul killed 13 U.S. troops. He appears in uniform and responds directly to Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger’s letter to troops and veterans asking whether the nearly 20-year-long war in Afghanistan was worth it.
“The reason people are so upset on social media right now is not because the Marine on the battlefield let someone down,” Scheller says in the video. “People are upset because their senior leaders let them down. And none of them are raising their hands and accepting accountability or saying, ‘We messed this up.’ ”
The video garnered more than 300,000 views and 22,000 shares on Facebook and LinkedIn, spurring both praise and criticism in the more than 4,000 comments within its first 24 hours.
It’s the latest in a spate of calls from veterans and others demanding that senior officials answer for mistakes over the course of the war, especially in its final months. Some have blamed the precipitous U.S. withdrawal for undermining the Afghan government and allowing the Taliban to seize the country.
Critics have also likened the Afghanistan failure to the Islamic State group’s sweep through Syria and Iraq in 2014, when President Joe Biden was vice president and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin led U.S. Central Command.
Scheller is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to a biography posted on his command’s website. It states that he started his career in 2005 with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, which is one of the units deployed to Kabul’s airport to support the U.S. airlift.
Eleven Marines, a soldier and a Navy corpsman were killed in the attack Thursday that was claimed by the Islamic State group. About 169 Afghans were killed, two officials told The Associated Press on Friday, though a final count is expected to take more time. Scores of others were wounded, along with at least 18 U.S. troops.
Scheller says he knows one of the people killed in the blast, but he declined to name the person until the family had been notified.
“Not making this video because it’s potentially an emotional time,” he says in the video. “Making it because I have a growing discontent and contempt for … perceived ineptitude at the foreign policy level.”
Scheller cites remarks Austin gave earlier this year suggesting that the Afghan security forces could withstand a Taliban advance. He also notes that two Marine generals are supposed to be advising the president: Berger, in his position on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CENTCOM boss Gen. Frank McKenzie, though he does not name McKenzie.
“I’m not saying we’ve got to be ... in Afghanistan forever,” Scheller says in the video. “But I am saying, ‘Did any of you throw your rank on the table and say, hey, it’s a bad idea to evacuate Bagram Airfield, a strategic air base, before we evacuate everyone? Did anyone do that?’”
A Marine of his rank and position would be fired immediately over “the simplest live-fire incident” or equal opportunity complaint, he says. He then suggests that the lives lost over the past 20 years could all be for naught if high-level political and military leaders don’t take responsibility for their actions.
“Potentially all those people did die in vain if we don’t have senior leaders that own up and raise their hand and say, ‘We did not do this well in the end,’ ” he says. “Without that, we just keep repeating the same mistakes.”
Scheller participated in the noncombatant evacuation of American citizens from Beirut in 2006 and deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, the following year.
Beginning in 2010, he spent a year in Afghanistan, where he led a team in Paktika and Ghazni provinces that destroyed explosives caches and sought to prevent attacks with improvised explosive devices.
“Obviously new generation Marine Corps,” LinkedIn user Erik Watson, whose profile lists five years as a Marine officer, wrote in response to Scheller. “There are proper channels [to voice concerns] and if it is not addressed to your satisfaction, so sorry so sad, keep it moving. Submit resignation ASAP.”
But others defended Scheller. Facebook user Craig Lowell called his video “probably the most incredible act of leadership I’ve ever seen.”
It’s definitely out of the ordinary but almost certainly violates military rules, said Jim Golby, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a 20-year Army veteran.
“I’m not sure the last time I’ve seen an active-duty battalion commander openly and directly challenge senior military officers, including the Commandant of the Marine Corps, in this way,” he said.
Scheller echoes what many are feeling, but the video could be used to sow division in the ranks, Golby said, and in the end likely does more harm than good.
Scheller had no plans to resign, he said in a comment responding to Watson, though in the video he says his critique would likely cut his career short “if I have the courage to post it.”
“I think what you believe can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk,” he says in the video. “I think it gives me some moral high ground to demand the same honesty, integrity, accountability from my senior leaders.”
“I’ve been fighting for 17 years,” he continues. “I’m willing to throw it all away to say to my senior leaders, ‘I demand accountability.’”
In a message on LinkedIn earlier in the day, Scheller declined to speak to Stars and Stripes “until the dust settles.” After his firing he said in his post that he would not be making further statements to the press until he leaves the service.
America “has many issues,” but is “the light shining in a fog of chaos” where he will raise his three sons, Scheller said in the post about his firing. He was looking forward to a new beginning after the Corps, he said.
“While my days of hand to hand violence may be ending,” he said. “I see a new light on the horizon.”
Chad Garland
Chad is a Marine Corps veteran who covers the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and sometimes elsewhere for Stars and Stripes. An Illinois native who’s reported for news outlets in Washington, D.C., Arizona, Oregon and California, he’s an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Arizona State University.
4. US intelligence community review does not determine origin of Covid-19
China must have made damn sure the gun was not smoking.
US intelligence community review does not determine origin of Covid-19
CNN · by Alex Marquardt and Jeremy Herb, CNN
(CNN)The US intelligence community reached an inconclusive assessment about the origin of the Covid-19 virus following a 90-day investigation ordered by President Joe Biden, according to an unclassified summary of the probe released publicly on Friday.
The intelligence community is still divided about which of the two theories -- that the virus came from a lab leak or that it jumped from animal to human naturally -- is likely to be correct, the intelligence community said. There is consensus among the intelligence agencies that the two prevailing theories are plausible, according to the summary released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
"All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and laboratory-associated incident," the intelligence community wrote.
The unclassified report, two-page report, was released Friday by the intelligence community after Biden had asked intelligence agencies to "redouble" their efforts to determine how the Covid-19 pandemic began. Biden, who tasked them with declassifying as much of the report as possible, was briefed on the investigation earlier this week.
"While this review has concluded, our efforts to understand the origins of this pandemic will not rest," Biden said in a statement after the summary was released Friday. "We will do everything we can to trace the roots of this outbreak that has caused so much pain and death around the world, so that we can take every necessary precaution to prevent it from happening again."
Read More
In the statement, Biden criticized China for not being more transparent in helping the investigation, and the intelligence community said China's cooperation would likely be needed to reach a more definitive conclusion.
"Critical information about the origins of this pandemic exists in the People's Republic of China, yet from the beginning, government officials in China have worked to prevent international investigators and members of the global public health community from accessing it," Biden said.
While the investigation did not reach a conclusive assessment on the origin of the virus, it did knock down some theories. The intelligence community judged, for instance, that Covid-19 was not developed as a biological weapon, as some Republicans had suggested last year. The report says most agencies assessed with low confidence that it's unlikely Covid-19 was genetically engineered, either.
Agencies divided on origin theories
Four intelligence community agencies and the National Intelligence Council assessed, with low confidence, that Covid was likely caused by natural exposure to an animal, the summary says. One agency assessed with moderate confidence, however, that the first human infection most likely was the result of a lab-associated incident that "probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute."
And three agencies said they were unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information.
One of the agencies that did not take a firm position one way or the other was the CIA, according to a source who was briefed on the contents of the classified report.
The intelligence report says the virus probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019.
But the summary says that the intelligence community would need more information from the early days of the pandemic to provide "a more definitive explanation for the origin of Covid-19."
"The IC -- and the global scientific community -- lacks clinical samples or a complete understanding of epidemiological data from the earliest Covid-19 cases," the intelligence community wrote.
China's unwillingness to cooperate hampered the intelligence community's ability to get answers on the origins of the virus. "China's cooperation most likely would be needed to reach a conclusive assessment of the origins of Covid-19," the intelligence community said. "Beijing, however, continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame(s) other countries, including the United States."
While the report does lay blame on China, it says Chinese officials "did not have foreknowledge of the virus before the initial outbreak."
Window for understanding origins is closing
Earlier this month, CNN reported intelligence agencies were poring through a trove of genetic data drawn from virus samples at the lab in Wuhan that some officials believe could have been the source of the outbreak.
Officials told CNN this week that the intelligence agencies were switching sides on which theory was more likely as recently as last week.
Biden launched the review into the origins of Covid-19 earlier this year amid growing calls for a deep dive after a US intelligence report found several researchers at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized.
Last month, a bipartisan group of lawmakers said they want Biden to continue investigating the virus' origins even after the 90-day review is completed.
The window to find an answer to the pandemic's origins could be fading, however. A team of experts commissioned by the World Health Organization said Wednesday that the opportunity to find out where the pandemic began is disappearing as people's immune responses fade away and any evidence in the bodies of animals vanishes.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
CNN · by Alex Marquardt and Jeremy Herb, CNN
5. As U.S. Troops Searched Afghans, a Bomber in the Crowd Moved In
Excerpts:
Airport security had closed two of the gates, but decided to leave Abbey Gate open, U.S. officials said.
They also said they believed that, earlier in the day, Taliban commanders and fighters manning checkpoints along the airport route had foiled two possible attempts by militants to reach the airport.
But the third one got through.
At 5:48 p.m., the bomber, wearing a 25-pound explosive vest under clothing, walked up to the group of Americans who were frisking people hoping to enter the complex. He waited, officials said, until just before he was about to be searched by the American troops. And then he detonated the bomb, which was unusually large for a suicide vest, killing himself and igniting an attack that would leave dozens of people dead, including 13 American service members.
“This is close-up war — the breath of the person you are searching is upon you,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of United States Central Command, said on Thursday after the attack, describing the face-to-face contact between Marines at the airport gate and Afghans they must search before allowing them to enter.
I am surprised these journalists got this wrong. While the Admiral may not be assigned to a SEAL unit is is still a member of the Navy SEALs. He is not a former member. I am sure he still wears his Trident.
Excerpt:
Rear Adm. Peter G. Vasely, a former member of the Navy SEALs running the airport operation, asked Taliban commanders to check people heading toward Abbey Gate more closely, the officials said. The Taliban, General McKenzie told reporters on Thursday, may have “thwarted” other attempts.
As U.S. Troops Searched Afghans, a Bomber in the Crowd Moved In
By Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt and Thomas Gibbons-Neff
Officials are still piecing together the chain of events in the attack that killed scores of people, including 13 U.S. service members, outside the Kabul airport.
Estimates of the total dead and wounded had varied, with local health officials saying that as many as 170 people were killed.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Aug. 27, 2021Updated 8:07 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON — The suicide bomber waited until the last possible moment, U.S. officials said.
A crowd straining to get into Hamid Karzai International Airport had converged on Abbey Gate, a main entryway manned by Marines and other service members. The troops knew that they could be targeted in an attack; just the day before, the State Department had warned of a “credible” threat at three gates at the airport, where more than 5,000 American troops had helped to evacuate more than 100,000 people in less than two weeks. Abbey Gate was on the list.
Airport security had closed two of the gates, but decided to leave Abbey Gate open, U.S. officials said.
They also said they believed that, earlier in the day, Taliban commanders and fighters manning checkpoints along the airport route had foiled two possible attempts by militants to reach the airport.
But the third one got through.
At 5:48 p.m., the bomber, wearing a 25-pound explosive vest under clothing, walked up to the group of Americans who were frisking people hoping to enter the complex. He waited, officials said, until just before he was about to be searched by the American troops. And then he detonated the bomb, which was unusually large for a suicide vest, killing himself and igniting an attack that would leave dozens of people dead, including 13 American service members.
“This is close-up war — the breath of the person you are searching is upon you,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of United States Central Command, said on Thursday after the attack, describing the face-to-face contact between Marines at the airport gate and Afghans they must search before allowing them to enter.
Pentagon officials said they were still piecing together the chain of events that took place at Abbey Gate on Thursday. There will be after-action reviews and storyboards with detailed lists of what led up to that moment. There will be questions: Why were so many service members grouped so close together? How did the bomber evade the Taliban checkpoints? Did someone let him through?
As the scope of the damage became clearer, health officials in Kabul raised the death toll, saying at least 170 people had been killed. Afghans seeking to escape Taliban rule continued to stream to the airport on Friday, but the size of the crowd was estimated in the hundreds, down from the thousands who were there when the blast occurred. The airport remained largely locked down, although evacuation flights continued.
Just after 2 p.m. Friday, as another gray-tailed U.S. aircraft lifted into the sky from the airport, this one carrying the flag-draped coffins of the 13 Americans, the anguish from Thursday’s bombing spread from Kabul to Kansas. At the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, service members were bracing for the ritual of dressing and preparing yet another group of American troops killed in Afghanistan.
“I’m never been one for politics and I’m not going to start now,” Marilyn Soviak, the sister of Maxton Soviak, a Navy corpsman from Ohio who was among the dead, posted on Instagram. “What I will say is that my beautiful, intelligent, beat-to-the-sound of his own drum, annoying, charming baby brother was killed yesterday helping to save lives.”
Just after the bomb went off, Defense Department officials said, fighters nearby began firing weapons. The officials said that some of the Americans and Afghans at Abbey Gate might have been hit by that gunfire. There was so much confusion in the aftermath of the explosion that the military initially reported that a second suicide bombing had taken place at nearby Baron Hotel. That turned out to be false, according to Maj. Gen. Hank Taylor, the Joint Staff deputy director for regional operations.
The Pentagon said at least 13 U.S. service members were killed and 15 wounded in the attack near an airport gate on Thursday. Scores of Afghan civilians were killed and wounded.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
At 25 pounds, the vest worn by the suicide bomber did untold damage. According to Army manuals, suicide bombers typically wear either a belt containing 10 pounds or less of explosives, or a vest packed with 10 to 20 pounds of explosives. With a 25-pound vest that included pieces of metal that acted as lethal shrapnel, the bomber also wounded dozens of Afghans, as well as 14 additional American troops, who were medevacked to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near the Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
From the moment last month that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered a Marine Expeditionary Unit from the U.S.S. Iwo Jima to disembark in Kuwait and be ready to help with evacuations in the event that Kabul fell to a surging Taliban, it has been clear to American troops that they could once again end up on the front lines of a war in Afghanistan that has been declared finished by a succession of presidents.
It did not take long for Hamid Karzai International Airport to transform from a commercial hub to the final defensive position for the U.S. military, which had once surged tens of thousands of troops to far-flung corners of Afghanistan. Apache gunships circled overhead, and Marine quick-reaction forces orbited the perimeter. In the command center, feeds from drones and surveillance cameras piped in infrared images of crowds massing at the gates.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
Card 1 of 5
Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
The Marines who were manning Abbey Gate on Thursday had arrived in Kabul about a week earlier. They were fresh, and linked up with their British paratrooper counterparts with one goal in mind: Get as many people through as possible. That meant using an interpreter and a loudspeaker to persuade a surging crowd to move back, a painstaking task that allowed the Marines to open two entry points.
The fall of Kabul had unleashed a tsunami of phone calls, emails and desperate texts from the foreign organizations that had worked in Afghanistan over the past 20 years, all imploring the Pentagon for help getting their Afghan workers and allies evacuated. Other people who worked with Afghans, including teachers who visited schools in Afghanistan, joined American senators, media chiefs and the heads of global organizations in asking for help for their former partners, who are in danger of Taliban reprisals.
The requests reached the American troops at Kabul airport. “The Marines who died were the ones who were helping our team,” said Cori Shepherd, a filmmaker who once helped Afghan girls come to school in the United States. “These men were quite literally going into the masses and pulling our women to safety, while coordinating with our guy to find them. The men who worked Abbey Gate were brave beyond measure.”
U.S. Marines guarding the perimeter of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul on Sunday.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Rear Adm. Peter G. Vasely, a former member of the Navy SEALs running the airport operation, asked Taliban commanders to check people heading toward Abbey Gate more closely, the officials said. The Taliban, General McKenzie told reporters on Thursday, may have “thwarted” other attempts.
But in the end, “there’s no substitute for a young man or woman — a young United States man or woman — standing up there conducting a search of that person before we let him in,” General McKenzie said.
The effort to get vulnerable people out of Afghanistan will continue, he said. “Because that is why we are there.”
John Ismay contributed reporting.
6. Afghanistan and the big flaw in US counterinsurgency doctrine
Excerpts:
No one really has figured out how a third-party military intervention shores up the legitimacy of a client state in a post-colonial context. FM 3-24 has no answers. Interestingly, current French doctrine, updated in 2013, at least acknowledges explicitly that everything has changed, and it highlight the limits on what a post-colonial intervening force can do. In essence: The client state’s existing political leadership has to rewrite the social contract, the failure of which is what made insurgency thrive. But it is not the intervening force’s place to write it, nor is it its place to impose an alien order.
All the intervening force can do is support the existing indigenous political structure, while the existing indigenous political structure orients “and even constrains” the intervention force. This approach necessarily demands great modesty on the part of the intervening country, as it places responsibility for success largely with the host nation. It also means that there is an almost inevitable tension between the intervening force’s agenda and its client, and between its timeline and the host’s own tempo.
I hate to be flippant. The answer to third party intervention is to NOT conduct a "COIN intervention." Do not conduct an intervention and do not be an occupying force, do not rewrite a country's social contract and do not impose an alien order (or in the case do not be "Maritan" (HERE)). The proper mission might be foreign internal defense (FID) - the employment of US government agencies and the military at advise and assist a host nation in its internal development and defense programs to help the host nation government defense itself against subversion, lawlessness, insurgency, terrorism and other threats to its sovereignty.
Ways to support a host nation conducting COIN may be through FID can be seen in Colombia (HERE) , El Salvador (HERE), and the Philippines (HERE) though of course these are apples to oranges comparisons with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Afghanistan and the big flaw in US counterinsurgency doctrine
The Hill · by Michael Shurkin, Opinion Contributor · August 25, 2021
While we struggle to understand the U.S. failure in Afghanistan, an important element that must be included in the discussion is a fundamental flaw at the heart of U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine. That doctrine has historical roots that go as far back as the Indian Wars and the Philippines. But in its contemporary iteration, American COIN doctrine is nearly synonymous with the U.S. Army’s Field Manual 3-24, originally published in 2006 under the imprimatur of General David Petraeus. Petraeus in turn drew heavily from French COIN doctrine, which itself has roots in France’s fin-de-siècle colonial adventures but achieved its fullest expression in the Algerian War (1954-1962). And that precisely is where the problem lies.
Petraeus’s direct inspiration was French Lieutenant Colonel David Galula (1919-1967), who was not the only French officer to develop COIN doctrine in the 1950s and not even necessarily the best, but he was the only one who wrote in English. Galula wrote convincingly about the need to provide security to local populations and to minimize combat operations in favor of hearts-and-minds efforts.
Galula had his men integrate themselves in local communities; he won the trust of villagers and succeeded in mobilizing locals to provide security and isolate insurgents. He did not do much fighting, and he criticized what Americans would later term “kinetic” operations as unlikely to achieve meaningful results. There is a direct line from his ideas to Petraeus’s, and later to the direction General Stanley McChrystal gave while in command in Afghanistan.
Galula’s ideas are not without merit, and there is a lot the French did in Algeria that might be applicable elsewhere. But Petraeus and other American enthusiasts in the 2000s appear to have overlooked entirely the historical context in which Galula wrote and the fundamental difference between then and now: Galula wrote in a colonial context. We are operating in a post-colonial context. Galula’s objective was perpetuating colonial rule. He, as a French officer, was fighting in France’s name to shore up France’s legitimacy. In contrast, we fight in someone else’s name to shore up someone else’s legitimacy.
At its most concrete, the difference between colonial and post-colonial settings boils down to what one can offer the population, which, per FM 3-24, is the true “center of gravity” in an insurgency. Galula emphasizes in his writing that a key part of the colonial regime’s pitch to the population is that the colonial power is not going anywhere. Therefore, siding with the colonial power and supporting it tacitly or actively is a reasonable choice. One can trust that which will always be there.
This argument undoubtedly helped France recruit large numbers of locals to fight under French colors. In contrast, the post-colonial foreign power that broadcasts its intention to leave from the moment it first arrives faces a far more difficult time rallying and sustaining support.
No one really has figured out how a third-party military intervention shores up the legitimacy of a client state in a post-colonial context. FM 3-24 has no answers. Interestingly, current French doctrine, updated in 2013, at least acknowledges explicitly that everything has changed, and it highlight the limits on what a post-colonial intervening force can do. In essence: The client state’s existing political leadership has to rewrite the social contract, the failure of which is what made insurgency thrive. But it is not the intervening force’s place to write it, nor is it its place to impose an alien order.
All the intervening force can do is support the existing indigenous political structure, while the existing indigenous political structure orients “and even constrains” the intervention force. This approach necessarily demands great modesty on the part of the intervening country, as it places responsibility for success largely with the host nation. It also means that there is an almost inevitable tension between the intervening force’s agenda and its client, and between its timeline and the host’s own tempo.
The distinction between colonial and post-colonial and the modesty required in the latter context sheds considerable light on what went wrong for the U.S. in Afghanistan. Without the distinction in mind, our government and military fell victim to inappropriate levels of ambition and paid insufficient attention to the strengths and weaknesses of its Afghan partners, who were in the driver’s seat.
It also meant that whatever transpired would be according to their priorities, and at their rhythm, which we had no reason to expect would match our incessant need to achieve success before the end of each period of performance, deployment or presidential term.
Michael Shurkin is a former CIA officer and RAND senior political scientist. He is director of global programs at 14 North Strategies and the founder of Shurbros Global Strategies.
The Hill · by Michael Shurkin, Opinion Contributor · August 25, 2021
7. To Honor the Fallen, Americans Must Learn the Right Lesson from Afghanistan
To Honor the Fallen, Americans Must Learn the Right Lesson from Afghanistan | Small Wars Journal
Author's Note: When I sat down to write this piece, I had no purpose in mind beyond catharsis and to exorcise some demons. I had no goal, audience, or particular message in mind. I just wanted to capture what I was thinking and this piece is what emerged after a lengthy and messy writing process. It is my sincerest hope that in releasing this piece to the broadest possible audience I am honoring the sacrifice of PFC Cody Board, his family, and that these words inspire others to do the same.
To Honor the Fallen, Americans Must Learn the Right Lesson from Afghanistan
By Michael Poce
It’s been through misty eyes that I’ve observed the events of the past few days unfold in Afghanistan. While it’s been years since I’ve been sanguine in my outlook toward how US (and our allies) involvement in Afghanistan would end, it is nevertheless surprisingly difficult to watch a total collapse happen in real time. The past few days have thrust questions back to the forefront of my awareness that, while never looming far off, had eased their grip over the years. Was Cody Board’s sacrifice “worth it?” What could I have done differently that might have saved his life? Did we make a difference? And do Americans even care?
It hasn’t taken long for me to reach the same conclusions that I have time and again, that brooding over questions such as these leads nowhere and will drive you mad if you let them. There is nothing we can do to change the past. But we must be deliberate in how we choose to move forward. In order to move on in the right direction, however, we must first learn the right lessons. Reading the analysis over the past several days has led me to question whether we as a country are in fact learning the right lessons from America’s Afghan experience. Specifically, that after twenty years of trying to establish a democratic government in Afghanistan that resembles our own, we have emerged as a nation that more closely resembles Afghanistan. Let me explain.
One of my vivid memories of September 11th and its aftermath was President Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress in the days following the attacks. I remember being frustrated and annoyed as a sixteen-year-old watching it on TV as everyone in the room stood up to clap and interrupt with every remark the President made. I wanted to scream, “Let him get his speech out!” It was only in school the following day that teachers explained the historical anomaly that we had witnessed the previous night. They explained that every speech a President delivers to Congress is politically fraught, with each side playing a choreographed part of applauding those statements that support its position and remaining conspicuously silent when a comment scores political points for the other side. I didn’t realize then what an amazing episode of American history I was having the privilege to witness. Looking back with what we know of American politics today, I don’t know if anyone did…
What does this episode have to do with the recent events in Afghanistan? I had the good fortune of only ever having to deploy to Afghanistan once, over ten years ago. But during my twelve months in country, it was a daily occurrence to see a diverse, multiethnic mosaic of tribes, artificially assembled together in name to form a country, remain bitterly unable to overcome centuries of mistrust toward one another to achieve a common good. The ONLY thing that mattered in my corner of the country whenever a person assumed a position of power was the tribe he belonged to. The typical dialogue amongst an assembly of Afghan interlocutors regarding a person of power would go something like the following: “Is he Pashtun or Tajik? Uzbek or Hazara? Oh, he’s Pashtun? Well, which tribe? Achekzai or Barakzai? Oh, Achekzai? Well, which neighborhood in the district is he from?” In everyone’s minds there was an ever-devolving sense of tribalism whereby unless a person looks exactly like me, thinks like me, and comes from the same place I come from, then they are an enemy and not to be trusted. Each person had a blind devotion to their own tribe that stifled conversation and prevented any sort of collaboration. This is my frame of reference when I hear or read about tribalism.
Over the past several weeks, commentators have marveled at the speed at which the Taliban has wrested control of Afghanistan from the Afghan government. What is more distressing to me is the dizzying speed at which we as a country have flitted away the sense of mutual resolve, shared identity, and common purpose that were on full display in the days after September 11th. In many respects, we now mirror the dynamic I saw in Afghanistan. No longer do certain segments of America view their fellow citizens as just that, common participants in an experiment of self-governance who hold an equal sense of dignity and responsibility regardless of their station in life. Instead, if they don’t look like me, think like me, have the same level of education I do, belong to the same class I do, believe the same religion I do, or live in the same geography I do, then they are an enemy actively and maliciously trying to destroy this country from within. We’ve substituted “Pashtun or Tajik” and “Uzbek or Hazara” for “liberal or conservative” and “coastal elite or Trump supporter.” In this climate, anger and recriminations masquerade as citizenship. To be abundantly clear, this sense of tribalism pervades BOTH the left and the right, and each time I see it manifest I am transported back to the same intransigence and fear of the other I saw in Afghanistan.
There is no shortage of people to blame for the failure in Afghanistan: presidents, congress, military leaders, the American people. While all these people share part of the blame, to stop there is to rob the Afghan people of agency. To my mind, the lesson from Afghanistan is that a diverse, multiethnic society failed to coalesce around an idea of something bigger than what’s best for their own immediate tribal group. And so long as we tell ourselves that we in America are more advanced and sophisticated than the people of Afghanistan, we miss the fact that we are equally susceptible to the most base of human impulses: the categorization and demonization of “the other.” That is the lesson we need to take from Afghanistan.
If you find yourself, like me, still disturbed by whether the sacrifices of so many Americans and their families (and those of our allies) was “worth it,” I’ll offer a closing thought. Don’t limit your thinking to the immediate situation in Afghanistan. Those who gave their lives swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, that is to say, the idea of what America is. They did not swear an oath to win a war in Afghanistan or to defeat a specific enemy. This subtle difference ought to be a call to action for all of us. Are we earning their sacrifice by the way we live our lives and the type of citizen we are? Or are we instead mirroring the tribal behaviors of a country that just collapsed? If we as a country consider these questions, and the answers effect a positive change that preserves the idea of what America is, then yes, their sacrifices were absolutely worth it. But it’s on us to earn it.
MAJ Michael Poce is a U.S. Army Special Forces officer. He served one tour of duty in Afghanistan from 2010-2011. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not represent the 5th Special Forces Group, 1st SFC, USASOC, or the United States Army.
8. Operation Pineapple Express Saw Special Ops Vets Lead The Rescue Of Hundreds Of Afghans
Great efforts by so many committed and selfless Americans who continue to serve and try to contribute even after they ETS/retire.
Operation Pineapple Express Saw Special Ops Vets Lead The Rescue Of Hundreds Of Afghans
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Earlier this week, the collection of current and former members of U.S. special operations forces units, intelligence operatives, aid workers, and others were able to sneak hundreds of at-risk Afghans into the safety of the American-controlled portion of Hamid Karzai International Airport. This involved helping small groups navigate past Taliban checkpoints to a secret entrance into the airport, and included the use of codewords and other signals. One of the individuals who led the effort, nicknamed the Pineapple Express after the group's own nickname, Task Force Pineapple, said that the entire affair often felt like something straight out of a Jason Bourne movie.
ABC News was first to report on the Pineapple Express mission, which took place between Wednesday and Thursday. Individuals from Task Force Pineapple were still shepherding Afghans into the airport when the fatal terrorist attack occurred yesterday evening, which you can read more about here, and some of the evacuees were wounded as a result. Members of this ad hoc group of special operators and others said they were able to help as many 500 Afghans get to safety in this one particular operation and that they had rescued more than 130 others since Aug. 16, the day after the Taliban marched into Kabul.
CENTCOM
A US Marine helps lift an Afghan up into the perimeter at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Afghanistan on Aug. 26, 2021.
"Dozens of high-risk individuals, families with small children, orphans, and pregnant women, were secretly moved through the streets of Kabul throughout the night and up to just seconds before ISIS detonated a bomb into the huddled mass of Afghans seeking safety and freedom," retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, a member of Task Force Pineapple and a retired Green Beret commander, told ABC News. "This Herculean effort couldn't have been done without the unofficial heroes inside the airfield who defied their orders to not help beyond the airport perimeter, by wading into sewage canals and pulling in these targeted people who were flashing pineapples on their phones."
However, informal groups and other kinds of networks that have sprung up have also become a critical means of getting individuals to safety. Task Force Pineapple is one of these entities, but there are known to be others, including one named Task Force Dunkirk, a reference to the legendary evacuation of the remnants of the British Expeditionary Force from France in 1940 during World War II. Individuals and groups outside of Afghanistan, using various online tools, have also been helping to coordinate these kinds of evacuations as part of what some have dubbed a "Digital Dunkirk."
Retired U.S. Army Captain Zac Lois, another former Green Beret working with Task Force Pineapple, "said he modeled his slow and steady system of maneuvering the Afghan families in the darkness after Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad for American slave escapees," according to ABC News. This particular network, which has reportedly been just using an encrypted chat group to coordinate its activities, uses Underground Railroad terminology, with "conductors" helping individuals move through a chain of safe locations in Kabul to get to the airport. Lois is described as the railroad's "engineer."
Those helping to guide Afghan "passengers," who include former government security forces personnel, intelligence assets, interpreters, and their families, among others, to safety are also referred to as "shepherds" in today's story. The evacuees are ultimately told to link up with individuals at the airport who are identified by some sort of code, such as a specific addition to their clothing. It's not clear what, if any, weapons the volunteers on the ground might carry, but pictures Lois provided to ABC News do show individuals who are apparently part of Task Force Pineapple carrying small arms.
CENTCOM
The exact extent to which Task Force Pineapple, and other groups like it, have been coordinating directly with the U.S. government is unclear, but formalized links do exist. "The group I was attached to as a volunteer was listed in the command center as a supporting element. We were part of the team," Tim Kennedy, an active-duty Army special operator who has been working with another group wrote on Twitter today, while also offering additional details you can read below.
Regardless, until this week, with the U.S. government's withdrawal deadline, which is still set for Aug. 31, drawing ever closer, Task Force Pineapple has only ever moved small groups of people in a single night. Even the details about what Task Force Pineapple has been doing sound absolutely harrowing. ABC News' piece includes the following description of the mission that started it all:
During an intense night last week involving coordination between Mann and another Green Beret, an intelligence officer, former aid workers and a staffer for Florida Republican and Green Beret officer Rep. Mike Waltz, the ad hoc team enlisted the aid of a sleepless U.S. Embassy officer inside the airport. He helped Marines at a gate to identify the former Afghan commando, who was caught in the throngs of civilians outside the airport and who said he saw two civilians knocked to the ground and killed.
"Two people died next to me -- 1 foot away," he told ABC News from outside the airport that night, as he tried for hours to reach an entry control point manned by U.S. Marines a short distance away.
With Taliban fighters mixing into the crowd of thousands and firing their AK-47s above the masses, the former elite commando was finally pulled into the U.S. security perimeter, where he shouted the password "Pineapple!" to American troops at the checkpoint. The password has since changed, the sources said.
Ramping up operations earlier this week only increased the risks. Mann described what happened between Wednesday night and Thursday morning as being "full of dramatic scenes rivaling a 'Jason Bourne' thriller unfolding every 10 minutes," according to ABC News.
"The small groups of Afghans repeatedly encountered Taliban foot soldiers who they said beat them but never checked identity papers that might have revealed them as operators who spent two decades killing Taliban leadership," the ABC News story explained. "All carried U.S. visas, pending visa applications or new applications prepared by members of Task Force Pineapple."
There have been reports for days now about the difficulties Afghans and even American nationals have had in getting through Taliban checkpoints to get to the airport. Politico reported just yesterday that U.S. officials had made the extremely controversial decision to pass information about U.S. citizens and Afghans to the Taliban to try to ensure they could get to the airport. This, of course, could only have increased the already substantial risks faced by all of these individuals, especially Afghans who are already in danger of reprisals due to their past work with the United States or affiliations with the now-defunct government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
"Many of the Afghans arrived near Abbey Gate [at Hamid Karzai International Airport] and waded through a sewage-choked canal toward a U.S. soldier wearing red sunglasses to identify himself," the ABC News piece continued. "They waved their phones with the pineapples and were scooped up and brought inside the wire to safety. Others were brought in by an Army Ranger wearing a modified American flag patch with the [U.S. Army's 75th] Ranger Regiment emblem."
At one point during the mission, a number of Task Force Pineapple teams on the ground lost signal to their cellphones and were unable to communicate with the rest of the group. This was reportedly the result of active electronic warfare jamming on the part of U.S. forces at the airport who were trying to prevent cellphones from being used to remotely trigger improvised explosive devices. There were other, separate reports earlier this week that jammers might have been used for this purpose amid escalating concerns that a terrorist attack could be imminent. This was all, of course, before yesterday's events outside of the airport in Kabul, which started with an individual detonating a suicide vest they were wearing.
"The whole night was a roller-coaster ride. People were so terrified in that chaotic environment," Jason Redman, a retired U.S. SEAL, author, and member of Task Force Pineapple, told ABC News. "These people were so exhausted, I kept trying to put myself in their shoes."
"I have been involved in some of the most incredible missions and operations that a special forces guy could be a part of, and I have never been a part of anything more incredible than this," retired Army Major Jim Gant, another former Green Beret who been working with Task Force Pineapple, also said. "The bravery and courage and commitment of my brothers and sisters in the Pineapple community was greater than the U.S. commitment on the battlefield."
It's not clear whether Task Force Pineapple, or any of the other similar groups, is still operating in Kabul or, if they are, how long they will continue to do so. The U.S. military is only days away from the date of its expected total withdrawal from Afghanistan and there are already indications that official evacuation operations are starting to wind down. This has included the start of controlled detonations at the airport to destroy equipment that won't be withdrawn at the end. There were also reports today that the Central Intelligence Agency had closed down one of, if not the last of its major operational sites in Afghanistan.
Other countries have been announcing the end of their own evacuation operations for days now ahead of the American deadline. There are also reports today that the Taliban have been exerting more authority over the civilian side of Hamid Karzai International Airport, though American officials have denied that U.S. troops have already pulled out completely.
While the U.S. government has insisted that evacuation operations will continue right up until the last moment, the total capacity to get people out of the country can only shrink in the coming days. With that, the ability of groups like Task Force Pineapple to just find planes to get people onto will also decrease.
"I just want to get my people out," Gant told ABC News, referring to Afghans who worked with Americans over the past nearly two decades of American operations in Afghanistan, as well as their families.
Hopefully, more of them will be able to make it to safety one way or another, but, unfortunately, the window to get out via the U.S. evacuation effort at Hamid Karzai International Airport is rapidly closing. Regardless, of what happens going forward, we have only beginning to hear the incredible stories of how many of them got out and the heroes who made it happen.
Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
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9. He was a baby on 9/11. Now he’s one of the last casualties of America’s longest war.
Heartbreaking. All 13 who we just lost.
He was a baby on 9/11. Now he’s one of the last casualties of America’s longest war.
Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, a U.S. Marine, was killed in the suicide bombing at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on Thursday.Credit...via the McCollum Family
- Aug. 27, 2021Updated 7:19 p.m. ET
After Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, 20, landed in Afghanistan with his Marine unit, his father, Jim, began checking his phone for a little green dot. Mr. McCollum had not been able to talk with his son, but the green dot next to Rylee’s name on a messaging app meant that he was online. That he was still OK.
When news came that a suicide bomber killed 13 American service members outside the airport in Kabul on Thursday, Mr. McCollum checked again for the dot. His son was on his first overseas deployment, had gotten married recently, and was about to become a father. Mr. McCollum messaged his son: “Hey man, you good?”
But the green dot was gone.
“In my heart yesterday afternoon, I knew,” Mr. McCollum said.
On Friday, Lance Corporal McCollum became one of the first American victims to be publicly identified in the attack that also killed at least 170 Afghans. It was the highest U.S. death toll in a single incident in Afghanistan in 10 years. His death was confirmed by his father and by the governor of Wyoming, Mark Gordon.
While the Department of Defense has not released an official accounting of the victims, their names began to emerge on Friday. They appeared in social media posts from family and friends and somber announcements from the high schools where the young men had played football or wrestled just a few years earlier.
Some of them, like Lance Corporal McCollum, who was born in February 2001, were still babies when the United States invaded Afghanistan. Others were not yet born. Now, they are among the last casualties of America’s longest war.
People outside of the airport in Kabul, after the explosion on Thursday.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Lance Corporal McCollum’s unit had deployed from Jordan to Afghanistan to provide security and help with evacuations, his father said in a phone interview on Friday. He had been guarding a checkpoint when the explosion tore through the main gate where thousands of civilians have been clamoring to escape the country’s new Taliban rulers.
“He was a beautiful soul,” Mr. McCollum said from his home in Wyoming.
Mr. McCollum’s fears for his son’s fate were confirmed when two Marines knocked on the door of the family’s home at 3:30 a.m. to deliver the news. Mr. McCollum said becoming a Marine had been his son’s dream ever since he was 3 years old.
That night other families in communities large and small were getting the same grim news.
In one small northern Ohio community where Maxton Soviak grew up playing football, his death left a “Maxton-sized hole” in the lives of the people who loved him, his sister Marilyn wrote in an Instagram post.
Mr. Soviak served as a Navy medic when he was killed, according to a statement from the Edison Local School District announcing his death. Mr. Soviak graduated from Edison High School in 2017, the district said.
“Everybody looked to Max in tough situations,” said Jim Hall, his high school football coach, who described Mr. Soviak as a deeply loyal friend. “He was energetic. He wore his emotions on his sleeve. He was a passionate kid. He didn’t hold anything back.”
Mr. Soviak’s social media profile showed an exuberant young man charging into the world — diving off a rocky precipice, rock-climbing, hiking the Grand Canyon. “If the world was coming to an end, I don’t wanna close my eyes without feeling like I lived,” he wrote in one post.
On Friday, Mr. Hall’s phone rang with people calling to mourn and share memories, and one image of Mr. Soviak kept returning to Mr. Hall’s mind. It was from a snowy regional playoff game a few years ago in which Mr. Soviak helped sack a quarterback to win the game.
Mr. Hall remembered watching Mr. Soviak celebrate on the field, exultant, snow swirling around him.
At least two of the slain service members were from California. They were identified by local law enforcement and a U.S. congressman as Hunter Lopez, 22, a Marine who is the son of two officers of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, and Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, a young martial arts champion from Norco, according to his social media accounts.
Hunter LopezCredit...Riverside County Sheriff's Department, via Facebook
On Friday, Kareem Nikoui’s mother, Shana Chappell, posted a photo on her Instagram account of her son with a broad smile, cradling his rifle amid the crowds of civilians and razor wire at the gate of the airport in Kabul. “This is the last picture my son sent me of himself. It was taken on Sunday. I know i am still in shock right now. I felt my soul leave my body as i was screaming that it can’t be true! No mother, no parent should ever have to hear that their child is gone,” she wrote in the post.
Some of the dead were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment based at Camp Pendleton, Calif. On Thursday evening, as many families were being notified, the Marine base held a candlelight vigil.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
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Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.
What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.
Lance Corporal McCollum loved the mountains where he grew up but could not wait to join the Marines, his father said. Since he was a boy, he could not stand injustice and would stand up for bullied classmates. So on his 18th birthday, he called his father from his school in Jackson Hole to ask him to come sign his enlistment papers.
“He wanted to get in there as quickly as he could,” Mr. McCollum said.
Mr. McCollum said his son had been deeply patriotic and had, from a young age, loved going to Fourth of July and Memorial Day parades and learning about the ceremonies surrounding the American flag. He was a successful wrestler who graduated in 2019, school officials said.
“He’s the most patriotic kid you could find,” Mr. McCollum said. “Loved America, loved the military. Tough as nails with a heart of gold.”
Flowers along the entrance sign at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, Calif., on Thursday. Some of the dead were assigned to the Camp’s 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment.
Regi Stone, a pastor whose son, Eli, was one of Lance Corporal McCollum’s best friends, described him as fiercely devoted. The two young men always had each other’s backs, he said, whether it was at bonfire parties in the Wyoming woods or in their decision to enlist in the Marines at about the same time.
“He wouldn’t back down from anything,” Mr. Stone said.
Mr. McCollum said it was wrenching to watch the chaos unfolding in Afghanistan after so many years of American military occupation and so many deaths.
“It kills me and pains me that we spent 20 years there, and all the lives that were lost there, including my son’s. And we’re back to square one,” he said.
He said he found some comfort in the fact that his son had died helping people — “doing good things,” as Lance Corporal McCollum put it.
“I couldn’t be more proud of him,” his father said. “He’s a hero.”
Sheelagh McNeill and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
10. The Campfire v. the Podium: the Persuasive Power of Storytelling
A seemingly radical proposal but I think the author is on the right track.
The Campfire v. the Podium: the Persuasive Power of Storytelling | Small Wars Journal
In this essay the author recommends that an emphasis on narrative construction and storytelling should replace argument as the means of persuasion in US Army Psychological Operations doctrine. It uniquely provides a light on past myth and mythmaking, not a myopic orientation to new tech, as just as important as any development in Psychological Operations. The article itself provides biological, evolutionary, and epistemological reasons why stories and narratives are superior to logic and arguments as the best means for behavior change, the main reason Psychological Operations exists.
The Campfire v. the Podium: the Persuasive Power of Storytelling
by Daniel Riggs
The Lesson of Peter Venkman: An Introduction to Stories and Narratives
When discussing narratives and stories, an iconic film gives us an insight into their persuasive power: Ghostbusters. Towards the end of the film, the Ghostbusters (the protagonists) are in the NYC Mayor’s office pushing their solution to the paranormal bedlam and looming problem of Gozer, destroyer of worlds. Walter Peck of the EPA (one of the antagonists) is also present. He intends to scapegoat the Ghostbusters for his actions, namely releasing the contained ghosts that terrorize the city. Both are battling for the mayor’s approval. Peck is first up and provides an argument and accusation:
Walter Peck: “I'm prepared to make a full report. These men are consummate snowball artists! They use sensitive nerve gases to induce hallucinations. People think they're seeing ghosts! And they call these bozos, who conveniently show up to deal with the problem with a fake electronic light show!”
The Ghostbusters instead paint a powerful narrative that better illustrates the Gozer problem and the paranormal crisis in contrast to a blame game:
Peter: Well, you could believe Mr. Pecker…Or you could accept the fact that this
City is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Ray: What he means is Old Testament biblical, Mr. Mayor. Real wrath-of-God-type stuff.
Fire and brimstone coming from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!
Egon: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes! Volcanoes!
Winston: The dead rising from the grave!
Peter: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
Mayor: Enough! I get the point! What if you're wrong?
Peter brilliantly drives home their persuasive pitch:
Peter: If I'm wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail. Peacefully, quietly. We'll
enjoy it! But if I'm right, and we can stop this thing; Lenny, you will have saved
the lives of millions of registered voters.
Peter shrewdly paints a persuading and illuminating story,
not a rational argument. This story casts the mayor (not the Ghostbusters) as the hero of New York. Peter has given the mayor the chance to live out a protagonist archetype in an existential threat, not rationally weigh costs and benefits. In contrast, Walter Peck believes rationality, bureaucracy, and processes have the power for meaningful behavior change. But the mayor, like any human, does not want rationality. He wants a persuasive narrative and story that satisfies his human desires and dreams, a universal impulse.Currently, US Army Psychological Operations (PSYOP) doctrine wants its Psychological Operations personnel (PSYOPers) to be like Walter Peck and use rational arguments as the central means to facilitate behavior change. It states, “the main argument is the reason that the Target Audience (TA) should engage in the desired behavior” and “the general format for this main argument is engaging in X (desired behavior) will result in Y (desirable outcomes for the TA)” (Department of the Army [DA], 2007, 2-90).” Unfortunately, this tactic is reductive and coarsely transactional.
Operationally, this philosophy of behavior change, along with other factors (Mayazadeh and Riggs, 2021), has failed the Department of Defense (DOD) in the Information Environment (IE) over the past few decades. The following will argue (ironically enough) narratives and stories are more persuasive in altering behavior than logical arguments. After an initial definition of critical terms, the following will detail the evolutionary, biological, and epistemological reasons why narratives and stories are persuasively superior and why arguments fail at the individual level and in the “marketplace of ideas.”
Key Terminology
Behavior
The first term requiring definition is behavior. Generally understood, behavior is “a form of conduct towards others and responses to any external stimulation, the “mechanistic function of a thing,” a kind of “alignment with societal norms and mores,” or the actions of someone or something in a particular situation as a response to exogenous stimuli (Meriam Webster, Cambridge, Dictionary.com). For this essay, the PSYOP field definition fits: “overt actions exhibited by individuals” (DA, 2007, 2-9). This definition’s strength refers to a shift in the overt and observable actions of individuals
and not whether it is a contextual and temporal violation of societal norms/mores. Therefore, it provides an understanding of behavior that is more objective than subjective norms.Narrative and Stories
Central to this discussion are narrative and story. Narratives often appear as a buzzword in contemporary discourse with a subsequent requirement to “frame it” or “seize it.” The Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) Project does an excellent job in providing substance to the definition of narrative: “stories/accounts of events, experiences, whether true or fictitious” (Agan, et al., 2016, 8). The online service Master Class provides an equally illuminating definition, with notable storytelling luminaries such as Neil Gaiman, David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, and David Baldachi providing this definition: “a way of presenting connected events in order to tell a good story” (MasterClass, 2021). One can discern from these two definitions (from two credible sources) that narratives are the framing devices and techniques that yield different interpretations of stories.
This current emphasis on narratives started with Post-modern philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault. They were some of the first to view narratives not just as hermetically sealed, objective items. They are culturally dependent, constructed, and critical in understanding social dynamics, beliefs, and phenomena (Agan et al., 2016, 5). Post-modern insights inspired literary historians and theorists to view and study narratives as a dynamic and analytical tool to understand people, their beliefs, their environment, and their behavior in it (Zweibelson, 2011).
Military intellectual spheres have since acknowledged the power and importance of narrative and have started inserting this language into doctrine.
Doctrinal Guidance instructs staff planners to “coordinate and synchronize narratives” (Department of Defense [DOD], EXEC SUMM-18) and “provide a coherent narrative to bridge the present to the future” (DOD, I-3), which will provide a more precise focus for the commander (DOD, III-46). Unfortunately, narratives are not as easy to divine as a tangible adversary capability. Narratives are transitory, adjusted, or steered beyond the direct control of an organization or society and shaped by heterarchical and hierarchical entities in a participatory/iterative fashion (Zweibelson, 2011). They subsequently establish particular and often enduring messages (Zweibelson, 2011) that shape the world. They are not empty stories.But understanding and utilizing narratives requires PSYOPers to understand stories, which are the frame for narratives. Just as a great painter must have expert dexterity, spatial awareness, and a sense of geometry in addition to fluid dexterity, fashioning narratives requires knowledge of storytelling. To some, this might appear to be a chic trend, but the importance of stories cannot be understated. Like narratives, stories shape an internal sense of self, the cultures and societies humans belong to, and the knowledge that allows humans to act within the world (Agan, et al., 2016, 1). Stories are how people want to receive information. Before Athenians were listening to the rigorous logic of Socrates in the Agora, humans were consuming stories as the basis for belief (and subsequent behavior) and coding this preference into the species’ DNA.
Evolution and Stories
A species’ continuation is contingent on adjusting to the changing order of its given environment. Humans will undergo physical changes and develop heuristics to create advantages to increase survivability. A species outward changes (e.g., a hedgehog beginning to develop quills 24 million years ago and emerging as a porcupine) are easy to spot. Still, the evolved mental heuristics due to environmental requirements are just as important. Stories and storytelling are one of these valuable evolutionary heuristics because they increase survivability. As it is evolutionarily beneficial, it thus has no geographic boundary.
Storytelling is universal. It occurs in every culture and from every age (National Geographic-Storytelling and Cultural Tradition). Cave drawings from 30,000 years ago depicting animals, humans, and other objects represented visual stories (National Geographic-Storytelling). These drawings were not just an aesthetic impulse for early man but a conceptual means to understand an environment undoubtedly considered chaotic and dangerous. Stories (including cave drawings) were a means to allow one to feel in control and make sense of the events in the random world (National Geographic-Storytelling) and even find recurrent formulas and patterns to traverse the chaos. When humans receive new knowledge (or a revelation), the static data can become dynamic intelligence that increases survivability or potential to thrive. Stories pieced together represent efficacious and crucial data that assists in formulating a better picture that might enhance survival. A story can result in a far more satisfactory sense of certainty than the previously unknown (Guzman, et al., 2013, 1186). Repeated over time, this has created a natural preference for humans.
The Agta Tribe of the Philippines, a hunter-gatherer community structured similarly to early pre-modern man, has helped corroborate this hypothesis. A 2017 study shows how a pre-modern hunter-gather community, in this case, the Agta, benefits from storytelling (Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al., 2017). The researchers conclude that storytelling may have played an essential role in the evolution of human cooperation by broadcasting social and cooperative norms to coordinate group behavior (Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al., 2017). Stories would “silence egos and perform the adaptive function of organizing cooperation in hunter-gatherers” (Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al., 2017). In contrast to philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes speculated pre-modern society as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and a “constant war of every man against every man.” However, finding a means to cooperate was the norm not the exception.
Stories helped facilitate survival.Sexual opportunities are also numerous for an expert storyteller and their ability to engender cooperation. Due to their value, skilled storytellers were (and are) picked more as mates and are more likely to reproduce” (Smith, D., Schlaepfer, P., Major, K. et al., 2017). Without too much explanation, it should be obvious why this would be an incentive.
Biological Rewards of Storytelling
The evolutionary advantages of storytelling had a natural and logical impact on human biology. To continue to value stories as a means of survival, humans evolved to receive certain stimuli from storytelling. Captivating stories provide not just a pleasurable means of escape but chemical rewards for receptive audience members.
The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a crucial role in how we feel pleasure and assists one’s ability to think, plan, strive, and receive inspiration (“Dopamine”). It also aids in memory and processing information to help humans to break down complexities, explore big themes and questions through a narrow lens that stories provide (Padre, 2018). One key finding concludes compelling storytelling releases dopamine for listeners (Padre, 2018). Memorable and captivating stories activate multiple parts of the brain leading to increased information (e.g., facts, figures, and events) retention, which correlates to an increased capacity for behavior change (Padre, 2018). A story is not just fun but a chemically attractive way to receive information, unlike arguments.
The brain also releases oxytocin in the presence of an impactful story (Padre, 2018). Oxytocin, the hormone typically associated with pregnant and nursing mothers (DeAngelis, 2008), plays a substantial role in social affiliation and bonding overall. Studies from Nature (Kosfeld, M., Heinrichs, M., Zak, P. et al., 2005, 675) and PLoS ONE (Zak PJ, Stanton AA, and S. Ahmadi, 2007) had shown the introduction of oxytocin increased generosity in social experiments.
The release of oxytocin during storytelling means participants are far more likely to be receptive to the lines of persuasion in the story. Instead of having a defense up, the release of oxytocin via stories helps to modulate anxiety (Guzman, et al., 2013, 1186), which is one of the primary evolutionary reasons why stories developed the importance that they did.
The Dynamic of the Story
Stories, by their nature, are also far more accessible due to their reduced threat to the listener. Storytelling is a collaborative, non-hierarchical process involving the learners as active agents in the learning process rather than passive recipients (Padre, 2018). In contrast, when presented with an argument, the immediate response is defense. An argument is a formal and direct challenge to someone’s beliefs, which many regards as the means for daily survival. By their nature, arguments attempts to overturn beliefs. A natural (read evolutionary) defense arises to counter an argument (“Immersed,” 2018). Depending on one’s commitment to a given belief, an argument becomes an existential threat or an obstinacy to daily living.
Stories circumvent these evolutionary instincts and stealthily challenge entrenched views without listeners knowing it via “narrative transportation” (Mitra, 2017). According to Dr. Melanie Green, “narrative transportation is the experience people have when they become so engaged in a story that the real world just falls away and results in a suspension of disbelief or reduction of counter arguing (“Immersed,” 2018). A new (but analogous) setting serves as an accessible and safe proving ground for new ideas. Relatable characters and analogous situations can further enhance this suspension of disbelief as the listener/viewer has something to empathize with (“Immersed,” 2018). These practical elements of stories reflect the phenomenon of isopraxism. Isopraxism is an animal neurobehavioral (humans included) that involves mirroring speech patterns, vocabulary, tone, tempo, etc., that helps build rapport (Voss, 2017, 35). It is fair to assume that mirroring comparable experiences via story elicits this reaction and allows defenses to drop. After all, humans fear what is different and chose what is similar for survival (Voss, 2017, 36).
The original Star Wars trilogy, for instance, has this power. When the viewers first see Luke, they see someone longing for something more and looking to the stars for adventure and self-actualization. Luke’s situation mimics a very human feeling of feeling trapped by our environments, localities, and family commitments and wanting more. The subsequent hero’s journey, which goes back millennia, is also familiar. Even though viewers see far off Tattonie, they feel they are there because it grabs at universal impulses and reflects standard and successful aesthetic scaffolding. Star Wars generates narrative transportation, focuses the audience’s attention, elicits strong and emotional reactions and generates vivid mental images (“Immersed,” 2018). The viewer is not just passively viewing images. The transported participant maintains story-consistent beliefs even after exiting the experience (“Immersed,” 2018). They are inspired and ready to act. Maybe that action is a behavior change not considered before the story.
For US Army PSYOP, the “so-what” is that narrative transportation through story is more likely to show attitude and belief change (“Immersed,” 2018) leading to behavior change. Arguments do not get to behavior change, but stories will. There might be something uncomfortable with the thought that humans are irrational and require stories. However, modern behavioral science backs up this pre-modern pedagogy and forces us to come to terms with human fallibility.
The Faulty Apollonian: Bias of the Argument
Since Socrates, there seems to be the belief in the West that man is a rational animal. Concurrent with physical maturation, a human’s developing brain increases its capacity for rational thought to figure out problems in the world as they grow into adults. In the 20th century, psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg helped buttress this belief through his theory of moral development. Kohlberg’s research contends that ethical behavior is contingent on moral reasoning (Kohlberg & Hersch, 1977, 54). Kohlberg’s process follows a linear and six-stage path as children reason their way to notions of justice (Kohlberg & Hersch, 1977, 56). Kohlberg’s work posits that even at the earliest stage, rationality is humanity’s epistemological default.
Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 The Righteous Mind challenged this hypothesis. Haidt theorizes beliefs (which pre-figure behavior) come through intuition and that reason is merely post hoc justification for the driving emotions (Haidt, 2012, CH 3-3:37). Logic and formal rationalism to establishing truth are not universal, and Haidt sees three models of choice, not just one (Haidt, 2012, CH 3-3:35):
- David Hume: Passions Rule, and Reasoning Comes Second.
- Plato: Reason Could and Should Rule (i.e., rationalist model).
- Thomas Jefferson: The Passion and Reason are “co-emperors.”
Echoing David Hume, Haidt argues that the rationalist model are decidedly exaggerated or non-existent for most people (Haidt, 2012, CH 5-34:27). Most of us are irrational. Kohlberg and other rationalists fail to understand that their epistemology and ethics is Western and in the minority. They are WEIRD: Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic.
Someone like Kohlberg and many other rationalists hail from countries that are consistent psychological outliers compared to 85% of the world’s population (Talhelm, 2015). They explain behavior and categorize objects analytically (Talhelm, 2015). In contrast, most majority of people think more intuitively—what psychologists call “holistic thought” (Talhelm, 2015). Argumentation and reason are not going to cut it. Even critical words in the language are deeply established and entrenched to have a specific meaning (Haidt, 2012, CH-3 14:24). When it comes to understanding behavior, rationalists are, in a sense playing tennis against a backboard on a hard court while everyone else is playing tennis with an actual opponent on clay (i.e., thinking holistically).
The doctrine for Military Planners and PSYOPers reflects the rationalist and analytical model for behavior and action. It is no wonder that WEIRD-inspired philosophy cannot to work in much of the world because it lacks self-reflection and fails to illuminate. The rationalist approach reflects the biases of planners and fails to empathize with target audiences.
The subsequent failure of this approach can be explained away via a type of updated false consciousness echoing Thomas Franks What’s the Matter with Kansas. Franks argues that the 2004 defeat of John Kerry was due to the population failing to understand the benefits of the Democratic Party. Similar thinking allows planners to fall back to faulty processes and merely blame the audiences. With humanity’s propensity for following intuition and irrational impulses, it is evident that logic and reason will always be second best.
The Unsecure Marketplace of Ideas
The micro failure to understand most individual’s decision-making processes (i.e., through emotions, intuition, and stories) extends to the macro level in PSYOP doctrine. One of the faulty propositions in PSYOP doctrine is that the most persuasive arguments emerge due to their logical strength and ability to appeal to rational needs and wants (DOD, 2007, 2-90 to 2-93). A target audience will receive a series of arguments and rationally select the best one with some vulnerabilities targeted. Subsequently, the desired behavior reflects a rational choice by the target audience.
The “marketplace of ideas” metaphor informs this doctrinal rationale,
which states that rational consumers will carefully weigh the relative quality of products/ideas, like in a market economy (Gordon, J., 235, 1997). In the analogous “marketplace of ideas,” the most rational and just products (i.e., ideas) stick around, and mediocre ones fall to the wayside. The marketplace of ideas is self-regulating and minimizes subversion. However, if Haidt’s work is the most robust explanation for how people come to their beliefs, the marketplace of ideas (based on a classical behaviorist model) cannot remain sacrosanct.Public Intellectual Curtis Yarvin details how this occurs. In the marketplace of ideas, no one is theoretically in charge. In theory, it is self-regulating and secure like blockchain (Quiones, P, 2020, 27:30). However, various means can manipulate it. These include (1) deliberate coercion (i.e., a specific message will be heard or silenced), (2) positive measures (i.e., the state or other power subsidize favorable influence entities), and (3) the state leakage of information (Quiones, P., 2020, 31:15).
Truth and rational arguments have currency, but the marketplace favors stories. An argument typically does not have the evolutionary staying power of narratives that provide dopamine and oxytocin.What succeeds in the marketplace of ideas are narratives and stories that satisfy physical desires to receive the natural chemical enhancement. Compelling stories and narratives in the marketplace of ideas do not necessarily say how X solves Y. For instance, how does it logically follow that (X) I support the Democratic Party because (Y) Black Lives Matter (Quiones, P., 2020, 42:45)? Dominant narratives and stories are often non-sequiturs, not arguments, which satiate human desires and inflate the egos of target audiences. Those forming winning narratives and stories do not expect the target audience to be informed King Solomons.
However, the audience of these successful narratives does feel kingly. There is a beneficial power exchange between the successful narratives and stories in the marketplace of ideas and the audience (Quiones, P, 2020, 41:30). Successful narratives and stories in the marketplace of ideas reward its followers with a feeling of power which people invariably enjoy and subsequently want to receive more of (Quiones, P., 2020, 38:30). Returning to the evolutionary point, humanity’s cave ancestors wanted to feel as they were in control of a chaotic world. With COVID and many other displacing phenomena, it can feel just as irritating and messy. If someone can receive a sense of power (and do so while passive), they will elect to do this every time. If an idea is going to flourish in the marketplace of ideas, it requires (1) the target audience to feel important and (2) serve the power structure (Quiones, P. 2020, 43:35). It does not require rationality.
Let us take an American example, the 2017 Parkland Tragedy. Someone reads about the 17 innocent people who died that day. If it is from the New York Times or CNN, it provides a left-of-center interpretation. If it is Fox News or the Wall Street Journal, it provides a right-of-center interpretation. These outlets offer narratives and stories to excite the reader’s emotions and make them feel like they matter (Quiones, P., 2020, 43:55). When one reads the left side, a reader feels energized to post on social media calling for strict gun control and providing a romantic story of the civilized European Countries. On the right, one reads accounts of past totalitarians who seized private firearms and prophesized a future big brother. A rational look at first principles to include personal security or security production is far from the list of priorities in modern discourse.
The powerful stories online are not just passive consumption of information but enable the reader to feel as if they are digitally marching on Selma. Again, how exactly does (X) gun rights or gun control solve the (Y) issue of school violence? It does not require a rational response because storytellers have accomplished the narrative's intent. The audience feels powerful. Reason would say these responses are non-sequiturs, but it does not matter. In the summer of 2020, plenty felt pedaling their Peloton contributed to Black Lives Matter (Quiones, P. 2020, 45:25) because the story of fighting for civil rights could be satisfied with oxytocin and dopamine received along with every burned calorie on a bike seat.
Moving Forward with Stories
If PSYOPers are to be successful, they need to reexamine the first principles in doctrine. If it is true that the US Military is inherently WEIRD, it ought to recognize it and adjust accordingly. Future publications should look to the lessons of Joseph Campbell, not just Clausewitz, to understanding how to understand what motivates people. The insights from a Campbell type might reveal cultural considerations, tensions, vulnerabilities, and opportunities to accomplish strategic goals. This essay is not a call for increased budgets and the newest tech but challenges PSYOPers to travel to the past and access the right side of the brain cognition to develop holistic doctrine.
Sergeant First Class Daniel Riggs serves as the S-3/5 for the Psychological Operations Courses at USAJFKSWCS in Fort Bragg, NC. SFC Riggs has previously completed Psychological Operations deployments to INDOPACOM and CENTCOM. He holds a M.S.c in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before joining Psychological Operations, he served as an Infantryman with the 101st Airborne Division deploying to Afghanistan in 2010.
References
Agan S.D, Haufler, A.W, Lauber, S. and G. Pinczuk. (2018) Assessing Revolutionary and
Insurgent Strategies Series: Narratives and Competing Messages (2nd ed.,). The United States Army Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg, North Carolina
Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.) Behavior. In Dictionary.Cambridge.com. Retrieved June 16, 2021,
DeAngelis, T. (2008). “The Two Faces of Oxytocin.” American Psychological
“Dopamine.” (n.d.) Psychology Today.
Gordon, J. (1997). “John Stuart Mill and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas.’” Social Theory and Practice.
23 (2), 235-249.
Guzmán, Y. F., Tronson, N. C., Jovasevic, V., Sato, K., Guedea, A. L., Mizukami, H.,
Nishimori, K., & Radulovic, J. (2013). “Fear-enhancing effects of septal oxytocin receptors.” Nature Neuroscience, 16(9), 1185–1187.
Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Unabridged. [United States]: Gildan Audio.
Hersh, R.H. & Kohlberg, L. (1977). “Moral development: A review of the theory.” Theory Into
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Kosfeld, M., Heinrichs, M., Zak, P. et al (2005). “Oxytocin increases trust in humans.” Nature.
Mayazadeh, S. and D. Riggs. (2021) “Blockchain and Psychological Operations.”
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MasterClass Staff. (2020). “4 Types of Narrative Writing.” MasterClass
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2021, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/behavior
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ONE 2(11): e1128.
The images of Biblical destruction also target the mayor’s likely vulnerabilities as a Christian. It is probably not a coincidence the mayor has New York City’s Catholic Cardinal in his Crisis Room as an advisor and looks to him for the final say.
Ludwig von Mises understanding of human action (in the aptly named Human Action) via praxeology might be instructive for PSYOPers: “Human action is purposeful behavior. Or we may say: Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life.”
One issue in the doctrine requiring further research and elucidation is narrative. Narratives are not as well-articulated and defined as they should be, nor is there is a defined means for developing, identifying, or countering narratives.
Imagine the cost of a small battle with an opposing tribe a few millennia ago. Even in victory, a simple cut might be enough for infection and subsequent death. Would you not want to exhaust every possible option before tribes charge into battle?
See Jill Gordon’s “John Stuart Mill and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas” in Social Theory and Practice Vol. 23, No. 2 for a further explanation of how this metaphor was ascribed to Mills though it doesn’t reflect his opinions on how to protect free speech.
A critical concern for state entities is how the fifth estate will narrate their actions. At this point, the state is leaking influence (Quiones, P., 2020, 35:30). This dynamic mimics the relationship between tiger Richard Parker and Pi Patel on their survival raft in Life of Pi: Pi has to find fish for the tiger or become lunch.
11. Lawmakers Probe State Dept Decision to Scuttle Plan for Crisis Response Bureau Months Before Afghan Catastrophe
Too bad. I would love to head up the Crisis Response Bureau (if we had one - though the scope outlined in this article is too narrow). (I would again push for implementation of a PDD 56 type process). And when not executing crisis responses I would be wargaming the hell out of the interagency.
That said I doubt very much it could have made any significant contribution to the Afghanistan problem. This had to be a military led operation. That said if the Bureau did exist maybe it would have had some influence in advocating for early evacuation before the military withdrew.
And we could actually staff this bureau with military retirees who rean TF Dunkirk and TF Pineapple. These organizations showed how things can be done. In fact I would recommend to state that they AAR these organizations and see if they have best practices that could be employed by Crisis Response Bureau (which I am sure they do).
Excerpts:
"The decision to shut down this program only months before a rushed withdrawal has led to dire consequences and is unacceptable," the lawmakers wrote. "Not only did President Biden leave without providing a chance for Americans to evacuate, the State Department shut down one of our most vital tools to facilitate the evacuation of Americans in times like these."
...
The CCR bureau was meant to provide "aviation, logistics, and medical support capabilities for the Department's operational bureaus, thereby enhancing the secretary's ability to protect American citizens overseas in connection with overseas evacuations in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster," according to an October memo notifying Congress of the State Department's intent to create the CCR.
Following the Free Beacon‘s original report on the CCR bureau, the State Department claimed that it "would not have introduced any new capabilities to the Department."
The rushed and chaotic evacuation effort in Afghanistan, however, has generated questions about the veracity of this statement.
Steil and Banks maintain the CCR bureau "was set up to provide capabilities that did not [already] exist at the Department," and that official explanations for why it was dissolved do not make sense.
Lawmakers Probe State Dept Decision to Scuttle Plan for Crisis Response Bureau Months Before Afghan Catastrophe
Congressional foreign policy leaders have ordered the Biden State Department to turn over all documents and internal communications related to its decision to abolish a Trump-era program that would have evacuated Americans stationed overseas in the case of an emergency.
Reps. Bryan Steil (R., Wis.) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.), members of the Republican Study Committee's foreign affairs task force and House Armed Services Committee, respectively, initiated on Thursday a formal investigation into the now-shuttered Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR), an emergency response initiative that was established in January by outgoing secretary of state Mike Pompeo, but did not become fully operational.
The Biden State Department moved in June to terminate plans to establish the CCR, the Washington Free Beacon disclosed earlier this month based on an internal memo and sources familiar with the decision. Deputy Secretary Brian McKeon signed off on the "discontinuation of the establishment, and termination of, the Contingency and Crisis Response Bureau (CCR)," according to a June 11 memo.
News of the decision fueled intense criticism of the Biden administration, which is struggling to evacuate Americans from Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban's takeover. While the State Department attempted to downplay the report, claiming the CCR bureau would not have helped with the Afghanistan evacuation, Banks and Steil say "the decision to shut down the CCR may very well have cost human lives," according to a copy of their investigation letter sent Thursday to the State Department and obtained exclusively by the Free Beacon.
"The decision to shut down this program only months before a rushed withdrawal has led to dire consequences and is unacceptable," the lawmakers wrote. "Not only did President Biden leave without providing a chance for Americans to evacuate, the State Department shut down one of our most vital tools to facilitate the evacuation of Americans in times like these."
Steil and Banks are ordering the State Department to turn over all documents, communications, and internal notes related to its decision to dissolve the CCR bureau. They also want "the name of the officials at the Department of State who recommended shutting down the CCR," according to the probe. The State Department must also provide Congress with an in-person briefing to explain "how shutting down the CCR has affected our efforts to evacuate Americans stranded in Afghanistan."
The State Department must hand over these documents by Sept. 3.
The Biden administration is struggling to pull Americans out of the Afghan capital of Kabul, where Taliban militants have encircled the airport and stopped U.S. citizens from boarding evacuation flights. While the White House and State Department have claimed that all Americans who want to leave the country will be helped, reports on the ground indicate that U.S. citizens have been unable to contact American officials for help. At least two explosions occurred near the Hamid Karzai International Airport, the only locations from which Americans can be flown out of the country, causing U.S. and civilian deaths.
The CCR bureau was meant to provide "aviation, logistics, and medical support capabilities for the Department's operational bureaus, thereby enhancing the secretary's ability to protect American citizens overseas in connection with overseas evacuations in the aftermath of a natural or man-made disaster," according to an October memo notifying Congress of the State Department's intent to create the CCR.
Following the Free Beacon‘s original report on the CCR bureau, the State Department claimed that it "would not have introduced any new capabilities to the Department."
The rushed and chaotic evacuation effort in Afghanistan, however, has generated questions about the veracity of this statement.
Steil and Banks maintain the CCR bureau "was set up to provide capabilities that did not [already] exist at the Department," and that official explanations for why it was dissolved do not make sense.
12. Opinion | What ISIS-K Means for Afghanistan
Excerpts:
A significant challenge, however, is how far to take such cooperation given both the political and operational risks. For example, the reported provision by the U.S. to the Taliban of names of Americans and Afghans that the U.S. wanted to be let through Taliban checkpoints created political uproar at home, with critics claiming that such action amounted to putting those Afghans on a Taliban “kill list.” Another major challenge is the Taliban’s cooperative relationship with jihadist groups beyond ISIS-K. The most notable of these from a U.S. perspective is al-Qaeda, which retains a small presence in Afghanistan and close ties to the Taliban that neither group is likely to sever anytime soon.
The Biden administration is thus confronted with a tough choice as to whether or not to continue limited counterterrorism cooperation with the Taliban—with a focus on ISIS-K—going forward. The Taliban have shown willingness and an ability to effectively fight this terrorist group in the past, and according to McKenzie, the Taliban have successfully foiled several previous ISIS-K attack attempts in the capital over the past two weeks. That said, the propagators of yesterday’s attack successfully made it past the entirety of the Taliban’s security apparatus in Kabul, which illustrates the group’s sophistication, and underscores the challenge the Taliban are likely to face in trying to protect the country’s citizens—especially urban ones—going forward. The likely addition of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped prisoners to ISIS-K’s ranks has the potential to make this far harder. It also has the potential to raise the threat profile of the group even further for the United States.
Opinion | What ISIS-K Means for Afghanistan
Opinion by JONATHAN SCHRODEN
Magazine
Opinion | What ISIS-K Means for Afghanistan
The hard-to-kill insurgency behind the bombing poses a huge challenge for the Taliban—and a puzzle for American efforts to keep the country stable.
Taliban fighters stand guard outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, a day after two suicide bombers affiliated with ISIS-K killed more than 60 people near the area. | AP Photo/Wali Sabawoon
Opinion by JONATHAN SCHRODEN
08/27/2021 06:30 PM EDT
Dr. Jonathan Schroden directs the Countering Threats and Challenges Program at the CNA Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and analysis organization based in Arlington, Virginia. The views expressed here are his and do not necessarily represent those of CNA, the Department of the Navy, or the Department of Defense. You can find him on Twitter at
The Taliban hadn’t run Afghanistan for two weeks before the nation saw its first horrific terror attack. Finger-pointing began immediately after Thursday’s suicide bombing near the Kabul Airport. President Joe Biden, in a speech to the nation, said America would hunt down the perpetrators—members of the extremist group ISIS-K, which has taken root in Afghanistan over the past several years. The Taliban blamed the United States, not for the bombing but for failing to keep things safe at the airport, saying the bombing “took place in an area where U.S. forces are responsible for security.”
The Taliban now claims to be the government of Afghanistan, so if the group wants to garner broad respect from Afghans and the international community going forward, it already has a huge challenge: protecting Afghans—and foreigners—from terrorist attacks on its watch. It can no longer just blame the U.S. for the nation’s ills. The bombing offered an instant preview of just how hard that will be.
ISIS-K has been a thorn in the Taliban’s side for years. Formally known as the Islamic State - Khorasan, it has existed since 2015, formed initially by the defection of disaffected members of various other jihadist groups in the region, including some former members of the Taliban. The group initially gathered thousands of followers and seized some small areas in the east and north of the country. In the years since then, the group has declined in size and stature due to relentless pressure from the United States, Afghan and Pakistani security forces, as well as the Taliban.
It has also been notoriously resilient. A U.S. special operator once told me he estimated that the U.S. had killed “five-thirds” of ISIS-K’s manpower over the course of several years. Since 2015, the group has lost four emirs to capture or death in operations conducted by U.S. and Afghan forces. Reports estimate that by 2019, 11,700 ISIS-K militants had been killed, 686 had been captured and 375 had surrendered.
Over the course of 2020, ISIS-K attempted to rebuild its forces from these heavy losses. These efforts met with mixed results, in part due to tacit cooperation between the U.S. military and Taliban forces in efforts to dismantle the group. Today, ISIS-K is generally estimated to have a few thousand fighters at its disposal and is considered degraded but not defeated, though such estimates may need to be revised based on reports of thousands of ISIS-K prisoners having escaped from Afghan penal institutions in the wake of the Taliban’s takeover.
Its resilience stems from the high degree of its members’ motivation, its network of alliances with other jihadi groups that provide ISIS-K assistance and multiply its reach, its attraction to disaffected members of the Taliban and other militants (especially from Pakistan), and its ability to recruit individuals from outside the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, including from India. One of the group’s key assets is its ability to attract a steady stream of experienced leaders and fighters from other local groups who know the region and how to survive in it.
Prior to the beginning of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, there was general consensus that ISIS-K was a threat outside of Afghanistan’s borders as well, with intentions to launch attacks on the United States and other Western countries. The combined efforts of the U.S. and others over the past five years have left the group without the capability to do so. However, U.S. intelligence estimates earlier this year suggested that if counterterrorism pressure were removed, the group might reconstitute the ability to attack the United States directly within 18 to 36 months.
As yesterday’s news clearly illustrates, despite being less powerful than it once was, ISIS-K still retains the ability to conduct horrific attacks even within the confines of Afghanistan’s capital. It does so for pure terrorism purposes—to slaughter those it deems unworthy of salvation—as well as for pragmatic ones. Such attacks are designed to advance the group’s claims of being the “purest” among Islamic extremist groups, as well as to bolster its efforts to recruit and expand its ranks. ISIS-K maintains its original transnational goals and subscribes to the Islamic State’s ideology of establishing a global Islamic caliphate. The “Khorasan” in its name refers to a province it hopes to establish as a secure platform for its global ambitions.
ISIS-K is also a sworn enemy of the Taliban. The group sees the Taliban as a bunch of sell-outs, who have abandoned the higher calling of a global caliphate in pursuit of their own goal of ruling Afghanistan. Calling them (among other things) “filthy nationalists,” ISIS-K has consistently sought to denigrate the Taliban and seize the mantle of jihad from its amīr al-muʾminīn (“Leader of the Faithful”), Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada.
For the Taliban, ISIS-K represents one of two immediate internal challenges to its writ as the new government of Afghanistan (the other being the National Resistance Front). For the U.S., the group’s rivalry with the Taliban presents both opportunities and challenges.
According to the head of U.S. Central Command, General Kenneth McKenzie, the U.S. has been providing the Taliban sanitized intelligence on ISIS-K threats in Kabul since Aug. 14. Further, he gave credit to the Taliban for having taken action on that intelligence, saying “we believe that some attacks have been thwarted by them.” So one opportunity is to build on this relationship of counterterrorism cooperation, at least insofar as it applies to the common enemy of ISIS-K.
A significant challenge, however, is how far to take such cooperation given both the political and operational risks. For example, the reported provision by the U.S. to the Taliban of names of Americans and Afghans that the U.S. wanted to be let through Taliban checkpoints created political uproar at home, with critics claiming that such action amounted to putting those Afghans on a Taliban “kill list.” Another major challenge is the Taliban’s cooperative relationship with jihadist groups beyond ISIS-K. The most notable of these from a U.S. perspective is al-Qaeda, which retains a small presence in Afghanistan and close ties to the Taliban that neither group is likely to sever anytime soon.
The Biden administration is thus confronted with a tough choice as to whether or not to continue limited counterterrorism cooperation with the Taliban—with a focus on ISIS-K—going forward. The Taliban have shown willingness and an ability to effectively fight this terrorist group in the past, and according to McKenzie, the Taliban have successfully foiled several previous ISIS-K attack attempts in the capital over the past two weeks. That said, the propagators of yesterday’s attack successfully made it past the entirety of the Taliban’s security apparatus in Kabul, which illustrates the group’s sophistication, and underscores the challenge the Taliban are likely to face in trying to protect the country’s citizens—especially urban ones—going forward. The likely addition of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped prisoners to ISIS-K’s ranks has the potential to make this far harder. It also has the potential to raise the threat profile of the group even further for the United States.
In his speech to the nation on Thursday, Biden said, “To those who carried out this attack, as well as anyone wishes America harm, know this: We will not forgive. We will not forget.” For several decades, the Taliban have wished America harm. While he will certainly never forgive the Taliban for that, the question confronting Biden now is whether he is willing to put the past in the past and work with the group against ISIS-K, an enemy who wishes harm for America and the Taliban alike.
13. 'Food fight': Lawmakers jockey for $6B in funding after Afghan military's collapse
This could be useful seed money to support the Afghan resistance. Of course there is no stomach for that.
'Food fight': Lawmakers jockey for $6B in funding after Afghan military's collapse
08/25/2021 10:31 AM EDT
Updated: 08/25/2021 06:24 PM EDT
"A whole lot of people have been looking at that money now," a top House Republican said.
A military helicopter flies over people during the March Afghan Security Forces Exhibition, at the Darul Aman Palace in Kabul, Afghanistan. | Rahmat Gul/AP Photo
08/25/2021 10:31 AM EDT
Roughly $6 billion that was either approved or will be approved for Afghan military training is now up for grabs after Kabul’s collapse last week, and the jockeying among lawmakers to find a new home for that money has begun.
The numbers include almost $3 billion unspent from fiscal years 2020 and 2021, and $3.3 billion requested by the Pentagon to train and equip the Afghan army, air force and national police in 2022.
"There's gonna be a food fight," said Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee. "A whole lot of people have been looking at that money now."
House Armed Services Chair Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Rogers have started discussions on how to handle the money, though a plan will have to be hammered out when the committee considers its version of the National Defense Authorization Act next week.
The new wrinkle comes as pressure mounts on the House to back a significant increase in military spending after the Senate tacked an extra $25 billion onto President Joe Biden’s proposed defense budget.
Lawmakers will likely use some of the funding to beef up U.S. counterterrorism operations in the region as the Biden administration grapples with how to combat terrorist groups without a military presence in Afghanistan or its neighboring countries. The Pentagon has said it intends to conduct "over-the-horizon" operations there, a concept Rogers and other lawmakers have criticized as impractical, and the military hasn’t explained.
"One of the first things that you're going to see, Adam and I agree on, is how we can use that for counterterrorism efforts," Rogers said.
"This over-the-horizon business that they're talking about, the Democrats, is just not workable. We can't fly out of UAE or Qatar and expect to be able to do ISR," he added, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations. "So I think you're going to see us looking for some good way that we can apply some of that money to counterterrorism."
House Armed Services is slated to roll out its full defense policy bill early next week before a Sept. 1 markup.
But House Armed Services isn’t the only committee that has to update its legislation in the wake of the U.S. pullout. Two top committees already set aside funding for the effort prior to the collapse of the Afghan government, and will need to revise their bills.
The Senate Armed Services Committee in July approved its version of the NDAA that backs the Pentagon’s $3.3 billion proposal for Afghan security forces. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), who chairs the committee, is weighing how to handle the funding ahead of a Senate debate on the legislation this fall.
The money would have come on top of the $83 billion the U.S. has already spent to train and equip the Afghan military and security forces over the past two decades. But those forces, however large and well-equipped they were just two weeks ago, no longer exist.
A Pentagon official confirmed that the building is in talks with lawmakers over the fiscal 2022 cash as well as the roughly $2 billion left over from the 2021 budget. The State Department included about $360 million for Afghanistan — an increase of $34 million — in 2022.
The House and Senate Appropriations panels will have to reallocate that money for any funding shift to become reality. Senate appropriators haven’t yet unveiled a fiscal 2022 defense spending bill. The House Appropriations Committee, however, approved a Pentagon funding bill in July that would provide just over $3 billion for Afghan forces, trimming the administration’s request slightly.
The collapse of the Afghan military was so stunning, and is so fresh that no one — from lawmakers, the Pentagon or defense industry insiders — knows where the money will end up.
“It’s not a windfall for the defense industry,” said one lobbyist with defense ties. “The cost of current operations and requirements like [counterterrorism] to address the fallout [will likely] create an even bigger bill.”
But a second lobbyist with defense ties thinks the money “definitely creates opportunity for defense contractors since it will free up in excess of $3 billion for the committees to spend.”
The scramble for the suddenly unclaimed $3 billion comes amid a much-wider bipartisan effort on Capitol Hill to boost the Pentagon budget beyond the $715 billion proposed by the Biden administration.
Republicans slammed Biden's Pentagon budget request for not keeping up with the expected rate of inflation, instead pushing for a boost of 3 to 5 percent above inflation.
In July, Senate Armed Services endorsed a $25 billion increase to Biden's budget proposal to hike Pentagon spending to $740 billion for the coming fiscal year. Broad bipartisan support in the Senate for the budget boost has ratcheted up pressure on the House to endorse a similar increase.
Smith, who backs Biden's lower topline, has conceded enough Democrats will support more defense funding to force an increase in the overall amount of funding authorized in the House NDAA. The freed up Afghanistan money, he says, is now part of the overall budget discussion, though he stressed "it does not fundamentally alter the topline debate."
"There's a lot of people who think that we need to go above Biden's budget anyway," Smith said. "There's another $3 billion to accomplish some of that. So that's been part of that broader discussion."
14. Conservatives are backing Afghanistan's resistance movement
This Is not going to be Charlie Wilson's War redux. Also I think these so-called conservatives are approaching this from the wrong perspective and want to continue to double down on our strategic mistake of the last 20 years which is to continue to impose a central government in Afghanistan. Recognizing Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud as the legitimate government representatives might make us feel good but will it advance US interests and Afghan interests. Perhaps we should step back and conduct a thorough assessment of the resistance potential and then determine what is in the realm of the possible and how to support a way ahead. Simply recognizing these Afghan and trying to reimpose them on the country as leaders of a central government just may not be the wise course of action. But we need to do a thorough assessment.
From a paper I am working on:
There is one lesson that has not been learned since the British decided to invade Afghanistan almost 200 years ago on October 1, 1838. Afghanistan is an unconventional warfare environment with the fighting to be done by solely or mostly by indigenous forces. It is not a battle-space for foreign conventional forces or great power intervention. The British, the Russians, and now the U.S. and NATO forces have all had a chance to learn this lesson. If this lesson can finally be learned then it is necessary to be able to adapt to this environment to protect U.S. national security interests remaining in the region.
The U.S. has only conducted two relatively successful missions in Afghanistan. The first was a proxy war in the 1980s working through, with and by the Mujahedeen which was a force resisting Russian occupation. The second was an in extremis punitive expedition in the fall of 2001 after 9-11 also working through, with, and by the Northern Alliance and other tribes to remove the Taliban from control of Afghanistan and eliminate a terrorist safe haven for Al Qaeda. These two missions were built upon the foundation of unconventional warfare.
The important U.S. national interest after 9-11 and the one that persists to this day is to prevent Afghanistan from being a safe haven for terrorists from which to plan and to launch terrorist attacks against the U.S. For twenty years the U.S and coalition forces tried to accomplish this through nation building, creating a military force it the western image, and trying to impose central governance over all of Afghanistan. While there has been a central Afghan government at times in the past, the conditions no longer seem possible to do so again, at least in the near term.
Conservatives are backing Afghanistan's resistance movement
By ALEXANDER WARD 08/27/2021 03:57 PM EDT Updated 08/27/2021 04:35 PM EDT
Sen. Lindsey Graham speaks during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Friday, July 30, 2021. | Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
With help from Paul McLeary and Daniel Lippman
Welcome to National Security Daily, your guide to the global events roiling Washington and keeping the administration up at night.
There’s a growing movement in conservative circles to push President JOE BIDEN to recognize former deposed politicians and newly minted resistance leaders as the true heads of Afghanistan’s government.
“After speaking with Afghan Vice President AMRULLAH SALEH and representatives of AHMAD MASSOUD, we are calling on the Biden Administration to recognize these leaders as the legitimate government representatives of Afghanistan,” Sen. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.) and Rep. MIKE WALTZ (R-Fla.) said in a joint statement. “We ask the Biden Administration to recognize that the Afghan Constitution is still intact, and the Afghan Taliban takeover is illegal.”
There’s no indication the White House or State Department is seriously considering backing the 48-year-old Saleh, who has already appointed himself Afghanistan’s “Acting President” and is in the rebel stronghold of Panjshir. And there’s even less evidence that administration officials would put their faith in Massoud, the 32-year-old commander of an anti-Taliban force forming in that province.
“We understand that Afghan leaders are in discussions regarding the future of their country and its government. We are focused on supporting these discussions and a peaceful and orderly transition of power to an inclusive government with broad support,” a State Department spokesperson told NatSec Daily.
But that hasn’t stopped the congressional duo from pushing the issue. Waltz’s office confirmed the representative and Graham spoke with Saleh on the phone yesterday. Sen. RICHARD BURR (R-N.C.), the former chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, joined them for the conversation, his office told NatSecDaily. And this evening, Fox News’ SEAN HANNITY will interview the Afghan politician before turning to Graham and Waltz for their reactions.
Graham’s office didn’t return multiple requests for comment.
Graham and Waltz have little power to get Biden on board with their plan, as recognizing a government squarely falls in the president’s authority. Yet NatSec Daily is told Waltz, the first Green Beret in Congress, plans to start his pressure campaign by adding an amendment to the behemoth defense policy bill to give the Pentagon authorities to back the Saleh-led resistance movement.
That tracks with the lawmaker’s comments in recent days. “Look, we’re going to take a play out of Charlie Wilson’s playbook,” Waltz told JACK DETSCH, ROBBIE GRAMER, and AMY MACKINNON of Foreign Policy magazine earlier this week. “We’re going to lead and drive this from Congress if the White House and the administration refuses to.”
“The U.S. government must immediately begin supporting this movement, most of it is humanitarian support — food, fuel, medical supplies and, I was asked this morning, please get us some COVID vaccine,” scandal-plagued Lt. Col. OLIVER NORTH (ret.) recommended on Monday, indicating he’s in touch with the Afghan fighters.
The back-Saleh-and-Massoud plot doesn’t seem to have much traction in left-wing circles, though, meaning this issue could turn into a fight about how best to engage with Afghanistan after Aug. 31.
15. U.S. Holds Talks With Taliban Over Post-Aug. 31 Presence in Afghanistan
Excerpts:
Officials have emphasized that talks with the Taliban do not represent U.S. recognition of the group as the country’s government.
U.S. officials also have begun talks with allies over how to use economic and diplomatic pressure to influence events in the country. President Biden on Friday asked U.S. diplomatic officials to coordinate with other countries on ways to ensure that third-party nationals and Afghans with visas are able to leave Afghanistan.
International officials, meanwhile, have called for a meeting of the Group of 20 leading nations in mid-September to coordinate diplomatic efforts toward Afghanistan following the West’s military withdrawal.
Some European officials also have contacted the Taliban to discuss future relations.
The Taliban, which took control after the U.S.-backed government and military collapsed earlier this month, is still viewed by U.S. officials as a terrorist organization that practices brutality and human rights abuses.
U.S. Holds Talks With Taliban Over Post-Aug. 31 Presence in Afghanistan
Cooperation, influence needed for continued evacuations after Western forces leave
WSJ · by Gordon Lubold and Bojan Pancevski
U.S. military officials had been holding talks with the Taliban as they relied on the longtime enemy force to provide security around the Kabul airport, where an emergency U.S.-led evacuation has been taking place.
The U.S.-Taliban discussions over a possible diplomatic presence after the Aug. 31 evacuation deadline set by President Biden represent an expansion of those airport-security talks. The Biden administration has vowed to continue helping U.S. citizens and Afghan partners leave the country after the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline set by Mr. Biden.
In a CBS interview earlier this week, Ross Wilson, the acting U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said the two sides have held talks in Qatar about “potential ways forward.”
He declined to say whether there would be a continued U.S. diplomatic presence in Afghanistan, saying, “There are still decisions to be made in Washington about the future shape of our presence and activities here.”
Passengers on a flight bringing evacuees from Afghanistan arrive in Frankfurt.
Photo: Armando Babani/Zuma Press
White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday that efforts to extract Americans and others out of Afghanistan would continue beyond Aug. 31. “And we will need to coordinate with the Taliban in order to do that,” she said.
Officials have emphasized that talks with the Taliban do not represent U.S. recognition of the group as the country’s government.
U.S. officials also have begun talks with allies over how to use economic and diplomatic pressure to influence events in the country. President Biden on Friday asked U.S. diplomatic officials to coordinate with other countries on ways to ensure that third-party nationals and Afghans with visas are able to leave Afghanistan.
International officials, meanwhile, have called for a meeting of the Group of 20 leading nations in mid-September to coordinate diplomatic efforts toward Afghanistan following the West’s military withdrawal.
Some European officials also have contacted the Taliban to discuss future relations.
The Taliban, which took control after the U.S.-backed government and military collapsed earlier this month, is still viewed by U.S. officials as a terrorist organization that practices brutality and human rights abuses.
U.S. officials have said repeatedly that the relationship with the Taliban during the evacuation has been reasonably productive and that coordination over security has been occurring daily.
The future relationship between the U.S. and the Taliban depends heavily on the security situation in and around the Kabul airport over the next several days, officials said.
“They’ve got a lot of pressure on us. We’ve got a lot of pressure on them,” said Rep. Brad Sherman (D., Calif.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The number one thing that we’ll remember over the next year is how they treat us over the next week.”
Ms. Psaki on Friday said that Taliban interest in maintaining a functioning airport and economic aid were key points of leverage that world powers have over the Taliban. Mr. Sherman and others also noted that the U.S. has control over much of the Afghan government’s financial reserves, totaling billions of dollars.
Whether the U.S. can keep a small diplomatic corps in Afghanistan would depend on a number of factors, officials said. Chief among them is whether security can be assured by the Taliban at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul after the U.S. military, which now controls the airport, leaves the country.
If the security at the airport is too tenuous, then Washington could consider creating a remote diplomatic presence in a nearby country, officials said.
Migrants from Afghanistan in the Turkish city of Van.
Photo: sedat suna/Shutterstock
European governments are pushing to keep the doors open for people trying to flee Afghanistan while preventing a mass of refugees from reaching Europe as the U.S.-led evacuation winds down.
A European plan initiated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron would potentially combine billions of euros in funding for Afghanistan and its neighbors to help refugees and internally displaced people, with measures aimed at securing Europe’s borders and cracking down on smugglers, according to officials and documents seen by The Wall Street Journal.
The proposal, to be put to other European Union members for approval on Tuesday, seeks to calibrate the need to protect those Afghans vulnerable to persecution under the Taliban regime with the desire to pre-empt a repeat of the 2015-16 refugee crisis in Europe, when more than two million asylum seekers streamed into the bloc.
EU officials are holding talks with Taliban leaders to help ensure any EU funding finds its way to those people displaced in recent weeks so as to prevent a mass-scale exodus from the country, according to officials and confidential documents viewed by the Journal.
The officials are also negotiating with Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Qatar and Turkey for those countries to help manage the potential outpouring of refugees.
“The EU and its member states stand determined to act jointly to prevent the recurrence of uncontrolled large-scale migration movements faced in the past,” a draft statement from EU interior ministers reads. “We should avoid creating pull factors and do our utmost to ensure that migrants receive protection primarily in the region itself.”
So far, very few European countries have committed to settle Afghan civilians beyond the people evacuated in recent days. Britain has said it would take in at least 10,000 this year and EU officials have said they could offer cash for member states to resettle people. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said any resettlement plan would be voluntary and that Europe would make commitments only as part of an international agreement with the U.S., Canada and others to take in refugees.
Germany alone has offered 100 million euros, equivalent to $118 million, in emergency aid to Afghanistan, with another €500 million to be shared between Afghanistan and its neighbors and which would primarily be used to take care of refugees, German government officials said.
Even before the fall of Kabul, the EU earmarked more than €20 million to help Iran and Pakistan deal with the inflow of Afghan refugees. On Tuesday, the EU said Pakistan and Iran stood to receive some €100 million this year to help host Afghans. The EU also suspended around €1 billion in development aid to Afghanistan after the Taliban swept into Kabul. That money could also be redirected to help Afghan refugees in the region, diplomats said.
Italian officials indicated that the funding they had previously earmarked to support Afghan armed forces could now be redirected toward humanitarian projects in the country.
Ms. Merkel spoke to the prime minister of Pakistan and the presidents of Uzbekistan and Turkey in recent days, while her special envoy for Afghanistan has been negotiating with senior Taliban officials in Qatar since Aug. 19, according to German government officials.
Markus Potzel, the German negotiator, said he had received assurances that the Taliban would keep a civilian airport running and allow those on Western evacuation lists with proper legal documents to leave after the final pullout of North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops on Aug. 31.
A senior EU official said on Friday that the Taliban wasn’t committing to letting Afghans citizens leave the country. “For the time being, we have nothing material to ensure there will be more evacuations.”
—Laurence Norman, Marcus Walker, Siobhan Hughes and Courtney McBride contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Gordon Lubold and Bojan Pancevski
16. FDD | What We Know—and Don’t Know—About ISIS-K
Key points:
Finally, can the Taliban be America’s counterterrorism partner, as some have argued?
If you’ve read my work, then you know my answer. No. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is just my enemy—not my friend. Such is the case with the Taliban, which remains intertwined with al-Qaeda. Thus far, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been content to watch America retreat in humiliation. They want U.S. forces gone by August 31, so they can get down to the business of restoring their Islamic Emirate. This has been their main religious and political goal all along.
We should be on the lookout for hostage-taking or other nefarious acts as the U.S. gets closer to its self-imposed deadline. But keep in mind the long game. Al-Qaeda is banking on the benefits of jihadist rule in Afghanistan, as it will be able to freely recruit, train and plot.
Most importantly, no one should ever trust the Taliban. Just this week, the group’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told NBC News there is “no proof” that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 hijackings. The Taliban has repeated this lie many times since 9/11—even as al-Qaeda repeatedly advertised its responsibility for the deadliest terrorist attack in history.
It says much about the Taliban, and its true agenda, that it can’t be honest about 9/11 after all these years.
The bottom line: ISIS-K remains a threat—both in Kabul, and elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean the Taliban is our partner.
FDD | What We Know—and Don’t Know—About ISIS-K
The group has claimed responsibility for the bombing outside the Kabul airport.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · August 27, 2021
The death toll from Thursday’s suicide bombing outside of the airport in Kabul continues to climb. At least 13 U.S. servicemembers were killed, while more than a dozen others were wounded. As of now, we still don’t know how many Afghans or others were killed. Current estimates say well more than 100 Afghans perished.
The Islamic State-Khorasan Province (often referred to as ISIS-K by the U.S. government) quickly claimed responsibility for the heinous attack. No one was surprised. In the days leading up to the bombing, American officials, including President Joe Biden, repeatedly warned that ISIS-K could strike at any time.
And so it did.
Here are answers to some of the basic questions that are being asked about ISIS-K.
Who is the leader of the Islamic State-Khorasan Province?
President Biden vowed Thusday to retaliate against those responsible for the bombings. One of America’s likely targets is the ISIS-K leader, a terrorist known as Shahab al-Muhajir.
The Islamic State’s senior leadership appointed al-Muhajir as its wali (or governor) for the region in June 2020, after a string of his predecessors were killed or captured in counterterrorism operations. Al-Muhajir is an effective operator. As a team of experts working for the U.N. Security Council reported this past June, al-Muhajir “served as [the Islamic State’s] chief planner for high-profile attacks in Kabul and other urban areas.”
Al-Muhajir’s men are prolific terrorists. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan documented 77 attacks that were either claimed by ISIS-K or attributed to it in the first four months of 2021 alone. Some of these were carried out in Kabul, where al-Muhajir’s network has regularly targeted civilians, as well as the now deposed Afghan government.
How many men does the Islamic State have in Afghanistan?
No one really knows. All estimates are fraught with problems. Terrorist organizations don’t publish their rosters, meaning a lot of guesswork is involved in coming up with figures. U.S. estimates of the manpower for the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban have been flawed for years.
According to the U.N. Security Council, ISIS-K was thought to have somewhere between 1,500 and 2,200 members in eastern Afghanistan earlier this year. But there are reasons to suspect that the group has hundreds of other members elsewhere throughout the country as well, including inside the Afghan capital. The Taliban’s jailbreaks have reportedly freed hundreds of additional ISIS-K loyalists, too.
Why is ISIS-K opposed to the Taliban?
When the Islamic State declared its caliphate in Iraq and Syria in June 2014, its leaders immediately rejected the legitimacy of all other Muslim and jihadist authorities—including the Taliban. According to the Islamic State’s scheme, once its men set foot on the soil of any country or region, all Muslims in the vicinity owe their allegiance to its caliph. The first Islamic State caliph was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And when the first iteration of ISIS-K was formed in 2014, the group immediately demanded that all Muslims in Afghanistan bend the knee.
The Taliban wasn’t and isn’t having it. The Taliban’s leadership has consistently rejected the Islamic State’s attempts to usurp its authority, including during the reign of Baghdadi’s successor, a terrorist known as Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda fought for nearly 20 years to resurrect the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan—the authoritarian regime that was toppled during the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. The Taliban is preparing to announce its restoration any day now. ISIS-K rejects the Islamic Emirate’s legitimacy outright.
The Taliban and ISIS-K have repeatedly fought one another. Al-Qaeda has, naturally, fought on the Taliban’s side. And ISIS-K usually has the losing hand in this intra-jihadist conflict.
Their battles aren’t just about which one is the rightful ruler of Afghans. ISIS-K’s initial leadership was made up of defectors from the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Pakistani Taliban, as well as other affiliated groups. These defectors likely had their own personal agendas, in addition to ideological objections to the Taliban’s rule.
This dynamic will continue to be a thorn in the Taliban’s side, as ISIS-K provides an outlet for any disaffected leaders or fighters. ISIS-K has its own indigenous recruiting networks as well.
Does ISIS-K pose a threat outside of Afghanistan?
Yes.
The U.N. Security Council’s expert staff has identified a body known as the Al-Sadiq office as a regional node in the Islamic State’s global network. Al-Sadiq is both “co-located” with ISIS-K in Afghanistan and “pursuing a regional agenda in Central and South Asia on behalf of the” Islamic State’s global leadership. In other words, ISIS-K isn’t a standalone unit—it is working with other parts of the Islamic State’s network to export terror outside of Afghanistan.
ISIS-K has recruited fighters from throughout the Central Asian states, with the goal of exporting jihad to them. The Islamic State views these countries as new ground for expanding its caliphate project. Thus far, however, the group has demonstrated only a small operational presence in these countries. In July 2018, for instance, a team of Islamic State terrorists ran over American and European cyclists in Tajikistan, killing four people.
South of Afghanistan, in Pakistan, ISIS-K has a more developed operational capability. The group has conducted a string of operations inside Pakistan over the past several years.
ISIS-K poses some degree of threat outside of Central and South Asia as well. In the summer of 2016, three men allegedly conspired to carry out terrorist attacks in New York City on behalf of the Islamic State. American investigators discovered that the trio had at least some contact with ISIS-K’s jihadists. In April 2020, German authorities broke up a cell of four Tajik nationals who were allegedly preparing to attack U.S. and NATO military facilities. Earlier this year, the CTC Sentinel published a report by Nodirbek Soliev, who expertly summarized the ties between this cell and Islamic State figures in Afghanistan and Syria.
To be clear: The overwhelming majority of ISIS-K’s operations are conducted within Central and South Asia. But American officials will have to try to keep tabs on the group after all U.S. military personnel are withdrawn, because no one can rule out the possibility that the outfit may try something in the West.
Is there any evidence showing that the Taliban and ISIS-K collude with one another, despite their obvious differences?
The answer to this one is tricky. According to the U.N. Security Council’s experts, some countries claim that there is evidence showing that the infamous Haqqani Network has used ISIS-K cells in Kabul as a cutout for operations the Taliban doesn’t want to claim, including bombings that kill a large number of civilians. The Haqqani Network is an integral part of the Taliban, and also closely allied with al-Qaeda. It is notorious, in part, because the Haqqanis have conducted some of the biggest terrorist attacks in Kabul’s history—to date.
The U.N. team has cited intercepts allegedly showing that Haqqani commanders had foreknowledge of ISIS-K attacks. But is this evidence that the Haqqanis were flying false flags? Or had these Haqqani commanders simply defected to ISIS-K? Shahab al-Muhajir, the leader of ISIS-K, may be a former Haqqani operator himself—though that hasn’t been proven.
In the end, the Haqqani-ISIS-K cutout theory is just that—a theory. We should be careful about running too far with it, especially absent solid evidence. President Biden said yesterday there is no evidence showing that the Taliban had cooperated with ISIS-K in the bombing outside Kabul’s airport. I don’t know how the president could have already known that—just hours after the fact—especially given that the Taliban is manning “security” checkpoints nearby.
Still, ISIS-K has its own agency and its own incentives for killing Americans, Afghans, and others at the Kabul airport. The Taliban and al-Qaeda won the war, so ISIS-K had every reason to steal their thunder. The bombings outside the airport will undoubtedly help with the Islamic State’s global recruitment efforts.
ISIS-K’s claim of responsibility took direct aim at the Taliban, pointing to the fact that the Taliban had cooperated with the U.S. in the evacuation of Americans and others. This argument is intended to undermine the Taliban’s jihadist credentials—and its legitimacy as a government. And as the U.N. team has noted, the cutout theory is a controversial topic among member states—some of which dismiss it out-of-hand.
Finally, can the Taliban be America’s counterterrorism partner, as some have argued?
If you’ve read my work, then you know my answer. No. Sometimes the enemy of my enemy is just my enemy—not my friend. Such is the case with the Taliban, which remains intertwined with al-Qaeda. Thus far, the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been content to watch America retreat in humiliation. They want U.S. forces gone by August 31, so they can get down to the business of restoring their Islamic Emirate. This has been their main religious and political goal all along.
We should be on the lookout for hostage-taking or other nefarious acts as the U.S. gets closer to its self-imposed deadline. But keep in mind the long game. Al-Qaeda is banking on the benefits of jihadist rule in Afghanistan, as it will be able to freely recruit, train and plot.
Most importantly, no one should ever trust the Taliban. Just this week, the group’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, told NBC News there is “no proof” that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 hijackings. The Taliban has repeated this lie many times since 9/11—even as al-Qaeda repeatedly advertised its responsibility for the deadliest terrorist attack in history.
It says much about the Taliban, and its true agenda, that it can’t be honest about 9/11 after all these years.
The bottom line: ISIS-K remains a threat—both in Kabul, and elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean the Taliban is our partner.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.
fdd.org · by Thomas Joscelyn Senior Fellow and Senior Editor of FDD's Long War Journal · August 27, 2021
17. Intervention: Unlearned Lessons, or the Gripes of a Professional
A lot to digest from Ambassador Neumann's critique.
Excerpts;
Even in the overlapping Afghanistan and Iraq wars few lessons were imported from one theater to another. A single example is the history of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs). Despite these having begun in Afghanistan several years before PRTs were initially fielded in Iraq, virtually no effort was made to import lessons learned from one war to the other. The initial problems of staffing, organization and support in Iraq were generally treated as new problems with new efforts at solution uninformed by reflection on what had worked or not worked in Afghanistan.
When the Afghan and Iraq staffing surges ended, there was no effort to study either the problems or successes of the efforts to field large numbers of civilians. The so-called 3161 mechanism (named after the section of law that provided the hiring authority) produced some very gifted and talented officers, and some who had to be sent back as unfit. The length of time needed to hire staff varied widely, with some moving quickly to deployment and others waiting months to be hired. There is a certain amount of legend about the causes of problems, but no systematic study has been done to identify ways to improve the process should the need arise again.
State’s one major effort to provide a contingency mechanism, the creation of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), now transformed into the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, has gone through repeated changes of mission and organization without settling on clear goals. The reasons for this are many and outside the focus of this article, but the bottom line is that State still lacks a clear organizational model for how to staff interventions.
The two decades since 9/11 have brought many changes in the world and in the practice of diplomacy. We will manage the challenges of the changes better if we study and learn from the past. Considering the examples above, we have some way to go.
Intervention: Unlearned Lessons, or the Gripes of a Professional
The State Department’s failure to effectively staff and run interventions requiring close civil-military cooperation in the field has a long history. Four critical lessons can be drawn from the post-9/11 experience.
BY RONALD E. NEUMANN
Iraq and Afghanistan were the latest in a 170-year history of American and State Department failure to figure out how to staff and run State’s part of military interventions. For the curious, I date State’s failure from 1848, when the department could not fill the U.S. Army’s request to send diplomats to help the Army manage civil affairs in conquered Mexican territory. Providing diplomatic personnel remained a problem in the latter half of the 20th century when every administration since President Harry Truman’s had foreign interventions that required diplomatic assistance. Nadia Schadlow has told much of this story in her book, War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success into Political Victory (Georgetown University Press, 2017).
The staffing problem is an example of the persistent unwillingness to learn from our own past. I have lived some of the latest chapters of this story while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The difficulties in staffing interventions are many, but the underlying issue is that every intervention has been treated as a unique occurrence, often better forgotten than studied. Yet with more than 70 years of repeated military interventions requiring close civil-military operations in the field since the close of World War II, it is plainly unreasonable to assume that “never again” is a sufficient response.
The literature on stabilization is now extensive. It is not my purpose to try to summarize it all in a short article. Rather, I would like to reflect on a few large lessons that seem to me critical, drawn primarily from the post-9/11 years but reaching back also to my first experience of war in Vietnam and fairly extensive reading and study over the half-century that I have lived with, watched and sometimes tried to grapple with these issues.
Out of many lessons worth discussing, four stand out to me. One is the lack of tours of duty sufficient to master problems. Second is the confusion of policy with implementation. Third is the intellectual arrogance that Americans bring to critical policymaking. And fourth is the need for the State Department to find a dependable mechanism for surging staff in a crisis.
Tour Lengths: Undermining Effectiveness
The problems of tour lengths bedeviled both the military and the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. I arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2005. Within months, most of the U.S. Embassy Kabul staff had turned over: It was the equivalent of an institutional frontal lobotomy that was repeated yearly. That this was scarcely a new problem is illustrated by the scathing comment attributed to John Paul Vann, the USAID deputy for Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS) in Vietnam: that we didn’t have 12 years’ experience, we had one year’s experience 12 times.
Some people do extend or return for additional tours, but the overall result of our practice is that few are knowledgeable or effective until well into their tours, by which time they are starting to think about an onward assignment. In UN Peacekeeping in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Professor Lise Morjé Howard identifies the lessons that made for effective United Nations missions. One of her fundamental points is the need to develop a “learning culture”—a deep understanding of the political and social factors that need to be taken into account to make progress in complex interventions. Developing such a learning culture takes time. It is not compatible with the rapid replacement of staff. The few who do develop deep knowledge find themselves repeatedly fighting uphill battles to explain, particularly to Washington, how what they have learned needs to be considered in the formulation of new policies.
All too often, our reaction to failure is to throw out the policy without studying whether the problem lies there, or in implementation.
This problem is exacerbated by the difficulty of using failure as a basis for learning. In the United States, some 30 percent of startups fail within two years, and the rate is higher in the first year. In business, there is a rich body of study about why businesses fail and what can be learned from failure. But in our bureaucratic culture, failure is usually condemned, and failed projects are abandoned rather than studied to learn how to improve. The fear of failure and the resulting criticism, especially from Congress, leads particularly to two unfortunate results.
One is the adoption of extensive provisions for design and oversight to try to prevent failure, which in turn make it slow and difficult to experiment. Yet when we plunge into chaotic situations, as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is little time to sit back and study issues before making decisions. Something must be done. Decisions must be made, and it is inevitable that some of the decisions will turn out poorly. The need is often for rapid experimentation and adjustment as lessons are learned; but that is not the way we operate. Second, the fear of criticism creates a bureaucratic reflex to defend projects and policies rather than to identify problems and make adjustments.
Confusing Policy with Implementation
These problems are reinforced by our propensity to confuse policy with implementation. Of course, sometimes policy does need changing. But often the policy isn’t the problem; it’s how we’re trying to implement it. Consider a hypothetical example. One could have a policy of using local tribesmen to secure roads. One could pick good leaders, reinforce them when attacked, and the result would be more secure roads and better trust between the tribal leaders and the government that supports them. Or one could find that the leaders were corrupt, money was stolen, and arms were used to repress rivals. Little security would be achieved, and the result would be failure. Yet the policy was the same.
All too often, however, our reaction to failure is to throw out the policy without studying whether the problem lies there, or in implementation. The result is a great deal of wasted time and little learning. One real-world example comes from the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s decision to redo the justice program in Afghanistan. Without a doubt, the program had problems. Holbrooke’s answer was to stop the program cold so that it could be redesigned. The executing contractor demobilized, let go of staff, got rid of equipment and gave up office space.
It took about a year until USAID, after several efforts, got Holbrooke to approve a new concept and was able to rebid new contracts, one of which was won by the same contractor who had previously demobilized. During that year, nothing was accomplished. I believe that focusing on and fixing specific problems would have been far more effective than the stop-andstart process we followed. This is but a micro example of the cost of not understanding that the hard work is often in policy execution.
Sometimes policy does need to change. Getting this right is definitely hindered by an intellectual arrogance that designs foreign policy with no regard for foreigners. The result is a policy that cannot be executed successfully. Two examples across time illustrate the point. The first is from Vietnam, where one U.S. policy decision after another failed because of the inability to understand the local conditions. Speaking of one set of recommendations to Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, William Colby, a CIA official who spent 15 years involved with Vietnam, wrote: “We defined the necessary psychological shock in terms totally counter to Diem’s personality and the realities of the Vietnamese power structure and society.”
As Colby ruefully noted: “The conviction [was] widespread among the Americans that the failures of the various American formulas for success in Vietnam could be due only to the unwillingness or inability of the Vietnamese to perceive their validity— indeed, their brilliance—and then apply them as indicated.”
Intellectual Arrogance
Fifty years later, a similar disregard for understanding a foreign leader was evident in one element of President Barack Obama’s decision for how America would manage the Afghan war. One of the goals of the military surge decided on in 2009 was to stabilize important areas of Afghanistan. Washington’s combination of arrogance and ignorance jumped out at me from the strategy memo, attributed to President Obama himself, addressing how to strengthen subnational governance and counter corruption. In considering how to accomplish this with the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the memo says the work will be done “working with Karzai where we can, working around him when we must.”
This approach was absurdly unrealistic, but it was often followed in the field. Visiting military teams scattered about Afghanistan in 2010, I frequently found Americans depicting the Kabul government as irrelevant to their operations. They had the money and the power in the field, and they would establish the policies they thought best. In many conversations, I tried to point out that this would not work because President Karzai had the ultimate power to hire and fire provincial officials. He would use that power when he felt the foreigners were going too far in undermining him.
It is the realistic perception of how to work with foreigners that is one of the strongest attributes of good diplomats, if our leaders will only make use of it.
Further, Karzai was engaged in a complicated game of political maneuvering to keep various competing Afghan political leaders and tribes under his control and to prevent others from becoming too strong. A local governor might be incredibly corrupt, inefficient or both; but if he was in place for a political purpose Karzai deemed essential, Karzai would retain that official. In this case, as in so many others, Kabul politics trumped policies made in Washington. Today, little remains from an incredible amount of work by military and civilian teams in the districts of Afghanistan.
Clearly, some policymakers have avoided the tendency to conceptualize policy without regard to the ground reality. Former Secretary of State James Baker was noteworthy for his ability to listen to others closely enough to understand how to close a deal. And it is the realistic perception of how to work with foreigners that is one of the strongest attributes of good diplomats, if our leaders will only make use of it.
A Mechanism for Surging Staff
Of the lessons unlearned despite repeated examples, the most glaring involves the State Department’s inability to surge staff, the failure with which this essay began. America’s diplomats are fully deployed. There is no reserve, nor even an excess over positions to allow for much long-term training. Then, when emergencies arise that need large increases in staff in the field, State will have to augment its personnel.
This problem has come up over and over. With the possible exception of President Donald Trump, who added military personnel to existing interventions but didn’t start a new one, every administration since Truman’s has undertaken foreign interventions. The usual conclusion is that we won’t do it again, so we don’t need to learn anything from the experience or prepare for the next one—and then we do it again.
Even in the overlapping Afghanistan and Iraq wars few lessons were imported from one theater to another. A single example is the history of provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs). Despite these having begun in Afghanistan several years before PRTs were initially fielded in Iraq, virtually no effort was made to import lessons learned from one war to the other. The initial problems of staffing, organization and support in Iraq were generally treated as new problems with new efforts at solution uninformed by reflection on what had worked or not worked in Afghanistan.
When the Afghan and Iraq staffing surges ended, there was no effort to study either the problems or successes of the efforts to field large numbers of civilians. The so-called 3161 mechanism (named after the section of law that provided the hiring authority) produced some very gifted and talented officers, and some who had to be sent back as unfit. The length of time needed to hire staff varied widely, with some moving quickly to deployment and others waiting months to be hired. There is a certain amount of legend about the causes of problems, but no systematic study has been done to identify ways to improve the process should the need arise again.
State’s one major effort to provide a contingency mechanism, the creation of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS), now transformed into the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, has gone through repeated changes of mission and organization without settling on clear goals. The reasons for this are many and outside the focus of this article, but the bottom line is that State still lacks a clear organizational model for how to staff interventions.
The two decades since 9/11 have brought many changes in the world and in the practice of diplomacy. We will manage the challenges of the changes better if we study and learn from the past. Considering the examples above, we have some way to go.
Now president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, Ronald E. Neumann was a 37-year career FSO who served in Senegal, Iran, Yemen and Iraq. He was ambassador to Algeria, Bahrain and Afghanistan. Before joining the Foreign Service, he was an infantry officer in Vietnam.
18. An army of veterans and volunteers organizes online to evacuate Afghans, from thousands of miles away
As I have mentioned, I think we can learn a lot from these efforts. When the Afghan NEO is AAR'd it must include an assessment of these groups and operations. I think there are best practices that can likely be applied to future crises.
An army of veterans and volunteers organizes online to evacuate Afghans, from thousands of miles away
The Washington Post · by Jonathan Baran , Alex Horton and Elizabeth Dwoskin Today at 1:43 p.m. EDT · August 26, 2021
BERKELEY, Calif. — On a quiet, tree-lined street in the Bay Area, Jon Reed’s computer screen swims with maps of Kabul, chat threads and text messages from Special Operations, military and civilian contractors inside and around the Hamid Karzai International Airport.
A former green beret, Reed is one of thousands of veterans, active-duty military, former government officials and civil servants working online to help Afghans flee Taliban retaliation. These efforts have taken on increased urgency this week as the window to shepherd people out of Afghanistan closes by Aug. 31, if not before, and the situation in the country deteriorates, including explosions outside the airport on Thursday. One group, Team America, says it has evacuated more than 200 Afghans and is tracking about 1,500 people.
“I’m pushing another ‘terp’ to the north side,” Reed tells another member of his group on the phone. “His name is Nick. That’s all the information I have right now.”
These groups of veterans and officials are leaning on their decades of deployments and thousands of hours of in-country experience in Afghanistan by acting as emergency dispatchers, calling in favors with gate guards, sharing intelligence about Taliban actions and directing families to the right runway to get a flight — all from thousands of miles away. They are using Slack and Signal groups to share highly sensitive information, and sending photos of evacuees to gate guards for verification. Others are software engineers and Silicon Valley investors who have connections to the region and the knowledge to code.
Many refer to the overall effort as “Digital Dunkirk,” a reference to the evacuation of stranded Allied soldiers from the beaches of northern France in World War II.
As the time frame for Afghans to leave shrinks, the volunteers are even booking transportation for evacuees. Reed’s group on Signal has pursued everything from buses to chartered flights, paid for and funded by private donations. Mick Mulroy, a former CIA paramilitary officer and Trump administration Pentagon official, said the volunteer group he works with, TF Dunkirk, has been working to secure helicopters out.
Zach Disbrow, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, has been working for the past week to get his interpreter — whom he calls “Mike” — out of Kabul. The interpreter was waiting outside the airport’s Abbey Gate, the site of one of the explosions Thursday, for over 36 hours and left shortly before the blast. “So we live to try another day,” Disbrow said.
The United States and other allies had ramped up evacuations this week, with Washington saying it has evacuated and helped in the evacuation of about 90,000 people since Aug. 14. But hours after it boasted of record high evacuations on Tuesday, the White House announced it would end evacuations before the Aug. 31 deadline to complete its full withdrawal from Afghanistan. On Wednesday, the Pentagon said its ability to airlift evacuees from the country could decrease as it turns to pulling out weaponry, equipment and troops. It was unclear how the bombings on Thursday would affect flights.
Late Wednesday in the United States — Thursday morning in Kabul — that prompted frantic coordination among the veterans and officials, who felt a sense of duty to assist those who had helped American forces over two decades in Afghanistan.
“As an American, I’m tired of feeling powerless,” said Joe Saboe, a former infantry officer who fought in Mosul, Iraq, and a spokesman for Team America. “And I’ve seen things that I don’t like happening in the world.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Wednesday told reporters: “There are certainly cases and incidents — and we have heard, you have reported — where individuals are not getting through that should get through. And we are approaching those and addressing those on a case-by-case basis as those are raised.”
Matt Pelak, a National Guard soldier who lives in Brooklyn and has spent days of his own time helping to coordinate evacuations, said he and other volunteers are in triage mode as the pullout date looms. The focus, he said, has become on people who have the right documents and have the best chance of getting through.
“Everyone sees the window closing rapidly,” Pelak said. “Now all we can do is help the people we can help.”
Many of these advocates have unique access to people and intelligence, feeding that information to potential evacuees over WhatsApp, text and through family members. Backgrounds in intelligence, communications and other specialties have combined to slice through inertia at the airport gate, where some veterans leverage contacts with colleagues still in uniform, Pelak said. Help can be in the form of a time and place to be, what to wear or hold, or even a signal or password.
“Often we’ll work with people in our group who work in the Pentagon and work in the State Department and have real-time access to information,” said Saboe, who lives in Denver.
Shaun So, an Army veteran volunteering in the effort who lives two doors down from Pelak, spent days coordinating the evacuation of his former interpreter, a naturalized U.S. citizen who uses the name Freddie. He shepherded paperwork to contacts on the ground and funneled Freddie to the right location to get through to the airport, So said. He also prepared Freddie, who had returned to Afghanistan to be with family, for the cold calculus of the situation: He could only leave if his two nephews stayed behind.
Freddie agreed, and on Wednesday morning, he crossed the threshold and made it onto airport grounds while speaking to a Washington Post reporter. He pointed his camera toward one gate, describing it as a frequent area for warning shots from U.S. troops.
“It’s chaos,” he said on a video call.
Pelak and Reed are a few of the more than 1,000 volunteers on a Slack group called AFG Expatriation, many of whom served on combat deployments and humanitarian relief missions. The channel has pulsated with activity all week, including rapidly evolving information, such as which gates may become open for a few minutes to let evacuees through. Once a member learns of the changes, texts crisscross between the United States and evacuees at the airport, directing them on where to go, Pelak said. Some Afghans used live location-sharing so volunteers could monitor their progress.
One of the most effective volunteers, according to members of the group, is Paul Alkoby, a 30 year-old former Air Force combat medic in Orlando. Alkoby’s relationships and networking capabilities were a linchpin in getting over 1,000 Afghans into the Kabul airport and eventually out of the city. Alkoby said he has made many calls to members of Congress to get attention to the plight of Afghans this week.
“They didn’t know who I was at first or maybe didn’t believe me,” Alkoby said. He said he is worried Americans remaining in Afghanistan could soon be in a similar crisis if a more unified rescue mission is not developed.
In Berkeley, an Afghan American veteran named Junaid Lughmani looking to volunteer discovered via Twitter that he lived only a quarter mile away from Reed. On Tuesday, the two sat side by side in Reed’s library office, liaising with sources in Kabul past midnight in Afghanistan.
In an effort to get the interpreter named Nick inside the Kabul airport, Reed juggled between chats with Afghan handlers, American soldiers and volunteers in the United States. Then, a gate guard at the airport sent him an image of a skull-like face wearing night vision goggles and a headpiece — a visual passcode.
Reed quickly copied and pasted the image into the thread with the handlers and instructed them on what Nick and his entourage should do with it: “Show this image.”
The group said they were racing off to the planned gate. Then Reed and his teammates waited.
“We need people at every gate, 24 hours a day, working with the Marines or whatever,” said Reed. “People are on the wall and saying, ‘I’ve received this information, I have the signal, I see them in the crowd, let’s get them in.’ And then they can get on their paperwork once they’re in. So that’s the mechanism that we’re trying to build in place.”
A few hours later, they received rumors of gunfire at the airport. A former interpreter, Lughmani called up a guard he knew was working at the gates and asked in Pashto what was really going on. The guard told Lughmani it was only warning shots, and for a moment everyone was relieved.
“I’ve had a heavy heart now since Kabul went down,” Lughmani told The Post. “You can’t sleep. You’re tossing and turning. You force yourself out of bed because maybe there’s that one extra person you can help.”
Pelak, who served in Iraq, said the emotions pouring out of him feel like a return from combat: a mix of pride, frustration and the feeling that most Americans are oblivious to the human disaster in the making.
On Tuesday he returned from a walk in Brooklyn, closed his door and sobbed for 10 minutes, he said, then got back to work. The next focus, he said, will be on how to resettle thousands of Afghans in the United States.
“I hope we don’t lose this energy,” he said. “The hard part is about to start.”
The Washington Post · by Jonathan Baran , Alex Horton and Elizabeth Dwoskin Today at 1:43 p.m. EDT · August 26, 2021
19. Spirit of America and Afghanistan emergency update
Please consider contributing to Spirit of America at this link: HERE
Spirit of America and Afghanistan emergency update
Dave,
I'm emailing from Tajikistan. As I was writing this yesterday, two explosions at the airport in Kabul killed 13 American servicemembers and at least 90 Afghans. We are deeply grateful for their courage and service and we mourn their loss. And, more servicemembers were injured. This happened while our troops were trying to help Afghans escape the Taliban. I hope our efforts to aid the Afghans that our troops were trying to help serves to honor their incredible sacrifice.
I could not be more proud of the Spirit of America team's response to the Afghan evacuation crisis. They are on the case 24/7 — meeting with, and fielding calls from, our US partners, as well as people and organizations, who need our support and from Americans who want to help. When I can tell you all that our team has done, you will be proud, too. In the meantime, here is what I’m cleared to say. A few photos are at the bottom.
We have team members on the ground in the Middle East, Central Asia and Europe, working side by side with our US military and government partners to provide emergency assistance. Spirit of America’s relationship with the US military has allowed us to respond immediately to the needs of refugees under US military care. One commander told our team in the Middle East: “We need 100 of you.”
Most Afghans are arriving with only the clothes they are wearing. We have provided assistance to more than 14,000 people: food, clothes for children and adults, baby formula, diapers, smartphone chargers, and books and toys for children. Women and children comprise ~70% of the refugees and helping them is our priority. Yesterday we provided 10,000 hygiene kits within 24 hours of when the need was identified to us. Moments ago I approved the purchase of 15,000 care packages with food and other essentials.
We are also funding meals, assistance and temporary housing for refugees in transition to the US and other host nations. In Tajikistan we are funding the renovation of an Afghan community center to support refugee needs.
It is an extraordinarily difficult situation. The need for assistance is increasing rapidly. Please encourage people support our Afghanistan Emergency Fund.
Thank you for being part of our coalition of the can do.
Jim
Photos
Spirit of America's Zack Bazzi with boxes of the hygiene kits at a base in the Middle East.
Spirit of America emergency assistance being delivered to US base
Spirit of America supplies being unloaded.
JIM HAKE
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
SPIRIT OF AMERICA
+1.310.227.3711
20. Most Americans say the declining share of White people in the U.S. is neither good nor bad for society
Yep. Neither good nor bad, just a fact based on the data.
AUGUST 23, 2021
Most Americans say the declining share of White people in the U.S. is neither good nor bad for society
A majority of U.S. adults say the decreasing share of Americans who identify their race as White is neither good nor bad for society, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.
About six-in-ten adults (61%) say the declining proportion of Americans who identify as White – a trend documented this month in new data from the Census Bureau about Americans who identify as solely White and not Hispanic – is neither good nor bad for society. About two-in-ten (22%) say it is bad, including 9% who say it is very bad. Slightly fewer (15%) say it is good for society, including 7% who say it is very good, according to the survey of 10,221 adults, conducted July 8-18, 2021.
Majorities across demographic and political groups have neutral views about the changing racial makeup of the U.S. population. But there are substantial differences in the shares who have a positive or negative opinion about the declining proportion of White people in the country.
How we did this
Differences by age are especially pronounced. Among those ages 18 to 29, around three-in-ten (29%) say the fact that White people are declining as a share of the U.S. population is good for society, compared with 13% who say it is bad. By contrast, 32% of Americans ages 65 and older say this demographic shift is bad for society and only 6% say it is good.
Views also differ sharply by partisanship and ideology, even as nearly identical majorities of Republicans and Democrats (61% vs. 62%) say it is neither good nor bad for society that White people are declining as a share of the population.
About a third of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (34%) say the decline of the White share of the population is bad for society, including 38% of conservative Republicans and 26% of moderate and liberal Republicans. Few Republicans (5%) say it is good for society.
By contrast, around a quarter of Democrats and Democratic leaners (24%) say this demographic shift is a good thing. However, liberal Democrats are more likely than conservative and moderate Democrats (32% vs. 17%) to say the declining share of White people is good for society, while conservative and moderate Democrats are more likely than their liberal counterparts (18% vs. 7%) to say this shift is bad.
Across racial and ethnic groups, majorities of Americans say it is neither good nor bad that White people are a declining share of the U.S. population, though White adults (26%) are somewhat more likely than Black (21%), Hispanic and Asian adults (16% each) to say the change is bad for society.
Among White adults, views differ little from the pattern in the overall public. About six-in-ten White adults of all ages say the declining share of White people in the population is neither good nor bad for society. But about a third of White adults 65 and older (35%) say it is bad for society, while just 13% of those under 30 say the same. And consistent with the overall partisan differences in these views, White Democrats (23%) are far more likely than White Republicans (3%) to say the declining share of White people in the U.S. population is good for society. Conversely, White Republicans are three times as likely as White Democrats (36% vs. 12%) to say this change is bad.
How the U.S. White population has changed over the decades
For the first time, the 2020 census showed the U.S. had a shrinking non-Hispanic White population that identifies with a single race, down 3% – or about 5.1 million people – from 2010 to 2020. The decline was widespread geographically, with 35 states seeing drops in their non-Hispanic White populations.
In previous decades, White people had still increased in numbers, but at a slower pace than other racial and ethnic groups, in particular Hispanic and Asian populations. (Unless otherwise specified, all racial groups in this analysis refer to non-Hispanics who identify with a single race.)
Despite its decline since 2010, the non-Hispanic White population of the U.S. stood at nearly 192.0 million in 2020 and remained the nation’s single-largest racial or ethnic group.
In 32 states, the overall population increased from 2010 to 2020, even as the non-Hispanic White population decreased. In these states, the largest decreases in the non-Hispanic White population came in Connecticut (-10%), while California, Maryland and New Jersey saw the next biggest decreases (-8% each). West Virginia, Illinois and Mississippi were the only states to see their total population decrease along with its non-Hispanic White population.
Only 15 states and the District of Columbia saw increases in their non-Hispanic White populations from 2010 to 2020, with the largest coming in D.C. (+25%), Utah (+11%) and Idaho (+10%).
The share of people in the U.S. who identify as non-Hispanic White and no other race has also declined in recent years, falling from 64% in 2010 to 58% in 2020, according to the new census data. This trend stretches back several decades: Non-Hispanic White people declined as a share of the U.S. population from 1980 to 1990 (80% to 76%) and in every decade since then.
The non-Hispanic White share of the U.S. population remains far higher than the shares who identify as Hispanic (19%), Black (12%) or Asian (6%). Another 4% identify with two or more races and are not Hispanic. This pattern is due to several factors. The White population is older than other groups and aging faster, contributing to a lower birth rate and an increased number of deaths. In addition, immigration is not a source of significant growth for the White population. Immigrants account for a significantly smaller share of the White population than of other groups, in particular Asians and Hispanics.
Racial identification in the 2020 census
Some people who identify their race as White also identify with another race or as Hispanic – or both as Hispanic and with another race. This more broadly defined White population saw modest growth of 2% from 2010 to 2020, increasing from 231.0 million to 235.4 million. However, the group’s share of the U.S. population declined over the past decade, from 75% to 71%.
The population growth of this racial group, referred to in census data as “White alone or in combination,” is due entirely to an increase in the number of people who identified as White and another race. From 2010 to 2020, their numbers grew from 5.0 to 12.2 million for non-Hispanics, and 2.5 million to 18.9 million for Hispanics.
These trends reflect broader societal changes in the U.S., such as the rising share of newlyweds who marry someone of another race and the growing number of multiracial or multiethnic babies. Americans’ views of their racial and ethnic identities also change over time, which can result in changes in how they report their race on census forms. Another contributing factor is that the format of the race questions in the 2020 census, as well as the way responses were coded, differed from previous versions of the decennial census.
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Jens Manuel Krogstad is a senior writer/editor focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew Research Center.
Amina Dunn is a research analyst focusing on U.S. politics and policy at Pew Research Center.
21. A heavily fortified C.I.A. base in Kabul has been destroyed.
A heavily fortified C.I.A. base in Kabul has been destroyed.
With an explosion heard across Kabul, Americans destroyed the base so its contents would not fall to the Taliban.
Afghans outside Kabul’s airport on Thursday. While most Afghans trying to escape the city have gone to the airport, the C.I.A. has shepherded hundreds of others, at particular risk of reprisals, to a base it destroyed on Thursday.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Aug. 27, 2021Updated 8:23 p.m. ET
A controlled detonation by American forces on Thursday that was heard throughout Kabul destroyed Eagle Base, the final C.I.A. outpost outside the Kabul airport, U.S. officials said on Friday.
Blowing up the base was intended to ensure that any equipment or information left behind would not fall into the hands of the Taliban.
Eagle Base, first started early in the war at a former brick factory, had been used throughout the conflict and grew from a small outpost to a sprawling center that was used to train the counterterrorism forces of Afghanistan’s intelligence agencies.
Those forces were some of the only ones to keep fighting as the government collapsed, according to current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence-related matters.
“They were an exceptional unit,” said Mick Mulroy, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Afghanistan. “They were one of the primary means the Afghan government has used to keep the Taliban at bay over the last twenty years. They were the last ones fighting and they took heavy casualties.”
Local Afghans knew little about the base. The compound was extremely secure and designed so it would be all but impossible to penetrate. Walls reaching 10 feet high surrounded the site and a thick metal gate slid open and shut quickly to allow cars inside.
Once the cars got inside, they still had to clear three outer security checkpoints where the vehicle would be searched, and documents would be screened before being allowed inside the base.
In the early years of the war, a junior C.I.A. officer was put in charge of the Salt Pit, a detention site near Eagle Base. There the officer ordered a prisoner, Gul Rahman, stripped of his clothing and shackled to a wall. He died of hypothermia. A C.I.A. board recommended disciplinary action but was overruled.
A former C.I.A. contractor said that leveling the base would have been no easy task. In addition to burning documents and crushing hard drives, sensitive equipment needed to be destroyed so it did not fall into the hands of the Taliban. Eagle Base, the former contractor said, was not like an embassy where documents could be quickly burned.
The destruction of the base had been planned and was not related to the massive explosion at the airport that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 American service members. But the detonation, hours after the airport attack, alarmed many people in Kabul, who feared it was another terrorist bombing.
The official American mission in Afghanistan to evacuate U.S. citizens and Afghan allies is set to end next Tuesday, Aug. 31. The Taliban have said that the evacuation effort must not be prolonged, and Biden administration officials say that continuing past that date would dramatically increase the risks to both Afghans and U.S. troops.
22. The Taliban’s vast propaganda machine has a new target
Excerpts:
Besides this, over the course of the last year in particular, the Taliban has been investing a huge amount of time and effort in shoring up support in its rank and file, legitimising its participation in the intra-Afghan talks and US-Taliban negotiations and seeking to position itself as a credible and good-faith stakeholder that is, crucially, unwavering when it comes to the implementation of its core ideological values.
Now that the Taliban has prevailed in Afghanistan, its media apparatus is more important than ever. Whether you view them as public diplomacy officials working for an emergent state bureaucracy or propaganda operatives in the employ of a terrorist group, their role is absolutely paramount to its ability to navigate through the next stage of its political project. If they fail to stay their course, it could spell the end of the Taliban’s unity and, consequently, its fragile hold on power.
The Taliban’s vast propaganda machine has a new target
The Taliban pumped out 38,000 pieces of propaganda in 12 months. Since taking Kabul, its tactics have changed and it's now facing down ISKP
Wired · by Condé Nast · August 28, 2021
The attack on Kabul airport was devastating, with more than 100 deaths from the terrorist attack reported at the time of writing. Following the attack, the Taliban’s first weeks in de facto control of Afghanistan will always be remembered as a time of chaos, violence, and despair.
The menace of ISKP, the Islamic State’s affiliate in the country, was already well-known, and unusual behaviour from it in the run-up to the attack, coupled with intelligence reports of an impending threat, meant that many expected it to launch an attack. But the speed, scale and precision with which it struck will leave an indelible mark on the Taliban’s first days as a ruling party.
These latest scenes of civilian suffering in Afghanistan come on the back of two decades of brutal conflict, one aspect of which appeared to come to a precipitous end earlier this month when the Taliban took Kabul. It was a moment that surprised Afghanistan watchers the world over as much as it did the Taliban itself. While most thought its takeover was a likelihood once the United States had completed its troop withdrawal in September, no one had predicted that the government of former president Ashraf Ghani would cede control as fast as it did.
It was not only in Kabul that the Taliban made such speedy gains. It took it just nine days to capture 18 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals from the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), with Kabul falling on the ninth day along with the eastern city of Jalalabad.
These advances were not just down to military might, something that is all the more important now ISKP has demonstrated its intent to destabilise Afghanistan. By all accounts, the Taliban was both outnumbered and out-armed by the ANDSF and its allies. Rather, the advances were the result of careful planning and years of strategic outreach, both online and offline.
The reality is that the Taliban has been working towards this moment for years, synergising an effective doctrine of insurgent warfighting with a comprehensive, multi-pronged communications effort that saw each and every one of its military advances handing it a new propaganda victory. No matter how big or small the advance in question, it would be reported on by Taliban media officials, often in a manner that was flagrantly exaggerated, before being amplified and celebrated via the Taliban’s sprawling online network, on both official and unofficial sites, and subsequently recast offline as yet another sign of an imminent Taliban takeover.
Sometimes, this would happen in reverse order, with Taliban leaders being filmed as they visited newly conquered communities or celebrated with the rank and file.
Whatever the case, the result was always the same. Both online and in the real world, the Taliban has been systematically shaping Afghanistan’s information environment for years, driving home the apparent inevitability of its victory. The impact of its efforts aggregated with time, such that it became a self-fulfilling, and accelerating, prophecy – the more territory it captured or troops that surrendered, the more fodder it had for its propagandists; the more fodder it had for its propagandists, the more it could triumph on the battlefield before even firing a bullet, as was the case when Kabul fell earlier this month.
Now that the Taliban has consolidated control, the people of Afghanistan and the international community alike are watching on anxiously, looking to see what its next move will be. And, with the attack on Kabul airport, the stakes are even higher.
In an effort to navigate through this melee, the Taliban has been redeploying its propaganda officials. Now, instead of agitating, they are integrating. Whereas before they were rallying Afghans against the government and security forces, now they are focusing on unity, security and good governance, seeking to establish the idea that the Taliban is an inclusive force that is working for all of Afghanistan, not just the doctrinaires of its rank and file.
So far, the lion’s share of their effort has manifested in statements from and interviews with leadership figures. The overarching tone for these materials was set the very day that the Taliban took Kabul, when its deputy supreme leader Mullah ‘Abdul Ghani Baradar issued a video message addressing, among others, the Taliban’s rank and file, noting that the most pressing challenge now was to provide security and bring a peaceful and prosperous life to all Afghans.
In the week since, this message – that the Taliban has swapped its draconian policies of the nineties for a more moderate and progressive approach towards Islamic governance – has been echoed time and again. Taliban officials have been filmed liberally as they meet with female workers and students, hospital staff, business leaders and religious minorities alike, making assurances that things have changed and that the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ of 2021 does not look like the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’ 20 years ago.
Moreover, in the wake of the airport attack, they were quick to blame the United States military for failing to secure the area sufficiently, insisting that the Taliban’s own counter-terrorism apparatus has a hold on the threat of ISKP terrorism.
Besides these broad policy pronouncements, it has also begun demonstrating how its new system of rule is purportedly working in practice. In one video published a few days ago, Talibs dressed up as civilians roamed the streets with expensive mobile phones, daring thieves to rob them. At around the same time, a video emerged showing a group of just-captured thieves. They had been badly beaten, but they still had their hands, meaning, implicitly, that the Taliban had opted not to implement the ‘Islamic’ punishment of amputation – at least, not yet.
This stream of ‘good governance’-focused content to one side, it is important to keep in mind that what the Taliban’s leaders and propagandists say is not necessarily going to translate into what the Taliban’s rank and file actually do, and, judging by the frequent reports of forced marriage, extra-judiciary raids, and rejection of female employees that are emerging from both Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan, it would appear that some if not many are already trying to break ranks.
With the pressures of ISKP agitation, as well as renewed calls for a US counter-terrorism presence in Afghanistan, the risk of its fragmenting as a result of internal dissatisfaction is mounting. On that basis, one thing is for sure: with the capture of Kabul and its now having de facto control of Afghanistan, the job of the Taliban’s propaganda officials just became a lot more difficult.
However, while difficult, it will not necessarily be impossible: after all, they know what they are doing. Their approach to communication is the result of a concerted and years-long effort to understand and shape the narrative landscape in Afghanistan.
At base, the Taliban appears to conceptualise outreach just like any other insurgent group – that is, with a view to propagating its ideals, legitimising its actions, and intimidating its adversaries. In doing so, it has been communicating simultaneously with supporters and adversaries alike, not to mention the vast number of Afghans who feel, or have felt, ambivalent towards both it and the now-former Afghan government.
In aid of these objectives, its influence efforts have generally taken three forms: media-based communications, in-person outreach, and signalling violence. Media-based communications comprise audio-visual content such as radio programmes, videos, magazines and photo-reports that can be broadcast on- and offline. In-person outreach involves community engagement, police patrols, religious fairs, and public punishments – that is, anything that results in direct interaction between Taliban outreach units and local communities. Lastly, signalling violence comprises acts of violence intended to show power, not necessarily just for territorial or material gain.
In the context of the first two – that is, media-based and in-person outreach activities – five distinct but complementary strategic narratives have taken precedence in recent years, superficially focusing on either the military effort or the Taliban’s vision for civilian life and governance.
The first two narratives revolve around the ideas of capability and vulnerability. Directly relating to the Taliban’s military activities in Afghanistan, they have long been a core focus of its propaganda. On the one hand, they show the impact of its armed operations, demonstrating that it is a professionalised, disciplined and well-equipped force. On the other, they make a case for why it is fighting in the first place, documenting in gruesome detail civilian losses caused by airstrikes and night-time raids in Taliban-controlled territories.
The other three narratives focus on more political aspects of its insurgent offering. First, there are the materials that underline its credibility as a governing actor, demonstrating its ability to rule and provide for Afghan citizens through anything from videos showing education provision and healthcare to mosque-building and roadworks. Second, there is the content that frames it as a good faith participant in the Afghan peace process, simultaneously attacking the ‘malign’ activities of other parties like the former government and the United States. And, third, there is its more nationalistic stream of propaganda, which revolves around making a case for its suitability as a patriotic and unifying representative of the Afghan nation.
To begin to understand the scale and sophistication of the Taliban’s propaganda apparatus, you need to consider what it has published over the course of the last 12 months. To do this, we downloaded, disaggregated and analysed the full extent of its online outputs using ExTrac, a conflict analytics platform focused on deciphering insurgent communications and military activities. Even a cursory glance at the data indicates that, not only is the Taliban’s propaganda machine vast, it is carefully segmented and entirely unspontaneous. On top of that, it dwarfs the media apparatus of the Islamic State, a group that is typically understood to lead the way in extremist communications.
In the year up to August, when the Taliban seized control of Kabul, its online media network published just shy of 38,000 pieces of propaganda. That is more than 145 times as much as was produced by the IS-KP in the same period. (Interestingly, since its capture of Kabul, the central node in its media infrastructure has been either offline or working intermittently. It remains to be seen what is causing these outages – whether it is external pressures from the Taliban's enemies or an internal decision to focus on monopolising the Afghan state's existing media infrastructure. Whatever the case, its output will likely stabilise again at some point in the not too distant future, though perhaps via a different online mechanism.)
These materials were published simultaneously in five languages – Arabic, Dari, English, Pashto and Urdu. About a third of them were Pashto, which is the language spoken by the Taliban’s core support base, with Dari-language materials making up a second third, and Arabic, English and Urdu content making up the remainder. That the majority of its content was in Afghanistan’s two most widely spoken languages – Pashto and Dari – makes sense. The propaganda effort was above all focused on the home front.
Whomever the target audience, the Taliban’s focus was unerringly on demonstrating its capability, credibility, legitimacy, and suitability, not to mention driving home the apparent vulnerability of the Afghan nation for which it claimed to be fighting. One of the standout components of its capability-focused propaganda – which made up the largest proportion of its output by far – was the content it published in relation to its amnesty campaign. This saw it documenting, often in minute detail, ANDSF surrenders and/or defections, footage or photographs that would usually be spliced with images of them being treated justly and with propriety when in Taliban custody.
It is worth noting that, on more than a few occasions, gross violations of this amnesty policy (including summary executions) have been reported. Regardless, the broader message seems to have sunk in, with the fall of Kabul happening as a direct result of mass surrender on the part of the ANDSF and then-government.
Besides this, over the course of the last year in particular, the Taliban has been investing a huge amount of time and effort in shoring up support in its rank and file, legitimising its participation in the intra-Afghan talks and US-Taliban negotiations and seeking to position itself as a credible and good-faith stakeholder that is, crucially, unwavering when it comes to the implementation of its core ideological values.
Now that the Taliban has prevailed in Afghanistan, its media apparatus is more important than ever. Whether you view them as public diplomacy officials working for an emergent state bureaucracy or propaganda operatives in the employ of a terrorist group, their role is absolutely paramount to its ability to navigate through the next stage of its political project. If they fail to stay their course, it could spell the end of the Taliban’s unity and, consequently, its fragile hold on power.
More great stories from WIRED
Wired · by Condé Nast · August 28, 2021
23. A Family Remembers The 1st U.S. Soldier Killed In The War In Afghanistan
We still mourn the loss of Nate. Just before 9-11 he left our battalion in Okinawa and returned to Fort Lewis where he responded to the request for volunteers with "send me."
He was the first military member killed by enemy fire. Michael Spann, former Marine and CIA officer was killed earlier by enemy fire at Mazar-i-Sharif on November 25, 2001. And sadly, Master Sgt. Jefferson Donald Davis, 39; Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Henry Petithory, 32; Staff Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser, 28, of 5th Special Forces Group were killed by friendly fire (a 2000 lb bomb) on December 5th, 2001.
A Family Remembers The 1st U.S. Soldier Killed In The War In Afghanistan
NPR · by Eleanor Vassili · August 28, 2021
Keith and Lynn Chapman at their StoryCorps recording in Frederick, Md., on Aug. 20. StoryCorps
The last conversation Keith Chapman had with his younger brother Nathan Chapman was on Christmas Day 2001. Nathan had called up his family from Afghanistan.
Although the 31-year-old, a sergeant first class with the U.S. Army's 1st Special Forces Group, couldn't disclose his location, his family put it together based on what time Nathan said it was where he was calling from.
"I don't remember that we said very much," Keith said during a StoryCorps interview in Frederick, Md., last week with their mother, Lynn Chapman.
That wasn't so unusual. The brothers, just two and a half years apart in age, had always had a complicated dynamic that was born from their two very different personalities.
A couple weeks after that phone call, Keith heard on his car radio that an American soldier had been killed in Afghanistan. He thought, "Well, yes, Nathan is there, but he's one of who knows how many? So, I put it out of my mind."
That is, until he got home that evening.
"My wife greets me at the door and says, 'I have bad news.' " he said.
"It was my birthday and I said, 'Oh, you burned the cake.' She says, 'No — your father called.' "
That's when it became clear to Keith: The fallen soldier was his own brother.
Nathan was killed in action near the town of Khost on Jan. 4, 2002. He was the first American soldier to be killed by enemy fire in the war in Afghanistan.
Chapman's death was just over a month after the first American death in combat in the war. Johnny "Mike" Spann, a 32-year-old CIA paramilitary officer from Alabama, was killed in late November 2001 during a revolt of Taliban prisoners in northern Afghanistan.
Words left unsaid
Keith said that growing up with his brother, "I felt like he was too different from me to really understand what was really good about him."
Keith was studious and didn't easily make friends. Nathan was the outgoing one.
"He didn't withdraw from me," Keith said. "I think, if anything, I withdrew from him."
From left to right: Nathan, Lynn and Keith Chapman, pictured in 1981 in Contra Costa County, Calif. The Chapman family
Since his death, Keith has struggled to process the relationship he had with his brother.
"All these memories now are 40-plus years old and they're all very thin in my mind," Keith said. "I haven't had the last 20 years of time when an adult might share time with his brother."
"And I think that that's probably, if not slowed down my improved understanding, it's maybe accelerated my loss of understanding."
The past two decades have given Keith time to think about what he wishes he had said to Nathan. Lynn asked her son what he would have told his brother, if given the chance.
"There was an opportunity at his funeral to provide words to be spoken," Keith told her. "But I wasn't able to come up with what was really important.
"The thing that I would say instead was that — there were times when I thought of Nathan as less than me. And that I was wrong. There were times when I thought — and even said to him — that he would never amount to anything. And I was wrong. Everything he wanted to do was important and meaningful."
"I don't see him as a symbol"
Nathan Chapman took to the Army right away. By 1989 he participated in his first combat mission, in Panama, and he would go on to deploy in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. In September 1991, he volunteered for Special Forces training.
Nathan Chapman in Haiti, 1995. The Chapman family
"The fact that he was in Special Forces was a natural fit for him," Lynn said. As a "very, very social guy," she said, he developed a close bond with his small unit in which it was crucial to have each other's backs.
He also served in Haiti in 1995 before spending three years in Okinawa, Japan.
Nathan was highly decorated, with honors including the Bronze Star with "V" device, denoting "Valor" for his heroism in combat, and a posthumous Purple Heart. It later emerged that Chapman had also been working for the CIA and was honored on the CIA's memorial wall.
But to Lynn, her son is far more than a celebrated example of American sacrifice and heroism.
"People take on larger than life quality when things like this happen," she said. "But I think of him as a son and a child — and then a soldier.
"I don't see him as a symbol. In some way, that takes him away from me."
Along with Lynn and Keith, Nathan is survived by his wife, Renae, his two kids Amanda and Brandon, his father Wilbur, and his half-brother Kevin.
Audio produced for Weekend Edition by Eleanor Vassili.
StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps.org.
NPR · by Eleanor Vassili · August 28, 2021
24. Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan
Excerpts:
But this alternative was never explored. Having campaigned against the war, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden undertook peace negotiations with the Taliban to whose extirpation we had committed ourselves, and induced allies to help, 20 years ago. These have now culminated in what amounts to unconditional American withdrawal by the Biden administration.
Describing the evolution does not eliminate the callousness and, above all, the abruptness of the withdrawal decision. America cannot escape being a key component of international order because of its capacities and historic values. It cannot avoid it by withdrawing. How to combat, limit and overcome terrorism enhanced and supported by countries with a self-magnifying and ever more sophisticated technology will remain a global challenge. It must be resisted by national strategic interests together with whatever international structure we are able to create by a commensurate diplomacy.
We must recognise that no dramatic strategic move is available in the immediate future to offset this self-inflicted setback, such as by making new formal commitments in other regions. American rashness would compound disappointment among allies, encourage adversaries, and sow confusion among observers.
The Biden administration is still in its early stages. It should have the opportunity to develop and sustain a comprehensive strategy compatible with domestic and international necessities. Democracies evolve in a conflict of factions. They achieve greatness by their reconciliations.
Henry Kissinger on why America failed in Afghanistan
It was not possible to turn the country into a modern democracy, but creative diplomacy and force might have overcome terrorism, says the American statesman
Aug 25th 2021
This By-invitation commentary is part of a series by global thinkers on the future of American power—examining the forces shaping the country's global standing, from the rise of China to the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Read more here.
The Economist Today
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THE TALIBAN takeover of Afghanistan focuses the immediate concern on the extrication of tens of thousands of Americans, allies and Afghans stranded all over the country. Their rescue needs to be our urgent priority. The more fundamental concern, however, is how America found itself moved to withdraw in a decision taken without much warning or consultation with allies or the people most directly involved in 20 years of sacrifice. And why the basic challenge in Afghanistan has been conceived and presented to the public as a choice between full control of Afghanistan or complete withdrawal.
An underlying issue has dogged our counterinsurgency efforts from Vietnam to Iraq for over a generation. When the United States risks the lives of its military, stakes its prestige and involves other countries, it must do so on the basis of a combination of strategic and political objectives. Strategic, to make clear the circumstances for which we fight; political, to define the governing framework to sustain the outcome both within the country concerned and internationally.
The United States has torn itself apart in its counterinsurgent efforts because of its inability to define attainable goals and to link them in a way that is sustainable by the American political process. The military objectives have been too absolute and unattainable and the political ones too abstract and elusive. The failure to link them to each other has involved America in conflicts without definable terminal points and caused us internally to dissolve unified purpose in a swamp of domestic controversies.
We entered Afghanistan amid wide public support in response to the al-Qaeda attack on America launched from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The initial military campaign prevailed with great effectiveness. The Taliban survived essentially in Pakistani sanctuaries, from which it carried out insurgency in Afghanistan with the assistance of some Pakistani authorities.
But as the Taliban was fleeing the country, we lost strategic focus. We convinced ourselves that ultimately the re-establishment of terrorist bases could only be prevented by transforming Afghanistan into a modern state with democratic institutions and a government that ruled constitutionally. Such an enterprise could have no timetable reconcilable with American political processes. In 2010, in an op-ed in response to a troop surge, I warned against a process so prolonged and obtrusive as to turn even non-jihadist Afghans against the entire effort.
For Afghanistan has never been a modern state. Statehood presupposes a sense of common obligation and centralisation of authority. Afghan soil, rich in many elements, lacks these. Building a modern democratic state in Afghanistan where the government’s writ runs uniformly throughout the country implies a timeframe of many years, indeed decades; this cuts against the geographical and ethnoreligious essence of the country. It was precisely Afghanistan’s fractiousness, inaccessibility and absence of central authority that made it an attractive base for terrorist networks in the first place.
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Although a distinct Afghan entity can be dated back to the 18th century, its constituent peoples have always fiercely resisted centralisation. Political and especially military consolidation in Afghanistan has proceeded along ethnic and clan lines, in a basically feudal structure where the decisive power brokers are the organisers of clan defence forces. Typically in latent conflict with each other, these warlords unite in broad coalitions primarily when some outside force—such as the British army that invaded in 1839 and the Soviet armed forces that occupied Afghanistan in 1979—seeks to impose centralisation and coherence.
Both the calamitous British retreat from Kabul in 1842, in which only a single European escaped death or captivity, and the momentous Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 were brought about by such temporary mobilisation among the clans. The contemporary argument that the Afghan people are not willing to fight for themselves is not supported by history. They have been ferocious fighters for their clans and for tribal autonomy.
Over time, the war took on the unlimited characteristic of previous counterinsurgency campaigns in which domestic American support progressively weakened with the passage of time. The destruction of Taliban bases was essentially achieved. But nation-building in a war-torn country absorbed substantial military forces. The Taliban could be contained but not eliminated. And the introduction of unfamiliar forms of government weakened political commitment and enhanced already rife corruption.
Afghanistan thereby repeated previous patterns of American domestic controversies. What the counterinsurgency side of the debate defined as progress, the political one treated as disaster. The two groups tended to paralyse each other during successive administrations of both parties. An example is the 2009 decision to couple a surge of troops in Afghanistan with a simultaneous announcement that they would begin to withdraw in 18 months.
What had been neglected was a conceivable alternative combining achievable objectives. Counterinsurgency might have been reduced to the containment, rather than the destruction, of the Taliban. And the politico-diplomatic course might have explored one of the special aspects of the Afghan reality: that the country’s neighbours—even when adversarial with each other and occasionally to us—feel deeply threatened by Afghanistan’s terrorist potential.
Would it have been possible to co-ordinate some common counterinsurgency efforts? To be sure, India, China, Russia and Pakistan often have divergent interests. A creative diplomacy might have distilled common measures for overcoming terrorism in Afghanistan. This strategy is how Britain defended the land approaches to India across the Middle East for a century without permanent bases but permanent readiness to defend its interests, together with ad hoc regional supporters.
But this alternative was never explored. Having campaigned against the war, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden undertook peace negotiations with the Taliban to whose extirpation we had committed ourselves, and induced allies to help, 20 years ago. These have now culminated in what amounts to unconditional American withdrawal by the Biden administration.
Describing the evolution does not eliminate the callousness and, above all, the abruptness of the withdrawal decision. America cannot escape being a key component of international order because of its capacities and historic values. It cannot avoid it by withdrawing. How to combat, limit and overcome terrorism enhanced and supported by countries with a self-magnifying and ever more sophisticated technology will remain a global challenge. It must be resisted by national strategic interests together with whatever international structure we are able to create by a commensurate diplomacy.
We must recognise that no dramatic strategic move is available in the immediate future to offset this self-inflicted setback, such as by making new formal commitments in other regions. American rashness would compound disappointment among allies, encourage adversaries, and sow confusion among observers.
The Biden administration is still in its early stages. It should have the opportunity to develop and sustain a comprehensive strategy compatible with domestic and international necessities. Democracies evolve in a conflict of factions. They achieve greatness by their reconciliations.
___________
Henry Kissinger is a former American secretary of state and national security adviser
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.
