Quotes of the Day:
"Happiness is not something readymade. It comes from your own actions."
- Dalai Lama
"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
- Lao Tzu
"Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism:
The right to criticize;
The right to hold unpopular beliefs;
The right to protest;
The right of independent thought.
The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know someone who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn’t? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in . . .
The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny -- Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear."
- Speech of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, given in the Senate Chamber 1 June 1950
1. Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for press freedom
2. U.S. Troops Have Been Deployed in Taiwan for at Least a Year
3. C.I.A. Reorganization to Place New Focus on China
4. The Last Days of Intervention: Afghanistan and the Delusions of Maximalism
5. The Tyranny of the 21st-Century Crowd
6. Why Biden’s Foreign Policy Looks so Similar to Trump’s
7. Special Forces soldier charged with murder of pregnant wife
8. Two-thirds of military teens want to follow in their parents’ footsteps. But these kids ‘are not okay,’ survey finds
9. China Urges U.S. to Abide by Deal to Keep Troops Out of Taiwan
10. Biden Administration Should Make Guam's Defense Center of Indo-Pacific Strategy, Expert Says
11. Taiwan is spending an extra $9B on its defense. Here’s what the money will buy.
12. State Department discloses number of nukes in US stockpile
13. Iron Dome heads to missile defense experiment in Guam
14. EXCLUSIVE US electronics firm struck deal to transport and hire Uyghur workers
15. FDD | Tehran Demands Access to $10 Billion of Frozen Iranian Assets as Reward for Negotiating
16. Palestinian official: ‘China will lead the world and is on our side’
17. Majority supports American troop intervention if allies targeted: poll
18. As CBO Shows How to Cut $1 Trillion From Pentagon, Progressives Urge Spending on ‘True Security’
19. Addressing Biocrises After COVID-19: Is Deterrence an Option?
20. Hundreds of billions were spent by the US in Afghanistan. Here are 10 of the starkest examples of 'waste, fraud and abuse'
21. DOD Announces Plan to Tackle Climate Crisis
22. Taiwan: how the ‘porcupine doctrine’ might help deter armed conflict with China
23. The Rot of Democracies
24. Zignal Labs Announces Public Sector Advisory Board
1. Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for press freedom
Wow. I actually now know a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Maria Ressa has been a good friend for the past two decades from her time in CNN in the Philippines and our time on Basilan Island. She has truly been a champion of freedom of the press and has been leading by example in the face of the political and legal assaults by President Duterte.
Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov win 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for press freedom
The Washington Post · by Paul Schemm, Shibani Mahtani and Robyn Dixon Today at 5:16 a.m. EDT · October 8, 2021
Journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov on Friday won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to promote freedom of the press and report under authoritarian governments.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, praised the journalists from Philippines and Russia for their efforts to safeguard the freedom of expression “which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
“By giving the Peace Prize to two very courageous outstanding journalists that have proved excellent in their profession really illustrates what it means to be a journalist and how you exercise freedom of expression even under the most difficult and destructive circumstances,” she said.
The statement from the commission said that “free, independent and fact-based journalism serves to protect against abuse of power, lies and war propaganda.”
Dmitry Muratov, according to the committee has for decades “defended freedom of speech in Russia under increasingly challenging conditions. In 1993, he was one of the founders of the independent newspaper Novaja Gazeta.”
Journalists from Novaya Gazeta have faced violence and threats and six have been killed including including Anna Politkovskaya, who reported fearlessly on human rights abuses in Chechnya and was shot dead outside her apartment in 2006.
The newspaper has reported on corruption, electoral fraud, police violence, Russian military actions and the presence of Russian mercenaries in Syria, Africa and elsewhere.
In the case of Ressa, the statement said that she exposed abuses of power, the use of violence and the “ growing authoritarianism in her native country, the Philippines.”
Ressa, 58, is the co-founder and chief executive of the Rappler news website.
She previously spent two decades at CNN covering Southeast Asia, before moving back home to found Rappler in 2011. Under the administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Ressa herself and her news organization have repeatedly been targeted through campaigns of online harassment and criminal charges which have been widely seen as politically motivated.
In 2020, the award went to the U.N.’s World Food Program for its role in addressing food supply crises and trying to improve conditions in conflict zones. The agency was also at the forefront of dealing with the economic fallout of the pandemic around the world and the the accompanying rise in hunger.
The prize is a gold medal and an award of $1.14 million dollars.
It was set up by the will of Swedish businessman and inventor Alfred Nobel in his 1895 with the aim of celebrating the people or organizations working for “fraternity between nations,” reducing standing armies and promoting “peace congresses.” Over the years, that criteria has been interpreted to also include the promotion of human rights.
Nobel also endowed prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine and literature.
Unlike the other prizes which are selected and awarded in Sweden, Nobel chose a Norwegian committee, selected by that country’s parliament, to administer the prize.
Schemm reported from London, Mahtani from Hong Kong, Dixon from Moscow.
The Washington Post · by Paul Schemm, Shibani Mahtani and Robyn Dixon Today at 5:16 a.m. EDT · October 8, 2021
2. U.S. Troops Have Been Deployed in Taiwan for at Least a Year
I have long advocated for re-establishing a Taiwan Resident Detachment of Special Forces:
Taiwan needs an unconventional deterrence capability in the form of a resistance operating concept adapted for its specific conditions to support, as one line of effort, an integrated deterrence posture.
Recommendation: US Special Forces should re-establish the Special Forces Resident Detachment Taiwan which was established in 1957 and withdrawn in 1974 when the 1st Special Forces Group (AKA Special Action Force Asia (SAFASIA)) was inactivated with the drawdown of the Vietnam War. Special Forces have a historical relationship with Taiwan that has long been dormant. In May of 2020 a Special Forces Detachment from Okinawa conducted training in Taiwan with their special operations counterparts. The mission of a permanently stationed detachment would be to advise and assist the Taiwan Special Forces in developing a civil resistance capability to contribute to unconventional deterrence.
From a Paper I gave just before COVID:
Resistance and Resilience in Asia – Political Warfare of Revisionist and Rogue Powers
We need to develop civil-military resistance capabilities along some similar lines. This is especially true for Taiwan. As I see the terrain of Taiwan, I get the sense that if Taiwan were ever to be invaded it would be a black hole, meaning what goes in will never come out. Taiwanese conventional military capabilities are insufficient to defend against a PLA attack. However, a civil military resistance could create devastating conditions for the PLA. Taiwan SOF could move away from direct action commando type operations to a more UW focused posture. It could lead an effort to organize, train, and equip local civil defense forces. It could learn from the Poles and the Swiss and the development of their civil defense and stay behind forces. US SOF could advise Taiwan SOF in this work. The number one purpose is for local civil defense. But such a plan would also contribute to governance and most importantly influence. The civil military linkage would reinforce government legitimacy. From an influence perspective due to the large number of Chinese spies this could not be done in secret. However, it will be good for the PRC to observe this effort as it could deter Kim from attacking and if he does attack this capability can mean the end to many Chinese bloodlines as the one child policy will result in the massive loss of families’ only sons. A Taiwanese “Tom Clancy” could write a fictional account of the invasion of Taiwan and illustrate it as a “black hole” and it could tell the stories of the demise of Chinese soldiers who are the end of their parents’ bloodline. I used Taiwan as an example, but it could be applied to Thailand and Mongolia and other countries. If we show the PRC the populations of Asian countries cannot be pacified during a PLA occupation the PRC might come to the conclusion that the price tag for its political warfare strategy is simply too high. This is what Robert Jones at USSOCOM J5 has called Unconventional Deterrence.
Since the PRC has infiltrated so many government and military organizations a counter- intelligence program could be devised that would cause the PRC to lose trust in all its recruited spies. A very simple program could be to establish a policy that says if you are recruited to become a PRC agent what you must do it report it to the proper authorities. If you report a legitimate foreign intelligence operative, you will be allowed to keep his payment and you will receive a matching stipend from the government. You will also be required to provided approved information from your government. Since some countries are so infiltrated by PRC spies this program will be immediately compromised and will be very difficult for the PRC to thoroughly vet ever person they recruit. It will not put an end to PRC espionage, but it will reduce the number of recruits the PRC can recruit, train, and deploy.
These are just a few ideas that hopefully will stimulate discussion. The bottom line is the US and its friends, partners, and allies face an aggressive and hostile PRC that is operating well below the threshold of conflict operating in the so-called gray zone. It is conducting a form of political warfare that seeks to undermine the international nation- state system and attack many of the international institutions for which the US had a large role in developing. The SOF “trinities” of irregular warfare, unconventional warfare, and support to political warfare along with governance, influence, and support to indigenous forces and populations can play a role in helping to advise an assist in these areas. Most important is we need to adopt a new campaign approach and learn to lead with influence so that we can execute a superior political warfare strategy built on the foundation of resistance and resilience to protect the sovereignty of democratic countries in Asia and around the world,
U.S. Troops Have Been Deployed in Taiwan for at Least a Year
Small presence of Americans secretly training local forces marks concern over China’s yearslong military buildup and recent moves
The U.S. special-operations deployment is a sign of concern within the Pentagon over Taiwan’s tactical capabilities in light of Beijing’s yearslong military buildup and recent threatening moves against the island.
Taiwan and U.S. officials have expressed alarm over nearly 150 flights near Taiwan in the past week by Chinese military aircraft. The Chinese aircraft have included J-16 jet fighters, H-6 strategic bombers and Y-8 submarine-spotting aircraft and have set a record for such sorties, according to the Taiwan government.
The Chinese flights, while not entering the area Taiwan defines as its airspace, have been a reminder of the Communist Party’s view of Taiwan as a part of China. Beijing has vowed to take control of the island by force if necessary. Top U.S. military officials testified earlier this year that Beijing is likely to try to use force in its designs on Taiwan within the next six years. Other officials have said China’s timeline could be sooner than that.
Taiwan’s defense minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, warned Wednesday that China would be able to launch a full-scale attack on Taiwan with minimal losses by 2025.
White House and Pentagon officials declined to comment on the deployment of the U.S. military force. There was no immediate response to requests for comment from Taipei. The deployment is rotational, the U.S. officials said, meaning that members of the U.S. units serve on a variable schedule.
China’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it urged the U.S. to adhere to prior agreements and to cease military aid to Taiwan. “China will take all necessary steps to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity,” it said.
Asian media reports last year suggesting a possible U.S. Marine deployment in Taiwan were never confirmed by U.S. officials. The presence of U.S. special operations forces hasn’t been previously reported.
The special-operations unit and the Marine contingent are a small but symbolic effort by the U.S. to increase Taipei’s confidence in building its defenses against potential Chinese aggression. Current and former U.S. government officials and military experts believe that deepening ties between U.S. and Taiwan military units is better than simply selling Taiwan military equipment.
The U.S. has sold Taiwan billions of dollars of military hardware in recent years, but current and former officials believe Taiwan must begin to invest in its defense more heavily, and smartly.
“Taiwan badly neglected its national defense for the first 15 years or so of this century, buying too much expensive equipment that will get destroyed in the first hours of a conflict, and too little in the way of cheaper but lethal systems—antiship missiles, smart sea mines and well-trained reserve and auxiliary forces—that could seriously complicate Beijing’s war plans,” said Matt Pottinger, a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution who served as a deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration.
Chinese military aircraft that have flown near Taiwan include H-6 bombers like this one, according to authorities in Taipei.
Photo: Taiwan Ministry of National Defense/Shutterstock
Mr. Pottinger said Taiwan’s overall military spending was similar to that of Singapore, which has a quarter of Taiwan’s population and “doesn’t have China breathing down its neck.” Mr. Pottinger said he was unaware of any American troop deployment to Taiwan.
In May, Christopher Maier, who later became assistant secretary of defense for special operations, told the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing that the U.S. should be considering strongly such a deployment of forces to help Taiwan strengthen its capabilities. Mr. Maier, who worked at the Pentagon under the Trump administration, didn’t say that special-operations forces already were operating there.
Mr. Maier told senators in May that American special-operations units could show forces in Taiwan how to defend against an amphibious landing or train for dozens of other operations needed to defend the island.
“I do think that is something that we should be considering strongly as we think about competition across the span of different capabilities we can apply,” he said then, referring to special-operations units.
While some aspects of the U.S. deployment might be classified, it is also considered politically sensitive given the tense relations between the U.S. and China, according to U.S. officials.
U.S.-China ties are strained over trade, the Covid-19 pandemic, human rights and regional security, including in the South China Sea. National-security adviser Jake Sullivan met in Zurich on Wednesday with Yang Jiechi, China’s top diplomat.
China is likely to view the presence of the U.S. military forces as a violation of commitments made by Washington in past agreements. In one establishing formal relations between the U.S. and China in 1979, Washington agreed to sever formal ties with Taiwan, terminate a defense agreement and withdraw its forces from the island. The U.S. later said it would reduce arms sales to Taiwan.
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A Pentagon spokesman pointed to the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act passed by Congress and said that law provides for assessments of Taiwan’s defense needs and the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China, or PRC.
“I would note the PRC has stepped up efforts to intimidate and pressure Taiwan, including increasing military activities conducted in the vicinity of Taiwan, which we believe are destabilizing and increase the risk of miscalculation,” the spokesman, John Supple, said in a statement.
The Trump administration loosened rules that restricted contacts with Taiwan by U.S. officials, in a move that was applauded at the time by Taiwan officials. The restrictions limited U.S.-Taiwan exchanges to avoid provoking China.
Before leaving office, the Trump administration declassified the U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific, a 10-page document broadly outlining objectives for the region.
A section on Taiwan says that China will take “increasingly assertive steps to compel unification with Taiwan” and recommends that the U.S. “enable Taiwan to develop an effective asymmetric defense strategy and capabilities that will help ensure its security, freedom from coercion, resilience and ability to engage China on its own terms.”
The strategy also calls for a “combat-credible” U.S. military presence to prevent Chinese dominance in the area that includes Taiwan.
The document hasn’t been supplanted by a new Biden administration strategy, nor is it technically being implemented. Biden administration officials have acknowledged that there are areas of continuity between the two administrations on China policies.
3. C.I.A. Reorganization to Place New Focus on China
Some key points for Korean (and Iran) watchers:
The new reorganization is not nearly so broad as Mr. Brennan’s. But Mr. Burns is undoing two changes put in place by Mr. Brennan’s successor, Mike Pompeo, who was President Donald J. Trump’s first C.I.A. director. Mr. Pompeo created mission centers focused on North Korea and Iran. Those groups will now be folded back into regional centers focused on the Middle East and East Asia.
...
A senior C.I.A. official said ending the independent Iran and North Korea centers did not reflect any reduction in the agency’s view of the importance of those countries or a lessening of the threat they posed. But a review of the agency’s operations concluded that Iran and North Korea were best analyzed inside the context of their wider regions.
There is merit to consider these problems in their larger regional context as they cannot be analyzed in a vacuum . But what I think we should really keep in mind is that the revision (China and Russia) and rogue (Iran and north Korea) power,s as well as violent extremist organizations, are inter-related in various ways. None can be considered in a vacuum.
C.I.A. Reorganization to Place New Focus on China
The agency will create two new mission centers, one focused on China, the other focused on emerging technology, climate change and global health.
The reorganization of the C.I.A. is centered on the establishment of a new China mission center.Credit...Jason Reed/Reuters
By
Oct. 7, 2021
WASHINGTON — The C.I.A. will embark on a reorganization intended to focus more on China, the agency’s director announced on Thursday.
At the heart of the effort will be a new China Mission Center meant to bring more resources to studying the country and better position officers around the world to collect information and analyze China’s activities.
The new center “will further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century, an increasingly adversarial Chinese government,” William J. Burns, the agency’s director, said in a statement.
Another new center will focus on new technology and global problems like pandemics and climate change. Called the Transnational and Technology Mission Center, part of its mission will be to identify new technologies that could be used by the agency to help collect intelligence and by others against C.I.A. operatives.
During his confirmation hearing in February, Mr. Burns identified China as his top priority, and the challenges of changing technology as another important focus area. The new mission centers, along with the creation of a new post of chief technology officer, are a way of formalizing those priorities.
The changes reflect a general policy across the Biden administration’s national security team of giving added attention to a new generation of challenges and threats to the United States after two decades in which terrorism dominated the work of the intelligence community.
The agency has briefed congressional leaders on the changes, and the increased focus on China at least is likely to be greeted warmly. Both Republicans and Democrats have argued that the intelligence agencies need to direct more resources to China and improve their analysis of the Chinese government.
The announcement comes only days after C.I.A. stations and bases around the world received a top-secret cable warning about informants who have been arrested, killed or turned into double agents.
Technological advances have made collecting intelligence in China very difficult. Ubiquitous surveillance cameras and facial recognition software powered by artificial intelligence have made evading detection in China particularly challenging.
A decade ago, the Chinese government systematically dismantled the C.I.A.’s spying operation in the country, with informants captured or killed. Some former officials have blamed a breach of the agency’s classified communications system, while others have blamed a former C.I.A. officer later convicted of giving secrets to China. Since then, the agency has tried to rebuild its networks, but the Chinese government’s power to track the movements and communications of people has slowed the effort.
A senior C.I.A. official said the new technology center would help the agency stay ahead of new technologies that can identify spies. During the last several years, the official said, the agency has been working to address new technological developments and pushing officers not to underestimate adversarial intelligence services.
In the jargon of the C.I.A., tradecraft is the skills spies use to evade adversarial operatives, find new sources and communicate with them securely. Technological advances by countries like China have forced the agency to update and improve their tradecraft. And the senior official said the new focus on technology and China would help in those efforts to continue to transform their tradecraft.
“The C.I.A. must adapt to the policy priorities of each new administration as well as to the evolving global landscape of national security challenges and opportunities,” Mr. Brennan said. “If there is any country that deserves its own mission center, it is China, which has global ambitions and presents the greatest challenge to U.S. interests and to international order.”
The new reorganization is not nearly so broad as Mr. Brennan’s. But Mr. Burns is undoing two changes put in place by Mr. Brennan’s successor, Mike Pompeo, who was President Donald J. Trump’s first C.I.A. director. Mr. Pompeo created mission centers focused on North Korea and Iran. Those groups will now be folded back into regional centers focused on the Middle East and East Asia.
With the ending of the Iran mission center, its current chief, Michael D’Andrea, is retiring from the agency. The appointment in 2017 of Mr. D’Andrea, who had a long career leading operations against Al Qaeda and other terrorist targets, was a sign of the Trump administration’s hard line on Iran. And inside the C.I.A., Mr. D’Andrea helped craft a more muscular approach against Tehran.
Throughout his time in the agency, Mr. D’Andrea worked undercover, even as he took senior leadership roles, and the agency would not publicly acknowledge or discuss his role. But with his retirement, his work can ever so slightly emerge from the shadows. Mr. Burns said Thursday that Mr. D’Andrea had had a “remarkable impact.”
“On behalf of all of us at C.I.A., I want to express deep appreciation to Mike for his decades of service and leadership on some of the most difficult issues we’ve faced,” Mr. Burns said.
A senior C.I.A. official said ending the independent Iran and North Korea centers did not reflect any reduction in the agency’s view of the importance of those countries or a lessening of the threat they posed. But a review of the agency’s operations concluded that Iran and North Korea were best analyzed inside the context of their wider regions.
China’s global ambitions, and its growing involvement in countries across the world through its development initiatives, mean that it could benefit from its own focal center.
Mr. Burns will start meeting with China experts on a weekly basis, much as his predecessors held weekly counterterrorism meetings for much of the last two decades.
The C.I.A. will also push more China experts to work overseas. While it may not be possible to increase the number of agency officials working in China, the agency can position more analysts in Asia and regions of the world where China is active, to help agency officers gain a better understanding of Beijing’s strategies and tactics.
In a message to the C.I.A. work force delivered on Wednesday, Mr. Burns said that in China the United States was “facing our toughest geopolitical test in a new era of great power rivalry.”
Adam Goldman in Washington contributed reporting.
4. The Last Days of Intervention: Afghanistan and the Delusions of Maximalism
Excerpts:
But just as the initial light footprint was better than the surge, so the later light footprint was better than a total withdrawal. A few thousand international troops, supporting air operations, were still capable of preventing the Taliban from holding any district capital—much less marching on Kabul. And by preventing a Taliban takeover, the troops were able to buy valuable time for health and educational outcomes to improve, development assistance to continue, income and opportunity to grow, and rights to be more firmly established for millions of Afghans.
Although the cost of the surge had been immense, the cost of remaining beyond 2021 would have been minimal. The United States could have supported 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan almost indefinitely—and with little risk. So long as U.S. airpower and support for the Afghan air force remained in place, the Taliban would have posed a minimal threat to U.S. troops in their heavily defended air bases. (Eighteen U.S. service members were killed in 2019, perhaps the fiercest year of the fighting, before the cease-fire agreement.) The Taliban were not on the verge of victory; they won because the United States withdrew, crippled the Afghan air force on its way out, and left Afghan troops without air support or resupply lines. In other words, the decision to withdraw was driven not by military necessity, the interests of the Afghans, or even larger U.S. foreign policy objectives but by U.S. domestic politics.
Yet many Americans welcomed the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan because their leaders had not properly explained to them how light the U.S. presence had become or what it was protecting. Politics in the West seems to abhor the middle ground, swinging inexorably from overreach and overstatement to isolationism and withdrawal. A light and sustained footprint modeled on the Bosnian intervention should have been the approach for Afghanistan—and, indeed, for interventions elsewhere in the world. Yet instead of arguing that failure in Afghanistan was not an option, former U.S. President Donald Trump behaved as though failure had no consequences. He showed no concern for how a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would affect the United States’ reputation and alliances, regional stability, terrorism, or the lives of ordinary Afghans. And he responded to exaggerated claims about Afghanistan’s importance not with moderate claims but with a refusal to maintain even the smallest presence there or to bear the slightest cost.
President Joe Biden has followed Trump’s Afghan policy in every detail, despite having famously advocated a light footprint—and argued against the surge—when he was Obama’s vice president. Somehow, over the years, he seems to have convinced himself that such an approach had failed. But the light footprint did not fail. What failed was the political culture of the West and the imagination of Western bureaucrats. The United States and its allies lacked the patience, realism, and moderation needed to find the middle path.
The Last Days of Intervention
Afghanistan and the Delusions of Maximalism
The extravagant lurches of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan—from a $1 trillion surge to total withdrawal, culminating in the reestablishment of a Taliban government 20 years after the 9/11 attacks—must rank among the most surreal and disturbing episodes in modern foreign policy. At the heart of the tragedy was an obsession with universal plans and extensive resources, which stymied the modest but meaningful progress that could have been achieved with far fewer troops and at a lower cost. Yet this failure to chart a middle path between ruinous overinvestment and complete neglect says less about what was possible in Afghanistan than it does about the fantasies of those who intervened there.
The age of intervention began in Bosnia in 1995 and accelerated with the missions in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Over this period, the United States and its allies developed a vision of themselves as turnaround CEOs: they had the strategy and resources to fix things, collect their bonuses, and get out as soon as possible. The symbol of the age was the American general up at 4 am to run eight miles before mending the failed state.
Had the same U.S. and European officials been seeking to improve the lives of people in a poor ex-coal town in eastern Kentucky or to work with Native American tribes in South Dakota, they might have been more skeptical of universal blueprints for societal transformation, paid more attention to the history and trauma of local communities, and been more modest about their own status as outsiders. They might have understood that messiness was inevitable, failure possible, and patience essential. They might even have grasped why humility was better than a heavy footprint and why listening was better than lecturing.
Yet in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq—places far more traumatized, impoverished, and damaged than anywhere at home—U.S. and European officials insisted that there could be a formula for success, a “clearly defined mission,” and an “exit strategy.” Any setback, they reasoned, could be blamed only on a lack of international planning or resources.
These ideas were damaging in Bosnia and Kosovo. But in the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq—unstable hybrids of humanitarianism and counterterrorism that soon became even more unstable hybrids of state building and counterinsurgency—they proved fatal. From the very beginning, the international plans were surreally detached from the local reality. The first draft of the development strategy for Afghanistan, written by international consultants in 2002, described the Afghans as committed to “an accountable, broad-based, multi-ethnic, representative government” based on “respect for human rights.” That same year, then U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed that terrorism from Afghanistan posed “an existential threat to our security.”
Such hyperbolic untruths, which multiplied with each new strategy or plan, were designed to win resources and defend the intervention at home. By exaggerating both the potential for success and the risks of failure in Afghanistan, they made it difficult to resist calls for more troops. And when troops were killed (and more of them were killed than at any time since the Vietnam War), domestic politics dictated ever more strident mission statements, increasingly inflated plans, and additional troop deployments.
Eventually, the rhetorical Ponzi scheme collapsed. But having failed to fulfill their fantasies and realize their power as saviors, the United States and its allies now seemed unable to recognize or value the progress that was actually occurring on the ground—in part, because it was slow, unfamiliar, and often not in line with their plans. Political leaders had so overstated their case that once they were revealed to be wrong, they could not return to the moderate position of a light footprint and instead lurched from extreme overreach to denial, isolationism, and withdrawal. In the end, they walked out, blaming the chaos that followed on the corruption, ingratitude, and the supposed cowardice of their former partners.
THE AGE OF INTERVENTION
The obsession with universal plans backed by heavy resources that led to the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq stemmed in part from a misunderstanding of an earlier success. The first act in the 20-year age of intervention, the nato operation in Bosnia, was largely effective. Not only did it end the war and preserve the peace for decades at almost no cost to the United States and its nato allies, but it achieved things that not long before had seemed impossible: the protection of civilians, the demobilization of vicious militias, the safe return of refugees to ethnically cleansed areas, and the imprisonment of war criminals. Today, the Bosnian state remains fragile, ethnically divided, and corrupt—but also peaceful.
This success, which emerged from a large but very restrained international presence, was misinterpreted as an argument for bold international interventions grounded in universal state-building templates and backed by overwhelming resources. Paddy Ashdown, the British politician who was the senior international representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, asserted that Bosnia demonstrated seven “pillars of peace-making” that “apply more or less universally” and provided a plan to create everything from security to water supplies, prisons, and an efficient market-based economy. In his view, an international administration with absolute executive power was needed to achieve these things. Local elections or consultations should be avoided. The intervening powers should, he said, “go in hard from the start,” establishing the rule of law as quickly and decisively as possible, “even if you have to do that quite brutally.”
Many embraced Ashdown’s vision and developed similar blueprints. James Dobbins, a former U.S. special envoy to Bosnia and a future special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, co-authored The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building, published by the RAND Corporation, which asserted that “heavy” peace-enforcement operations required 13 soldiers for every 1,000 inhabitants and “light” peacekeeping operations required two. The future president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, matched this with a co-authored textbook titled Fixing Failed States that defined ten functions of a state and laid out a universal state construction scheme that could be applied from the Horn of Africa to the Urals.
At the heart of the tragedy in Afghanistan was an obsession with universal plans and extensive resources.
In Kosovo and Iraq, ever-greater power was deployed to advance such plans. In Kosovo, the un administration assumed the authority to jail anyone, change the constitution, appoint officials, and approve the government’s budget (although it used these powers relatively cautiously). In Iraq, Paul Bremer, the American administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, assumed full executive power and sent American and British officials—I was one of them—to govern the Iraqi provinces. They rewrote university curricula, remade the army, and fired hundreds of thousands of members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and detained tens of thousands more.
Afghanistan—the third of the four great interventions of the age—was the exception. There, the senior un official, Lakhdar Brahimi, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proposed a light footprint. Although they came from very different political traditions (Brahimi was an anticolonial independence leader in Algeria), they both mocked Kosovo as a neocolonial farce. Both feared that a heavy footprint in Afghanistan would make the government too dependent on foreign money and troops and provoke an insurgency. Rumsfeld initially authorized only 2,000 U.S. troops and forbade any nation building. No attempt was made to create anything comparable to the mission in Kosovo or, later, that in Iraq. And in order to ensure that his idealistic un staff was not tempted into running Afghanistan, Brahimi blocked the opening of un field offices in many of the provinces. Instead, the lead was given to the Afghan transitional government under President Hamid Karzai.
By 2004, three years into the intervention, most of Afghanistan was safer, freer, and more prosperous, with better services and opportunities than it had had in 30 years. But there was a dark side to this story: the corruption was far worse than during the Soviet occupation or Taliban rule, the police were brutal, and the judicial system worked only for those who could afford the bribes. The production of opium poppies—which had been nearly eliminated by the Taliban by 2000—soared, with profits flowing to the most senior government officials.
Securing Hamid Karzai International Airport, Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2021
U.S. Marines / Reuters
Helmand Province was perhaps the most extreme failure. It was controlled by local strongmen—confirmed in government positions by Karzai—whose families had run the province in the 1980s and early 1990s and who used their newfound power to reignite a decades-long civil war over land and drugs. (Helmand was then producing 90 percent of Afghanistan’s opium and much of the heroin that found its way to Europe.) Regularly robbed and tortured by these commanders, Afghans in some parts of the province became nostalgic for the Taliban.
Many commentators blamed these setbacks on the light footprint, arguing that the United States had been distracted by Iraq, had failed to plan properly, and had not deployed enough resources or troops. Un officials, counternarcotics agents, journalists, and human rights and anticorruption campaigners all called for the toppling of the warlords. Academics warned that the lack of good governance would alienate the local population and undermine the credibility of the Afghan government. Practically everyone assumed that there was a realistic plan to fix governance in Afghanistan—and that the missing ingredients were more resources and international troops. As one 2003 rand report on nation building argued: “The United States and its allies have put 25 times more money and 50 times more troops, on a per capita basis, into post-conflict Kosovo than into post-conflict Afghanistan. This higher level of input accounts in significant measure for the higher level of output measured in terms of democratic institutions and economic growth.”
These ideas led nato to launch what was in effect a second, heavier intervention: a regime-change operation aimed this time not at the Taliban but at the power structures that had been established by the coalition’s ally Karzai. By 2005, nato “provincial reconstruction teams” had sprouted up across the country, the un had begun to disarm and demobilize the warlords and their militias, and the number of nato troops had begun to climb. General John Abizaid, the head of U.S. Central Command, predicted that 2005 would be “the decisive year.”
As the troop counts rose, the problem of good governance became a problem of insurgency.
By 2006, the most powerful warlords had been stripped of their posts in Helmand, and the United Kingdom had deployed thousands of troops to the province. Their aim was not to fight the Taliban, perceived at the time as a weak force. Rather, the troops focused on improving governance and justice and on stamping out corruption and drugs. This plan, dubbed “the comprehensive approach,” demanded an ever-heavier international footprint. Few seemed to doubt its feasibility. The commander of the nato-led operation, British General David Richards, insisted that the mission was “doable if we get the formula right, and it is properly resourced.” He increased the number of troops under his command from 9,000 to 33,000 and claimed that 2006 would be “the crunch year.”
But as the troop counts rose, the problem of good governance became a problem of insurgency. In 2006, the number of Taliban bomb attacks increased fivefold, and the number of British casualties increased tenfold. This, too, was blamed on an imperfect plan and insufficient resources. In 2007, a new general announced another strategy, requiring still more resources. The same thing happened in 2008. Nato troop increases were followed by U.S. troop increases. In 2009, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal announced a new plan for 130,000 U.S. and nato soldiers, claiming he was “knee-deep in the decisive year.”
FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION
By this point, tens of thousands of Afghans and thousands of international troops had been killed, and Afghanistan was considerably less safe than it had been in 2005. But the interveners still insisted that somewhere out there was a formula for state building and counterinsurgency that could succeed. Counterinsurgency experts began to suggest that perhaps 700,000 troops would do it.
As the U.S. presence in Afghanistan increased, so did the temperature of the political rhetoric in Washington. In 2003, when 30 U.S. service members were killed in Afghanistan, it was possible to justify the mission as one of a number of small U.S. operations stretching from Asia to the Horn of Africa. But by 2008, with five times as many U.S. soldiers dying per year and tens of billions of dollars being spent, more extreme justifications were demanded. Officials now argued that if Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, Pakistan would, too, and extremists would get their hands on nuclear weapons. Catching Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama insisted, required “winning” in Afghanistan. Failure was not an option.
None of this was true, of course. Pakistan and much of the Middle East were more important threats in terms of terrorism and regional instability. Catching bin Laden required only catching bin Laden. But the savage and changeable winds of public opinion demanded ever more paranoid and grandiose statements. U.S. plans for state building and counterinsurgency became tissues of evasion and euphemism, justified with contorted logic, dressed in partial statistics, and decorated with false analogies. They were inflexible, simplistic, overly optimistic, and shrilly confident. And because these plans remained obsessed with fixing the Taliban-dominated areas of southern Afghanistan, they diverted investment from the stable, welcoming areas of central and northern Afghanistan, where significant development progress was still possible.
McChrystal in Nakhonay, Afghanistan, June 2010
Denis Sinyakov / Reuters
Many of these optimistic plans contained barely concealed prophecies of failure. McChrystal, for example, maintained that no amount of U.S. military power could stabilize Afghanistan “as long as pervasive corruption and preying upon the people continue to characterize governance.” Obama himself acknowledged that such misconduct was unlikely to change—but he nonetheless authorized a slightly pared-down version of McChrystal’s request for almost 40,000 additional troops.
While the United States continued to refine its plans, the Taliban implemented their own vision for how to establish security, governance, and the rule of law. They called it sharia, and they sold it not from a military fort but from within tribal structures, appealing to rural habits and using Islamic references, in Pashto. And the more military power the interveners deployed against them, the more they could present themselves as leading a jihad for Afghanistan and Islam against a foreign military occupation.
To the Americans and their allies, it seemed impossible that the U.S. military, with its fleets of gunships and cyberwarfare capabilities, its cutting-edge plans for counterinsurgency and state building, and its billions of dollars in aid and investment, could be held off by a medieval group that lived in mud huts, carried guns designed in the 1940s, and rode ponies. The interveners continued to believe that the international community could succeed in nation building anywhere in the world, provided that it had the right plan and enough resources.
THE FALSE LESSONS OF BOSNIA
This view reflected a tragic misreading of the experience in Bosnia, which was a much more cautious and constrained intervention than many recall. The number of international troops was higher there than in the early days of the war in Afghanistan, but both foreign soldiers and foreign civilians in Bosnia were severely limited in what they could do. (Ashdown’s vision of an omnipotent international state builder, overruling local voices and implementing the perfect plan, was what he wished for, not what he found.)
Scarred by memories of Vietnam and the more recent failed intervention in Somalia, senior U.S. and European officials did not wish to be drawn into the long history of ethnic strife in the Balkans and so approached the conflict with immense caution. When the United States belatedly mounted a military intervention, it was focused on air operations to bomb the Bosnian Serb artillery around Sarajevo. The ground fighting was conducted by the Sarajevo-based Bosnia authority and by Croatian soldiers, who received their training from U.S. contractors. When international troops were deployed after the Dayton peace accords, they spent most of their time on their bases. More U.S. soldiers were injured playing sports than in action.
The Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina had much less power than its equivalent would be given in Kosovo and could not order military or police officers to enforce its decrees. The Dayton agreement handed 49 percent of the country’s territory to the Bosnian Serb aggressors and enshrined their power in areas that they had ethnically cleansed. The cautious international presence also initially left the Croatian and Serbian paramilitaries, special police forces, and intelligence services in place and did not disarm them. Instead of doing the equivalent of “de-Baathifying,” as Bremer did in Iraq, or toppling the warlords, as U.S. and coalition forces did later in southern Afghanistan, the high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina was required to work with the war criminals. The party of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was responsible for the massacre in Srebrenica, was allowed to participate in elections (and won the first postwar one, in 1996).
Success in Bosnia was due not to the strength of the international presence but to its comparative weakness.
Bosnia was ultimately transformed not by foreign hands but by messy and often unexpected local solutions that were supported by international diplomacy. The first breakthrough came when Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic split from her mentor, the war criminal Karadzic, and then requested international support. Plavsic was herself a war criminal who had described Bosnian Muslims as “genetically deformed material.” But the international forces worked with her to disarm the special police forces, Bosnian Serb units that acted as de facto militias. Later, the death of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and the toppling of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic fatally weakened their proxies in Bosnia. Neither of these events was part of a planned strategy by the international community, but both helped what had initially been a tiny and apparently toothless war crimes tribunal in The Hague expand its operations, leading eventually to the capture and prosecution not only of Karadzic but also of Plavsic herself. Cautious compromises ultimately led not to appeasement but to justice.
The reversal of the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia also owed very little to international plans. Despite the Dayton agreement’s commitment to refugee return, many international experts considered it reckless to allow refugees to go back to villages that had been burned to the ground and occupied by hostile militias. Nonetheless, small groups of Bosnians tried to move back to their homes. Some were ejected immediately by armed groups, but others held on and persuaded international troops to follow and protect them. These small Bosnian-led initiatives—improvised, incremental, and following no international plan—opened the door for the return of over a million refugees.
Within a decade of the intervention, more than 200,000 homes had been given back to their owners, over 400,000 soldiers from three armies had been disarmed, and Bosnia had built a unified army of 15,000 soldiers. All the major war criminals were caught and tried, and Bosnia’s homicide rate fell below that of Sweden. All of this was achieved at a cost of almost zero American and nato lives. And as Gerald Knaus, the chair of the European Stability Initiative, a European think tank specializing in the Balkans, has argued, such successes were due not to the strength of the international presence but to its comparative weakness: a relatively restrained intervention forced local politicians to take the lead, necessitated often uncomfortable compromises, and made foreign civilians and troops act cautiously to reinforce unexpected and improvised local initiatives.
THE VANISHING MIDDLE GROUND
Could a light footprint in Afghanistan have eventually led to similar successes? Perhaps, but with greater difficulty. Afghanistan was much poorer when the United States invaded than Bosnia was at the time of the nato intervention: adult life expectancy was about 48, one in seven children died before the age of five, and most men (and almost all women) were unable to read or write. Afghan communities were far more conservative, religious, and suspicious of foreigners than Bosnian communities had been (thanks in part to CIA efforts to develop their identity as heroic resisters of foreign occupation during the Soviet period). But the initially limited and restrained international presence in Afghanistan still enabled far more progress than most critics of the war have acknowledged.
The violence and poor governance—particularly in Helmand, elsewhere in southern Afghanistan, and in eastern Afghanistan—that were used to discredit the light-footprint approach were not representative of all of rural Afghanistan. In Bamiyan, for example, a province of three million people in the center of the country, military strongmen retained power, but there was peace. Between 2001 and 2004, locals established excellent schools, even in outlying settlements, providing most girls with their first experience of formal education and laying the foundation for some of them to attend college. The people of Bamiyan—long a marginalized community—began to take senior positions in universities, the media, ministries, and other government agencies. The government extended paved roads and electricity to villages that had never seen them before. Life was much better than it had been under the Taliban, which had led genocidal attacks against Bamiyan communities. (In the winter of 2001–2, I walked through village after village that had been burned to the ground by the Taliban.) All this progress occurred with only a few dozen foreign soldiers in the province and no international civilian administrators.
There also was progress in other central regions and in areas to the north, including in Herat, much of Mazar-e Sharif, the Panjshir Valley, the Shomali Plain, and Kabul. In all these places, a light international footprint meant fewer international casualties, which in turn reduced the pressure on American and European politicians and generals to make exaggerated claims. It also compelled the international community to engage in a more modest discussion with the Afghan people about what kind of society they themselves desired and to accept ideas and values that Americans and Europeans did not always share. In short, it forced a partnership.
By 2005, the Afghan economy was almost twice as big as it had been in 2001. The population of Kabul had quadrupled in size, and new buildings were shooting up. On television, young female and male presenters had the confidence to satirize their rulers. And the progress was not confined to the capital: across the country, 1.5 million girls went to school for the first time. Mobile phones spread like wildfire. Health and life expectancy improved. There was less violence than at any point in the previous 40 years, and no insurgency remotely comparable to what had exploded in Iraq. Perhaps most encouraging of all was that although millions of people had fled in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, millions of Afghan refugees were choosing to return home during this period.
A light and sustained footprint modeled on the Bosnian intervention should have been the approach for Afghanistan.
What would have happened if the United States and nato had tried to retain a light footprint and a restrained approach beyond 2005? What if they had deployed fewer troops, invested in generous development aid, and resisted fighting the drug trade, toppling warlords, and pursuing a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban? The answer would have depended to a great extent on the initiatives of local actors and the competition among them, the developments in neighboring countries, and luck—just as the outcome in Bosnia did. In many parts of Afghanistan, there would have been poverty, a lack of democratic representation, and strongman rule. In regions controlled by drug lords and racked by Pashtun infighting and Pakistani meddling, there probably would have been continued horror, especially if U.S. special operations forces and their proxies had continued to hunt for terrorists. But across much of the country, from Bamiyan to Panjshir, there could have been continued improvements in health, education, and employment—particularly if an overambitious surge had not diverted development funds away from these regions and to the insurgency areas. And for millions of people in Herat and Kabul, this progress could have been combined with an increasingly open and democratic civil society.
Most important, however, many of the problems caused by the heavier international presence and the surge would have been avoided. Well meaning though they were, the attempts to depose local warlords in the name of good governance created power vacuums in some of the most ungovernable regions of the country, alienated and undermined the elected government, and drove the warlords and their militias to ally with the Taliban. The counternarcotics campaigns alienated many others who lost their livelihoods.
The United States did attempt to return to a lighter footprint in 2014, but by then, immense damage had been done. The surge had formed an Afghan army that was entirely reliant on expensive U.S. aircraft and technology, created a new group of gangster capitalists fed from foreign military contracts, and supercharged corruption. Military operations had killed thousands of people, including many civilians, deepening hatred. And the presence of more than 100,000 international troops in rural villages had allowed the Taliban—which had been a weak and fragile group—to present themselves as fighting for Afghanistan and Islam against a foreign occupation. In 2005, under the light footprint, a British intelligence analyst told me there were between 2,000 and 3,000 Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Six years later, after tens of thousands of Afghans had been killed and half a trillion dollars had been spent, General Richard Barrons of the British army estimated that there were 36,000 Taliban fighters in the country.
But just as the initial light footprint was better than the surge, so the later light footprint was better than a total withdrawal. A few thousand international troops, supporting air operations, were still capable of preventing the Taliban from holding any district capital—much less marching on Kabul. And by preventing a Taliban takeover, the troops were able to buy valuable time for health and educational outcomes to improve, development assistance to continue, income and opportunity to grow, and rights to be more firmly established for millions of Afghans.
Although the cost of the surge had been immense, the cost of remaining beyond 2021 would have been minimal. The United States could have supported 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan almost indefinitely—and with little risk. So long as U.S. airpower and support for the Afghan air force remained in place, the Taliban would have posed a minimal threat to U.S. troops in their heavily defended air bases. (Eighteen U.S. service members were killed in 2019, perhaps the fiercest year of the fighting, before the cease-fire agreement.) The Taliban were not on the verge of victory; they won because the United States withdrew, crippled the Afghan air force on its way out, and left Afghan troops without air support or resupply lines. In other words, the decision to withdraw was driven not by military necessity, the interests of the Afghans, or even larger U.S. foreign policy objectives but by U.S. domestic politics.
Yet many Americans welcomed the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan because their leaders had not properly explained to them how light the U.S. presence had become or what it was protecting. Politics in the West seems to abhor the middle ground, swinging inexorably from overreach and overstatement to isolationism and withdrawal. A light and sustained footprint modeled on the Bosnian intervention should have been the approach for Afghanistan—and, indeed, for interventions elsewhere in the world. Yet instead of arguing that failure in Afghanistan was not an option, former U.S. President Donald Trump behaved as though failure had no consequences. He showed no concern for how a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would affect the United States’ reputation and alliances, regional stability, terrorism, or the lives of ordinary Afghans. And he responded to exaggerated claims about Afghanistan’s importance not with moderate claims but with a refusal to maintain even the smallest presence there or to bear the slightest cost.
President Joe Biden has followed Trump’s Afghan policy in every detail, despite having famously advocated a light footprint—and argued against the surge—when he was Obama’s vice president. Somehow, over the years, he seems to have convinced himself that such an approach had failed. But the light footprint did not fail. What failed was the political culture of the West and the imagination of Western bureaucrats. The United States and its allies lacked the patience, realism, and moderation needed to find the middle path.
5. The Tyranny of the 21st-Century Crowd
A thoughtful essay from Robert Kaplan that wehousl ponder. My question: are you part of the mob or a victim of the mob or are you not bothered by the mob?
Excerpts:
The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.
This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.
The brilliant 19th-century Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen, anticipating Spengler and writing in the wake of the failed 1848 democratic revolutions, delivered perhaps the most pessimistic of warnings:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
That is what we are up against. As globalization naturally plunges the West into the crosscurrents of other civilizations, and extreme forms of identity politics trample the rights of the individual, historic liberalism has the task of infinitely postponing Herzen’s vision. Historic liberalism, as the champion of individual agency, delivers a rebuke to all ideologies and to the fate Herzen had in mind. The direction of history is unknowable, thus we have no choice but to fight on. After all, 1848 was not a foregone conclusion.
The Tyranny of the 21st-Century Crowd
Mobs that form from the bottom up may prove even harder to defeat than totalitarian regimes.
WSJ · by Robert D. Kaplan
But there was something even more fundamental than the close-run failure of 1848 that wrought the ideological horrors of the 20th century: technology. The tens of millions of the “dispossessed of the Industrial Revolution,” in Strausz-Hupé’s words, became mindless foot-soldiers to class and racial warfare, abetted by the new force of mass media. It’s impossible to imagine Hitler and Stalin except against the backdrop of industrialization, which wrought everything from tanks and railways to radio and newsreels. Propaganda, after all, has a distinct 20th-century resonance, integral to communications technology.
Technology has kept evolving, so that the roots of our present crisis lie in what went wrong in the 20th century. Nazism and communism shared two decisive elements: the safety of the crowd and the yearning for purity. In “Crowds and Power,” first published in German in 1960, Elias Canetti may have written the most intuitive book about the crisis of the West over the past 100 years. Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” argues that Western civilization, like all civilizations, is ultimately ephemeral, but Canetti’s book shows the actual mechanics.
The crowd, Canetti says, emerges from the need of the lonely individual to conform with others. Because he can’t exert dominance on his own, he exerts it through a crowd that speaks with one voice. The crowd’s urge is always to grow, consuming all hierarchies, even as it feels persecuted and demands retribution. The crowd sees itself as entirely pure, having attained the highest virtue.
Thus, one aim of the crowd is to hunt down the insufficiently virtuous. The tyranny of the crowd has many aspects, but Canetti says its most blatant form is that of the “questioner,” and the accuser. “When used as an intrusion of power,” the accusing crowd “is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light.”
There are strong echoes of this in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “1984,” and particularly in Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” But Canetti isolates crowd psychology as an intellectual subject all its own. Crowds have existed since the dawn of time. But modern technology—first radio and newspapers, now Twitter and Facebook —has created untold vistas for the tyranny of the crowd. That tyranny, born of an assemblage of lonely people, has as its goal the destruction of the individual, whose existence proves his lack of virtue in the eyes of the crowd.
There is a difference, however, between the 20th and 21st centuries. The 20th century was an age of mass communications often controlled by big governments, so that ideology and its attendant intimidation was delivered from the top down. The 21st century has produced an inversion, whereby individuals work through digital networks to gather together from the bottom up.
But while the tyranny produced has a different style, it has a similar result: the intimidation of dissent through a professed monopoly on virtue. If you don’t agree with us, you are not only wrong but morally wanting, and as such should be not only denounced but destroyed. Remember, both Nazism and communism were utopian ideologies. In the minds of their believers they were systems of virtue, and precisely because of that they opened up new vistas for tyranny.
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were defeated by U.S. military and industrial power. Civilizations rest not only on intellectual and cultural foundations but also on coarser aspects of strength and power. The historic West, which is ultimately about the freedom of the individual to rise above the crowd, survived the 20th century thanks to American hard power, itself maintained by a system of individual excellence in the arts and sciences, in turn nurtured by an independent and diverse media. But that media is now becoming immersed in the crowd, where it demands virtue in its purest ideological form, so that much of the media too often plays the role of Canetti’s accuser.
The lust for purity combined with the tyranny of social-media technology in the hands of the young—who have little sense of the past and of tradition—threatens to create an era of the most fearsome mobs in history. The upshot of such crowd coercion is widespread self-censorship: the cornerstone of all forms of totalitarianism.
This ultimately leads toward a controlled society driven by the bland, the trivial and the mundane, wearing the lobotomized face of CNN weekday afternoon television. Outright evil can surely be dealt with, but a self-righteous conformity is harder to resist. Left unchecked, this is how the West slowly dies.
The brilliant 19th-century Russian intellectual Alexander Herzen, anticipating Spengler and writing in the wake of the failed 1848 democratic revolutions, delivered perhaps the most pessimistic of warnings:
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
That is what we are up against. As globalization naturally plunges the West into the crosscurrents of other civilizations, and extreme forms of identity politics trample the rights of the individual, historic liberalism has the task of infinitely postponing Herzen’s vision. Historic liberalism, as the champion of individual agency, delivers a rebuke to all ideologies and to the fate Herzen had in mind. The direction of history is unknowable, thus we have no choice but to fight on. After all, 1848 was not a foregone conclusion.
Mr. Kaplan holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is author, most recently, of “The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian.”
WSJ · by Robert D. Kaplan
6. Why Biden’s Foreign Policy Looks so Similar to Trump’s
Conclusion:
Haass admits that the squandering of wealth and manpower that resulted in the relative decline was foolish. But he then prescribes a continuation of the same grand strategy, displaying a lack of understanding of where the world is heading and how the next order is going to be. If someone’s baseline for analysis is faulty, the resultant policy is bound to be flawed. Policy comes after one can predict the coming order correctly. Relative decline lets a great power cut losses and retrench and recuperate, while having others share the burden and bleed. Absolute decline either results in collapse, or results in fear and war and overstretch, which then results in implosion and collapse. There is no euphemistic way of stating the obvious. The American hegemony is gone. That is not unsurprising, as hegemony is inherently unsustainable and draining to resources. But if America needs to maintain its preponderant position in the globe, it needs other powers and allies to share the burden, while rivals bleed. That requires retrenchment from regions that are corrosive, and conceding security of some regions to rival powers. Some of those decisions will be unilateral and will be sold to the American public often by overtly nationalistic rhetoric.
Why Biden’s Foreign Policy Looks so Similar to Trump’s
If America needs to maintain its preponderant position in the globe, it needs other powers and allies to share the burden, while rivals bleed. That requires retrenchment from regions that are corrosive, and conceding security of some regions to rival powers.
Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass recently wrote for Foreign Affairs that President Joe Biden is determined to carry on a Trumpian nationalism that rejects American internationalism at precisely the time when it is needed most. The dawn of a new consensus looms in Washington, DC: The dawn of America First. Despite the Biden administration’s rhetoric of internationalism, “there is far more continuity between the foreign policy of the current president and that of the former president than is typically recognized,” Haass writes. The new consensus perhaps pushes aside a strategy that evolved in the wake of World War II. The present paradigm is hardly isolationist, but it rejects the core tenet of internationalism that the United States has a vital stake as a shareholder to actively prevent collapse and preserve the international liberal order.
Haass admits there were mistakes made during the hubristic “unipolar moment” after the end of the Cold war, including a failure to stem China’s rise, decisions to expand NATO that sparked Russian revanchism, and of course the Iraq War. But Haass is wary of the nationalism that accompanies the new emerging realism and restraint consensus:
Accompanying this focus on great powers is a shared embrace of American nationalism. The Trump administration eagerly adopted the slogan and idea of “America first,” despite the label’s origins in a strand of isolationism tinged with sympathy for Nazi Germany. The Biden administration is less overt in its nationalism, but its mantra of “a foreign policy for the middle class” reflects some similar inclinations.
“America first” tendencies also characterized the Biden administration’s initial response to COVID-19. U.S. exports of vaccines were limited and delayed even as domestic supply far exceeded demand, and there has been only a modest effort to expand manufacturing capacity to allow for greater exports.”
Beyond that, the Biden administration, while nominally talking about values and democratic unity in the face of rising authoritarianism, has continued to work with both authoritarian leaders such as in the Philippines, and majoritarian non-liberal democracies such as India. Interests trumped (for lack of a better word) values, as long as the goal was to balance China in a great power rivalry.
Moreover, Haass is extremely concerned with the instinct to pull out of the greater Middle East, where he finds a distinct overlap between Biden’s realism and Trumpian retrenchment.
Central to the new foreign policy is the desire to pull back from the greater Middle East, the venue of the so-called forever wars that did so much to fuel this paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy. Afghanistan is the most striking example of this shared impetus.
This isn’t the first time Haass has shown concern about pulling out of Afghanistan. On August 21, he tweeted, “The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not ‘endless occupation’ but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem.” Open-ended presence in this context is a euphemism for garrison diplomacy, a refined version of coercive imperialism. Haass writes that not only is Biden following the Trump act on retrenchment, he is doing so in a Trumpian way by carrying it out unilaterally.
Like Trump before him, he considered the war in Afghanistan a ‘forever war,’ one he was determined to get out of at any cost. And Biden didn’t just implement the Trump policy he had inherited; his administration did so in a Trumpian way, consulting minimally with others and leaving NATO allies to scramble.
The same unilateralism, also on display in the creation of AUKUS, has harmed transatlantic ties. “Multilateralism and an alliance-first foreign policy in principle gave way to America-first unilateralism in practice,” Haass writes, adding “In the absence of a new American internationalism, the likely outcome will be a world that is less free, more violent, and less willing or able to tackle common challenges.”
Apart from incoherence, some of the accusations are somewhat baffling. It is understandable that the U.S. government prioritized vaccinating its own population. Vaccines are the primary arsenal to tackle a pandemic against the threat of infection, and it is unclear why Haass would rather have the world benefitting from American charity, presumably at the cost of American taxpayers. Hard times require trade-offs. AUKUS is itself a multilateral treaty, just not the countries Haass would prefer to be aligned with. Haass would have the United States align with social-democratic West Europe, especially the EU core ruled from Brussels, even when the EU core has taken freeriding to an art-form, and would rather side with China. America, in very crude terms, aligned with the core Anglosphere and passed the buck on EU security to Europe.
No matter how it would have happened, there was no way of pleasing all sides. The Australians came to the British, who then came to the United States. Should Washington have said no? Haass’ argument is predicated on the conception that America is losing credibility in Europe. The evidence is lacking. If France, Germany, and the rest of Europe were genuinely worried about the credibility of American cooperation, as well as major Russian invasion threats, we'd see immediate “internal balancing” and rapid rearmament. That is the only measurable criteria to judge actual loss of military credibility. Unless that happens, we can chalk it all up to rhetoric, optics, and domestic politics.
With AUKUS, and the subsequent Greco-French defense entente targeted towards Turkey, the era of massive ideological alignments are over, and smaller, purely military and strategic pacts are back. In a way, this is a return to the norms that existed before World War I. That is not a bad thing. These arrangements share burdens, are narrow and interest-oriented, and avoid both ideological wars and freeriding. They also favor natural great powers, over disproportionately influential, ideological, and activist small states. It creates a far more natural order of affairs.
It was also absurd to claim that the United States should have continued policing Afghanistan and the Middle East, especially after the top U.S. military leadership testified that the strategic situation would not have changed. For a start, the United States isn’t really retrenching from the Middle East. The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet is still based in Bahrain, for example. Beyond that, the idea that the Middle East is of equal strategic importance as West Europe or East Asia is frankly not grounded in reality. Theoretically, no one can launch a seaborne invasion of the U.S. mainland. No threat there is existential to U.S. survival.
However, potential great power or hegemonic threats originating from West Europe and East Asia might be. Geography is destiny. The botched evacuation and withdrawal were not the fault of the civilian leadership and should entail resignations from top generals for incompetence. The withdrawal was planned and decided over a year and a half back, in a bipartisan political decision by two different presidents. The reality is that the military leadership didn't want to follow through with civilian political orders and wanted to remain. As a result, they delayed the withdrawal to the point where it was botched. At last week’s Congressional hearing, they were trying to save skin by blaming their institutional incompetence on civilian leadership. There would have been no status quo with 2,500 troops. To claim otherwise is to misunderstand conflict, grand strategy, Afghanistan, and the greater Middle East. The choice was always either “leave” or “surge.”
The final issue was about Biden’s “Trumpian” tone. Haass is not the only one to argue about rhetoric. Shadi Hamid, of the Brookings Institution, argued that Biden is not a progressive, but a Trumpian nationalist. Stephen Wertheim of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace countered that there is a difference between the two. The discomfort among a section of academic progressive-realists to find out that realpolitik (the acts, not the theory) requires a steady dose of nationalism to sell to the electorate, as well as an instinct of bulldozing machtpolitik, is somewhat amusing to observe, but it does not change the reality. Foreign policy is neither an ideological crusade nor a feel-good club or fellowship, but an uncomfortable, morally gray coexistence with questionable countries. To paraphrase former French diplomat Gerard Araud, the world is a jungle without judges and policemen where one’s goal is not converting carnivores to vegetarianism but not to be eaten. The ideas that drove the civilizing missions in Afghanistan and foreign ideology imposition in the Middle East are still entrenched in the bureaucratic and defense circles, as well as certain think tanks, often funded by foreign countries and lobby groups and copious grants from the War on Terror era. But the political winds of the country have changed. That should be reflected in a new counter-elite, which is the ascending realism and restraint movement.
To borrow a phrase from The Godfather, the effete military-NGO-complex that wrecked American relative power for over twenty years were “peacetime consiglieres.” In a new era of great power competition, amoral, unsentimental, realist counter-elites are required. America is in relative decline, and understanding the difference between relative decline, and absolute decline and collapse are vital to employ a new grand strategy. Some of the flaws Haass mentions in his essay, such as NATO expansion, and futile wars like Libya and Iraq, were not just random occurrences. They were the fruits of his favored internationalist worldview. The NATO expansion was a direct result of a Clintonian grand-strategy of democratic peace theory. American wars and proxy wars in the Middle East were a logical conclusion of the idea that semi-feudal societies could be transformed to democracies regardless of their history or geography, tradition, and culture if America leads the way.
If America needs to maintain its preponderant position in the globe, it needs other powers and allies to share the burden, while rivals bleed. That requires retrenchment from regions that are corrosive, and conceding security of some regions to rival powers.
Haass admits that the squandering of wealth and manpower that resulted in the relative decline was foolish. But he then prescribes a continuation of the same grand strategy, displaying a lack of understanding of where the world is heading and how the next order is going to be. If someone’s baseline for analysis is faulty, the resultant policy is bound to be flawed. Policy comes after one can predict the coming order correctly. Relative decline lets a great power cut losses and retrench and recuperate, while having others share the burden and bleed. Absolute decline either results in collapse, or results in fear and war and overstretch, which then results in implosion and collapse. There is no euphemistic way of stating the obvious. The American hegemony is gone. That is not unsurprising, as hegemony is inherently unsustainable and draining to resources. But if America needs to maintain its preponderant position in the globe, it needs other powers and allies to share the burden, while rivals bleed. That requires retrenchment from regions that are corrosive, and conceding security of some regions to rival powers. Some of those decisions will be unilateral and will be sold to the American public often by overtly nationalistic rhetoric.
Sumantra Maitra is a National Security Fellow at the Center for the National Interest. He is also a non-resident fellow at the James G Martin Center and an elected Early Career historian member at the Royal Historical Society, UK.
Image: Reuters.
7. Special Forces soldier charged with murder of pregnant wife
I don't mean to be petty about this tragic incident, but dammit CNN, he is not a Special Forces soldier. He is a signal soldier assigned to a Special Forces unit. Why don't you use the headline, "Signal soldier charged with murder?" Don't answer that. I know the answer.
Special Forces soldier charged with murder of pregnant wife
CNN · by Jennifer Henderson, CNN
(CNN)A Special Forces soldier has been formally charged with the murder of his pregnant spouse, according to a news release from the military.
Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Santiago, 33, a signal support systems specialist, was charged with the murder of Meghan Santiago and the injury of an unborn child following an incident at Fort Campbell in Kentucky on September 27, the release from Fort Campbell's Public Affairs Office states.
Santiago was taken into custody on September 28 and held, pending an investigation by the US Army Criminal Investigation Division, at the Grayson County Jail.
"Meghan's death is a tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with her family and friends," Col. Brent Lindeman, commander of 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) said in the release.
"This tragic event has shaken our entire unit. We take all allegations of domestic violence seriously, and we will provide every resource to ensure a thorough investigation," said Lindeman.
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"The charges in this case are merely accusations and all Soldiers accused of a crime are presumed innocent until proven guilty," the release adds.
"No further information will be released at this time to protect the integrity of the ongoing investigation."
CNN's Melissa Alonso contributed to this report.
CNN · by Jennifer Henderson, CNN
8. Two-thirds of military teens want to follow in their parents’ footsteps. But these kids ‘are not okay,’ survey finds
Our "family business" is in some trouble.
Two-thirds of military teens want to follow in their parents’ footsteps. But these kids ‘are not okay,’ survey finds
Two-thirds of military teens say they plan to serve in the military in the future, according to the results of an online survey being released today.
That finding was surprising to the military teens and family advocates alike who worked together to compose the survey and field it online for two weeks in May. Some 2,116 military teens ages 13 to 19 participated in the survey, which provides a rare, recent window into the experiences of military teens.
While the number of those who want to follow the family tradition of serving may be a good sign, there were also troubling findings. “The kids are not okay,” wrote the researchers in this survey, conducted by Bloom: Empowering the Military Teen, and the National Military Family Association. Among other things, 42 percent of teens showed signs of emotional distress; one-third of teens experienced food insecurity; and 11 percent experienced domestic abuse or violence in their homes.
In general over the years, a number of military children have followed in their parents’ footsteps, but there have been indications those trends were waning, with some surveys finding that military parents are increasingly unlikely to recommend service to their children. And these teens were all born in a time of wartime deployments, in post-9/11 years. The finding that 65 percent want to serve in the military is in stark contrast to a 2019 Defense Department poll indicating that 13 percent of Americans in the general population ages 16 to 24 are likely to serve in the military.
The high number of military teens who want to serve in the military is stunning, said 17-year-old Elena Ashburn, co-founder of Bloom with her 17-year-old friend Matthew Oh. Bloom is an online platform and community for military teens, with content provided by military teens. They were approached by the National Military Family Association to work together to amplify the voice of teens, Matthew said, and the work led to the survey. Elena, who turns 18 Oct. 9, lives in Florida, and Matthew lives in South Korea. Both are Army children, and are high school seniors.
Elena and Matthew, as well as advocates at NMFA, feel that military teens’ voices are not being heard.
“No one is looking at this population. No one is paying attention to these teens,” said NMFA’s Crystal Lewis, director of research and insights for the nonprofit. Most of the teens who responded to the survey are active-duty kids or have lived the active-duty lifestyle, “where they are frequently relocating geographically, making new friends, changing schools, all of those challenges, on top of those standard challenges of being a teenager,” Lewis said.
“A common misconception even among the military is that for kids, military life gets easier,” said Matthew. In some ways that may be true, he said, but when it comes to leaving friends and schools, “I feel like it gets harder because you become emotionally aware of what’s happening. You feel deeper connections with people that you then have to leave.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention building bonds and relationships with adults and friends, and helping teens feel connected to their schools and community can help protect adolescents from poor mental health.
And, these researchers add, the military lifestyle doesn’t foster that connectedness.
While the finding of low mental well-being among teens wasn’t surprising to Elena, those 65 percent of military teens who intend to join the military is a “shocking” finding, she said.
“The military is becoming sort of a family business,” Elena said. “If we want to ensure these military teens are able to serve, then we need to make sure we have adequate mental health support for them as teenagers. It’s really sad to me that the future of our force is suffering a lot with something that, if we invested money into it, had more programs, could be significantly changed and made better.”
Bloom is hoping to help military teens make the best of their military lifestyle. “Matthew and I talk about how hard military life is, but we wouldn’t trade it for anything. For every bad thing, there are seven great things,” Elena said.
Of those who responded to the NMFA + Bloom Military Teen Survey, 41 percent are in current active-duty families; 27 percent are children in National Guard families; 13 percent in Reserve families, 11 percent in retired families, and 7 percent in veteran families.
Across the survey participants, 58 percent were from enlisted families; 35 percent were from officer families; and 7 percent were unsure.
Among the findings:
*Military teens’ mental wellbeing is low, with 42 percent of respondents showing signs of emotional distress. By comparison, according to the CDC, about 37 percent of high school students in the general population experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in 2019. Only 13 percent of military teen respondents indicated a high level of mental wellbeing, based on the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale, a seven-item scale used to measure well-being and psychological functioning. About 45 percent of the survey participants reported only moderate mental well-being, which is still categorized as being at risk, researchers stated.
*Of no surprise to military families, the survey showed that military teens who reported experiencing more deployments or separations lasting three months or longer generally reported lower mental well-being. And in this survey of teens who have grown up in post-9/11 wars, 45 percent reported their family had gone through between one and four deployments that were three months or longer; nearly 8 percent between five and seven deployments; 6 percent between eight and 10. There were 15 teens who said they’ve gone through 19 or more such deployments as a military family.
*Like many military children, these teens have experienced their share of moves, uprooted from their schools and neighborhoods. Of these teens, 62 percent said they had made between one and five military moves; 18 percent have made six to 10 moves; and 7 percent moved 11 or more times.
*36 percent of survey participants said they had experienced food insecurity within the past year, based on the USDA Food Security Survey for Youth Ages 12 & Older. Among the teens in active-duty families, 29.5 percent reported food insecurity, or about 262 teens out of the approximately 890 teens in active-duty families who participated in the survey, Lewis said. Of the overall survey participants, 28 percent said they had “sometimes” experienced food insecurity; and nearly 8 percent said they had “often” experienced food insecurity. The researchers cited research from the Department of Agriculture noting that 10.5 percent of families in the general population were food insecure in 2020. The nonprofit Feeding America predicts a level of food insecurity for as many as one in six American children in 2021. “Military families are not immune from the pressures facing the nation as a whole,” the military teen report stated.
*11 percent reported they had experienced domestic abuse or violence in their homes; with 5 percent saying they had experienced child abuse and 5 percent experiencing dating violence; 17 percent selected multiple answers to the question about personal experiences with violence. The majority — 57 percent — experienced none of this violence. According to the CDC, 61 percent of adults surveyed across 25 states reported that they had experienced or witnessed at least one type of adverse childhood event — such as experiencing violence, abuse, or neglect or witnessing violence in the home or community — in their years up to age 17, and nearly one in six reported they had experienced four or more types of adverse childhood events.
*20 percent of the teens said they’ve been treated differently or have been made fun of because they were military kids.
There were 15 questions, as researchers wanted to keep the survey to five minutes or less, to encourage participation, said NMFA’s Lewis. While 4,000 people started the survey, about 3,000 completed it. About 1,000 of the participants were military parents trying to complete the survey for their teens. Their responses were not used, Lewis said.
Connectedness is a key issue, which is what Bloom is working toward on a worldwide level. But there needs to be a better sense of community on bases among teens, Elena said. Teens need to talk with others about what’s going on in their lives, she said.
“Knowing you’re not alone in your struggles is helpful. So many other people have been going through it too, and they might have ways and methods to help you cope with it. It could be incredibly helpful. That’s what we try to do at Bloom.”
The online survey is not a random scientific sampling, and these online surveys of the military community have become more common among a number of military nonprofits. Surveys sponsored by DoD provide the scientific sampling, as they have access to contact information of service members and spouses.
Decades ago, DoD surveyed military youth on a periodic basis, and compared them to the general population of youth. Over the years DoD and the services have worked to provide programs for military teens, with a variety of programs through youth services such as Boys & Girls Clubs of America; and schools have programs such as the Military Child Education Coalition’s Student 2 Student to help ease the transition for military kids. And through the Interstate Compact for the Education of Military Children, states have been addressing education transition issues for military children.
Lewis said NMFA will look at steps to take to “nurture this population that’s been swept under the rug,” such as expanding its Operation Purple Camps to include some teen-only camps. “We’re not just going to sit back and say this is a problem,” she said.
Matthew said Bloom is also working with NMFA on ways to educate adults who interact with military teens, such as teachers, coaches, community leaders to help them understand the issues, such as difficulties making transitions from one location to another. There are different struggles in different locations, he said.
“Including military teens in these conversations is important,” he said. “We’re more than happy to talk and share our experience. MFA listened to us.”
Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book "A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families." She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.
9. China Urges U.S. to Abide by Deal to Keep Troops Out of Taiwan
You do have to like threats by tweet:
Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper, earlier called on the U.S. to disclose the troops’ location, suggesting that would aid a Chinese attack. “See whether the PLA will launch a targeted air strike to eliminate those US invaders!” he said in a tweet.
China Urges U.S. to Abide by Deal to Keep Troops Out of Taiwan
Bloomberg News
October 8, 2021, 3:44 AM EDT Updated on October 8, 2021, 5:33 AM EDT
- Foreign Ministry responds to reports of U.S. troop deployment
- Developments comes after Joe Biden, Xi Jinping agree to speak
China called on the U.S. to abide by its agreement to withdraw troops from Taiwan, in a relatively muted response to reports that a small number of American military advisers have been deployed to the island.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian urged the U.S. to uphold the consensus that led Washington to sever ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing more than four decades ago, including ending its formal security pact. Zhao was responding Friday to reports that about two dozen American military advisers have been deployed on the island.
“The One China principle is the political foundation of China and U.S. relations,” Zhao told a regular news briefing in Beijing. “The U.S. must sever diplomatic relations and abrogate its mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and U.S. forces must withdraw from Taiwan.”
The U.S. was training local forces to better defend the democratically ruled island from a future attack by China, a U.S. defense official told Bloomberg News on Thursday. The official, who asked not to be identified, confirmed an earlier report by the Wall Street Journal that American service members, including special forces, have been in Taiwan for more than a year.
The subdued response comes as the two sides make plans to hold a video summit between President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping before the end of the year. The announcement of the meeting followed six hours of talks Wednesday between White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi in Zurich, including discussions on Taiwan.
While the U.S. has stepped up diplomatic and military support for Taiwan in response to a pressure campaign by Xi, it was unclear whether the deployment was new or related to that effort. The U.S. has played down military interactions with the island since ending its alliance with Taipei and establishing ties with Beijing in 1979.
“The U.S. has made its clear commitment to China,” Zhao said Friday. “In his phone call with President Xi Jinping, President Biden emphasized that it has no intention to change the One China principle.”
The presence of small numbers of U.S. forces on the island wasn’t unprecedented. Still, the deployment of foreign forces on Taiwan is one of six conditions Chinese military commanders have set for launching a military strike, according to a state media report in April 2020 that cited a retired researcher with the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force.
Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper, earlier called on the U.S. to disclose the troops’ location, suggesting that would aid a Chinese attack. “See whether the PLA will launch a targeted air strike to eliminate those US invaders!” he said in a tweet.
— With assistance by Colum Murphy
10. Biden Administration Should Make Guam's Defense Center of Indo-Pacific Strategy, Expert Says
Biden Administration Should Make Guam's Defense Center of Indo-Pacific Strategy, Expert Says - USNI News
USS Nimitz (CVN 68) enters Apra Harbor prior to mooring at Naval Base Guam for a scheduled port visit on June 24, 2020. US Navy Photo
The defense of Guam should be the centerpiece of the Biden administration’s focus on countering threats from China in the Indo-Pacific, an expert on missile defense said Wednesday.
“Make the main thing the main thing,” Thomas Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said. He stressed the island’s strategic importance to American presence and operations in the region.
The U.S. territory provides major support for Navy submarines operating in the Pacific, an air base capable of sustaining Air Force strategic bombers and a Coast Guard headquarters and several cutters.
“There are going to be some things like an island you cannot hide,” he said during a Heritage Foundation online forum. “Indo-Pacific commanders have been pounding the table” to come up with an acceptable missile defense plan for Guam for several years, he added.
Kathleen Hicks in a recent appearance underlined the increased threat facing Guam and Hawaii from China’s continued military expansion; but so far, there has been no congressionally- accepted plan for the island’s defense.
The former head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Phil Davidson, has advocated for the Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense system to defend Guam from Chinese missiles. Davidson included the system in a list of priorities he sent to Congress about the Indo-Pacific.
To defend Guam against new hypersonic and updated cruise missiles or an “old-fashioned ballistics’” attack from China or North Korea, Karako said the threats have to be identified. Defending Guam would require working with mature technologies, providing integrated air and missile defense systems for the island, and having these systems be interoperable among the services and with allies.
In the past, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency, has told Congress that a hybrid system – using Aegis systems either ashore or afloat coupled with the Army’s Theater High Altitude Area Defense system, could meet the need.
Brad Roberts, director of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said “we need [in missile defense] the ability [to] prevent limited attacks” to stop China, Russia or a rogue state from using blackmailing to get its way in a crisis.
“We don’t need Astrodome” missile defense for the whole United States because an all-out attack is unlikely, he said. But protection for key areas like Guam and nuclear command and control centers are necessary.
The role of missile defense in the past has been to outpace rogue states like North Korea in posing threats to the U.S. homeland and providing allies in Europe and the Pacific security against regional attacks by Russia, China, North Korea or Iran.
But Pyongyang’s continued advances in weapons and missile technology has accelerated the need for the U.S. Missile Defense Review the Biden administration is conducting. Beijing and Moscow will likely carefully study the review once it’s released.
Russia and China are “15 to 20 years down a path” at gauging American intentions and future capabilities in missile defense and nuclear modernization, according to Roberts, who worked on missile defense issues in the Obama administration.
Neither Roberts nor Karako expects the Biden administration to complete its Missile Defense Review by the start of the new year. “There’s some big strategic questions here,” Roberts said, that need to be answered in the administration’s National Defense Strategy to keep the missile review in line with it and the Nuclear Posture Review.
Looking ahead, Roberts said it’s important to frame discussion and policy on missile defense as complementary to nuclear deterrence.
Related
11. Taiwan is spending an extra $9B on its defense. Here’s what the money will buy.
Taiwan is spending an extra $9B on its defense. Here’s what the money will buy.
MELBOURNE, Australia — Taiwan plans to set aside an extra $9 billion as a special budget for additional defense spending over the next five years as it prioritizes long-range and anti-ship weapons in the face of ongoing pressure from China.
This sum will be on top of its regular annual defense budget, which was already set at $16.89 billion for fiscal 2022, which runs Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2022.
Although Taiwan’s parliament must still approve the special budget, it’s likely to pass given the majority in the legislature held by the ruling Democratic Progressive Party of President Tsai Ing-wen.
Taiwan’s deputy defense minister, Wang Shin-lung, said the bulk of the funds would go to domestic weapons projects, although he noted that some of the money would go to parts and technological support from the U.S.
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said those locally developed systems include cruise missiles and warships; Wang specifically cited the Antelope air defense system, the Wan Chien long-range cruise missile and the Hsiung Feng IIE anti-ship missile.
He added that part of the additional budget would also go toward Taiwan’s indigenous shipbuilding program, which is building missile corvettes, landing ships and diesel-electric submarines for Taiwan’s Navy.
“Communist China has continued to invest heavily in its defense budget, its military strength has grown rapidly, and it has frequently dispatched aircraft and ships to invade and harass our seas and airspace,” the ministry said in a statement after a weekly Cabinet meeting. “In the face of severe threats from the enemy, the nation’s military is engaged in military building and preparation work, and it is urgent to obtain mature and rapid mass production weapons and equipment in a short period of time.”
Taiwan’s announcement comes as China sent a record number of aircraft into the self-governing island’s air defense identification zone, with 39 aircraft entering the zone on Oct. 2 and a record-setting 56 aircraft two days later.
However, the aircraft, which included Shenyang J-16 multirole strikes fighters and Xian H-6 bombers, did not enter Taiwanese airspace or approach the island, according to maps provided by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry showing their flightpath.
12. State Department discloses number of nukes in US stockpile
State Department discloses number of nukes in US stockpile
AP · by ROBERT BURNS · October 5, 2021
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a reversal of Trump administration policy, the State Department on Tuesday disclosed the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile. It said this will aid global efforts to control the spread of such weapons.
The number of U.S. weapons, including those in active status as well as those in long-term storage, stood at 3,750 as of September 2020, the department said. That is down from 3,805 a year earlier and 3,785 in 2018.
As recently as 2003, the U.S. nuclear weapon total was slightly above 10,000. It peaked at 31,255 in 1967.
The last time the U.S. government released its stockpile number was in March 2018, when it said the total was 3,822 as of September 2017. That was early in the Trump administration, which subsequently kept updated numbers secret and denied a request by the Federation of American Scientists to declassified them.
“Back to transparency,” said Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. He said the Biden administration was wise to reverse the prior administration’s policy.
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Kristensen said disclosing the stockpile number will assist U.S. diplomats in arms control negotiations and at next year’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty conference, which will review the disarmament commitment made by nuclear powers who are treaty signatories, including the United States.
The Biden administration is conducting a nuclear weapons posture and policy review that is expected to be completed early next year.
At the Conference on Disarmament last February, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “President Biden has made it clear: the U.S. has a national security imperative and a moral responsibility to reduce and eventually eliminate the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.”
AP · by ROBERT BURNS · October 5, 2021
13. Iron Dome heads to missile defense experiment in Guam
Iron Dome heads to missile defense experiment in Guam
The deployment, dubbed Operation Iron Island, will test the capabilities of the system and further train and refine the deployment capabilities of air defenders, the statement notes. It will also fulfill the requirement in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that an Iron Dome battery be deployed to an operational theater by the end of 2021.
Iron Dome will arrive in mid-October and the exercise will last through November, an Army spokesman confirmed.
The 94th AAMDC will oversee this “temporary, experimental deployment,” to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, according to the statement.
Soldiers and equipment from the 2-43 Air Defense Artillery Battalion from Fort Bliss, Texas, will deploy with the system. The unit has been training on it for the better part of a year. Soldiers from the 38th ADA Brigade will also come from Japan to support the mission.
The exercise is focused on “gathering data on sustainment, deployment considerations, and how we integrate Iron Dome with our existing air defense systems,” which, in this case, is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense Battery that has been deployed to Guam since 2013, the spokesman said.
“There is currently no plan to conduct a live fire of the system while it is on Guam,” the statement said.
The Army does not intend to buy more Iron Dome batteries, but instead could incorporate parts of the system into its indirect fires protection capability, which is being designed to defeat cruise missiles and drones as well as rockets, artillery and mortars.
Jen Judson is the land warfare reporter for Defense News. She has covered defense in the Washington area for 10 years. She was previously a reporter at Politico and Inside Defense. She won the National Press Club's best analytical reporting award in 2014 and was named the Defense Media Awards' best young defense journalist in 2018.
14. EXCLUSIVE US electronics firm struck deal to transport and hire Uyghur workers
EXCLUSIVE US electronics firm struck deal to transport and hire Uyghur workers
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A general view shows a manufacturing plant of Universal Electronics Inc in Qinzhou, Guangxi Autonomous Region, China, April 13, 2021. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
QINZHOU, China, Oct 7 (Reuters) - U.S. remote-control maker Universal Electronics Inc (UEIC.O) told Reuters it struck a deal with authorities in Xinjiang to transport hundreds of Uyghur workers to its plant in the southern Chinese city of Qinzhou, the first confirmed instance of an American company participating in a transfer program described by some rights groups as forced labor.
The Nasdaq-listed firm, which has sold its equipment and software to Sony, Samsung, LG, Microsoft and other tech and broadcast companies, has employed at least 400 Uyghur workers from the far-western region of Xinjiang as part of an ongoing worker-transfer agreement, according to the company and local officials in Qinzhou and Xinjiang, government notices and local state media.
In at least one instance, Xinjiang authorities paid for a charter flight that delivered the Uyghur workers under police escort from Xinjiang's Hotan city - where the workers are from - to the UEI plant, according to officials in Qinzhou and Hotan interviewed by Reuters. The transfer is also described in a notice posted on an official Qinzhou police social media account in February 2020 at the time of the transfer.
Responding to Reuters' questions about the transfer, a UEI spokeswoman said the company currently employs 365 Uyghur workers at the Qinzhou plant. It said it treated them the same as other workers in China and said it did not regard any of its employees as forced labor.
Sony Group Corp (6758.T), Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS), LG Corp (003550.KS) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) each say in social responsibility reports they prohibit the use of forced labor in their supply chains and are taking steps to prevent it.
Sony declined to comment on specific suppliers. In a statement to Reuters, it said if any supplier is confirmed to have committed a major violation of its code of conduct, which prohibits the use of forced labor, then "Sony will take appropriate countermeasures including request for implementing corrective actions and termination of business with such supplier."
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company takes action against any supplier that violates its code of conduct, up to termination of its business relationship, but that UEI was no longer an active supplier. "We have not used hardware from the supplier since 2016 and have had no association with the factory in question," the spokesperson said.
A Samsung spokesman said the company prohibits its suppliers from using all forms of forced labor and requires that all employment be freely chosen. He declined to comment on UEI.
LG did not reply to requests for comment.
The UEI spokeswoman said the company covers the cost of the transfer of workers to its Qinzhou plant from a local airport or train station in Guangxi, the region in which Qinzhou is located. She said the company does not know how the workers are trained in Xinjiang or who pays for their transport to Guangxi.
Reuters was unable to interview plant workers and therefore was not able to determine whether they are being compelled to work at UEI. The conditions they face, however, bear hallmarks of standard definitions of forced labor, such as working in isolation, under police guard and with restricted freedom of movement.
UEI's Uyghur workers are under surveillance by police during their transportation and life at the factory, where they eat and sleep in segregated quarters, according to details in Qinzhou government notices and local state media.
Programs like this have transferred thousands of Uyghur laborers to factories in Xinjiang and elsewhere. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other rights groups, citing leaked Chinese government documents and testimony from detainees who say they were forced into such jobs, say the programs are coercive and part of China's overall plan to control the majority-Uyghur population in the region.
In response to Reuters' questions, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not address employment at UEI, but denied forced labor exists anywhere in the country.
"This so-called 'forced labor' is a completely fabricated lie," the ministry said in a statement. "Xinjiang migrant workers in other parts of China, like all workers, enjoy the right to employment in accordance with the law. The right to sign a labor contract, the right to labor remuneration, the right to rest and vacation, the right to labor safety and health protection, the right to obtain insurance and welfare rights and other legal rights."
Xinjiang authorities did not respond to requests for comment.
The U.S. Department of State, which has criticized China and several other governments for condoning forced labor, said the United States has found "credible reports of state-sponsored forced labor practices employed by the (Chinese) government in Xinjiang, as well as situations of forced labor involving members of these groups outside Xinjiang."
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on UEI, but said wittingly benefiting from forced labor in the United States was a crime under the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
That law "criminalizes the act of knowingly benefiting, financially or by receiving anything of value, from participation in a venture, where the defendant knew or recklessly disregarded the fact that the venture engaged in forced labor," the spokesperson said in a statement. The law imposes criminal liability on individuals or entities present in the United States, the statement added, even when the forced labor occurs in another country.
The State Department referred Reuters to the Justice Department for further comment on UEI; Justice did not respond.
The import of goods into the United States made wholly or in part by forced labor is also a crime under Section 307 of the Tariff Act of 1930. UEI told Reuters "a very small quantity" of products made at its Qinzhou factory are exported to the United States. It did not specify who purchases the goods.
The law is enforced by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which can seize imports and start a criminal investigation of the importer. Customs said it does not comment on whether specific entities are under investigation.
Legal experts told Reuters there have been very few forced labor prosecutions in the United States over abuses overseas, given the difficulty of proving an offense. "As the law currently stands, there's very little that the U.S. government can do to hold American companies accountable when they build, manage and profit from supply chains that engage in forced labor and other human rights abuses outside the United States," said David McKean, deputy director of the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable, a coalition of rights groups.
Legislation before the U.S. Congress, called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, was designed to toughen up restrictions by creating the legal presumption that any products made in Xinjiang are the result of forced labor, putting the burden on importers to prove they are not. The latest version of the legislation was passed by the Senate this year but has yet to pass the House of Representatives.
The UEI spokeswoman told Reuters the company does not conduct independent due diligence on where and how its workers are trained in Xinjiang. She said the arrangement is vetted by a third-party agent working with the Xinjiang government, who brokered the deal. She declined to identify that agent. Reuters could not determine if the agent is independent or works for the Xinjiang government.
'VOCATIONAL' INTERNMENT CAMPS
China has detained over 1 million Uyghurs in a system of camps since 2017 as part of what it calls an anti-extremism campaign, according to estimates by researchers and United Nations experts. China describes internment camps in the region as vocational education and training centers and denies accusations of rights abuses.
Organized transfers of Uyghur laborers to other parts of China date back to the early 2000s, according to state media and government notices from the time. The program has expanded since about 2016, Xinjiang officials said in late July, around the time the mass internment program began.
Xinjiang officials told reporters at a Beijing media conference in late July that transfers of workers outside of Xinjiang are common and voluntary. "There are many labor-intensive industries that fit the skills of people in Xinjiang," said Xu Guixiang, a spokesman for the provincial government. "They go where the market needs them."
Suppliers for some U.S. companies have been accused of using forced laborers transported from Xinjiang. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think tank, last year released a report identifying 83 brands linked to Uyghur labor transfer programs, citing Chinese-language documents, satellite-imagery analysis and media reports. None of the U.S. companies were directly involved in the transfers, however.
Aside from remote-control technology, UEI also makes home security products under the Ecolink brand. It has more than 3,800 employees in 30 countries and a market value of about $670 million. Its headquarters are in Scottsdale, Arizona, but the company has no plants in the United States.
The company's two largest investors are funds run by BlackRock Inc and Eagle Asset Management, an affiliate of Carillon Tower Advisers.
BlackRock declined to comment. A spokesman for Eagle Asset Management said: "Since becoming aware of purported labor issues involving one of our investments, we immediately approached the company's senior leadership and they have provided assurances that labor is paid, treated humanely and employed at-will. Should we learn otherwise, we will take appropriate action."
GOVERNMENT FUNDING
Six groups of workers were transported from Xinjiang to the UEI factory between May 2019 and February 2020, according to Qinzhou government notices, confirmed to Reuters by government officials in Xinjiang and Guangxi.
In early 2020, as the new coronavirus began to spread in China and lockdowns crippled manufacturing, about 1,300 Uyghurs were transported from Xinjiang’s southern Hotan region. They were sent to factories around the country to alleviate labor shortages and help get them running again, according to officials cited by Chinese state media outlet Economic Daily in February 2020.
The police-escorted charter flights were funded by the Xinjiang government, according to Qinzhou government notices and an official in Hotan who spoke to Reuters in May.
UEI’s Qinzhou factory took more than 100 workers in the February 2020 transfer, according to notices on the Qinzhou government website, state media and Qinzhou officials. That was one of several transfers made under an agreement struck some nine months earlier between UEI and Xinjiang authorities. Reuters could not determine exactly where the workers came from.
UEI’s operation underscores the role played by agents in supplying companies with Uyghur workers.
The UEI spokeswoman confirmed the company entered into an agreement with Xinjiang authorities in 2019 after being approached by the third-party agent. UEI said the same agent hires and pays the workers and that UEI does not sign individual contracts with the workers.
The spokeswoman declined to disclose what the Uyghur workers are paid, beyond saying that they receive the same as others at the facility, which is "higher than Qinzhou local minimum wage."
The Economic Daily reported that workers sent in UEI's February 2020 transfer are expected to make around 3,000 yuan ($465) a month. That compares with the average manufacturing wage in the province of Guangxi of 3,719 yuan, according to China’s national bureau of statistics.
UEI's Uyghur employees are part of a much bigger system. Two separate labor agents hired by Hotan and Kashgar authorities in Xinjiang told Reuters they had each been set targets of placing as many as 20,000 Uyghurs annually with companies outside the region.
They, and one other agent, showed Reuters copies of three contracts for transfers already completed this year. These included a January contract to transport 1,000 workers to an auto parts factory in Xiaogan, Hubei province, who had to undergo "political screening" prior to transfer.
The three agents told Reuters that separate dormitories, police escorts and payments overseen by third-party agents are routine elements in such transfers.
"Uyghur workers are the most convenient workers for companies," one of the agents told Reuters. "Everything is managed by the government."
The Uyghurs of UEI are kept under tight watch all along this labor-supply chain.
Photographs published online by the Economic Daily and an official social media account of Qinzhou police, dated Feb. 28, 2020, show the workers lining up before dawn outside the airport in the city of Hotan before taking the flight.
"Get to work quickly and get rich through hard work using both hands," one manager employed by Xinjiang authorities told the gathered workers, according to an account published online by the Qinzhou Daily. Accompanying photos show the workers dressed in blue and red uniforms.
More than a dozen uniformed police officers escorted the same workers through the Nanning Wuxu airport and onto buses, according to posts on a social media account of a Qinzhou police unit and a post by the Qinzhou government. The buses were then escorted by police vehicles to the UEI factory in Qinzhou, some 75 miles (120 km) away.
SEPARATE DORMS, POLICE ‘EDUCATION’
The mostly young Uyghur laborers at UEI’s plant sleep in separate dormitories and eat in a segregated canteen under the watch of managers assigned by Xinjiang authorities. Non-Uyghur laborers are not subject to such monitoring. The managers stay with the Uyghur workers throughout their employment, according to state media, local police notices and government officials who spoke to Reuters.
UEI said the canteens were established to provide local Uyghur food, and says it allows Xinjiang workers to share dormitories "as they wish."
The Uyghurs must participate in what are described as "education activities" run by Qinzhou police and judicial authorities within the UEI facility, as part of the agreement between the U.S. firm and local authorities, according to notices on the government website of the Qinzhou district where UEI's factory is located.
Reuters could not determine what those activities involve. Beijing has said that legal education is a key aspect of the training programs in Xinjiang's camps. The education activities in UEI’s factory only apply to the Uyghur workers, according to two Qinzhou government notices.
The UEI spokeswoman said UEI is "not aware of specific legal education activities" that Uyghurs take part in at its plant.
'TERRORISTS, XINJIANG PEOPLE AND MENTAL PATIENTS'
Two Reuters journalists visited the Qinzhou factory in April during a local public holiday when the plant was not running. Women in Uyghur ethnic dress were visible inside the compound.
Half a dozen police arrived, followed by a delegation of officials from the Qinzhou Foreign Affairs Office. The officials confirmed that Uyghur laborers worked in the factory, which is run by UEI's wholly owned China subsidiary Gemstar Technology. The officials said Gemstar had taken the lead in setting up the May 2019 agreement to transfer workers. The officials told Reuters not to take photos of Uyghurs in the factory.
The district of Qinzhou where UEI is located has surveillance measures targeting Uyghurs that predate the transfers. A June 2018 procurement document seen by Reuters shows police there purchased a 4.3 million yuan ($670,000) system that establishes blacklists of "high-risk" people. These include "terrorists, Xinjiang people and mental patents."
The document also lists a specific need for "automatic alarms" - a computer system that sends alerts via an internal messaging system to police when Uyghurs from Xinjiang are detected in the area.
According to a March 2020 post on the official Qinzhou police website, UEI agreed to provide daily reports on the workers to police.
Reporting by Cate Cadell in QINZHOU, China Editing by Reuters staff
15. FDD | Tehran Demands Access to $10 Billion of Frozen Iranian Assets as Reward for Negotiating
Excerpts:
Given the possibility that America and Iran will ultimately resuscitate the JCPOA, other key stakeholders must intervene. U.S. governors and private attorneys, as well as Israel and the Gulf states, should use a combination of market and political deterrence to diminish the economic benefits to Tehran from an American return to the JCPOA. Some congressional Republicans have already signaled to the market — through legislation, resolutions, and open or personal letters — that when they take back power, they will reinstate sanctions and impose significant costs on anyone who has re-entered the Iranian market. Companies may thus enjoy only a few years of business opportunities before sanctions return.
U.S. governors can reinforce this market deterrence by expanding state laws to divest public pension funds from companies doing any business with the Islamic Republic. Private attorneys currently hold more than $50 billion in outstanding judgments against the clerical regime on behalf of victims of Iranian terrorism. They should seek to attach these judgments to transactions between international companies and Iranian entities.
These steps would help mitigate the deleterious effects of any revival of the JCPOA, denying Iran billions of dollars in cash that it would use to finance its malign activities.
FDD | Tehran Demands Access to $10 Billion of Frozen Iranian Assets as Reward for Negotiating
fdd.org · by Mark Dubowitz Chief Executive ·and Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow
October 7, 2021
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Saturday that Washington should unfreeze $10 billion of Iranian assets as a goodwill gesture before Tehran resumes negotiations over compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). While the Biden administration’s subsequent rejection of this demand displayed a welcome measure of common sense, Washington remains eager to offer the Islamic Republic billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for Tehran’s return to the flawed JCPOA.
Since Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August, his government has repeatedly claimed that it would come back to negotiations once it completed an internal review of Tehran’s nuclear policies. On September 21, Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said that talks “will resume soon and over the next few weeks.” On September 24, Amirabdollahian said Iran would re-enter negotiations “very soon,” but provided no date. The exact timetable remains unclear.
The delay constitutes an attempt by Tehran to boost its leverage and toy with the United States. The Islamic Republic is exploiting the current suspension of talks to advance its nuclear program without consequence, potentially reducing its breakout time — that is, the amount of time needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one nuclear weapon — to as low as one month, according to arms control experts at the Institute for Science and International Security and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Concurrently, Iran continues to stonewall the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of undeclared nuclear materials found at several sites across the country. Yet the agency’s Board of Governors has failed to pass a resolution referring the Islamic Republic to the UN Security Council for countermeasures, apparently fearing that such a step would torpedo negotiations between Washington and Tehran.
“Iran will eventually return to the talks in Vienna,” a senior Iranian official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. “But we are in no rush to do so because time is on our side. Our nuclear advances further [sic] every day.” As a senior European diplomat put it, the Iranians “want to create a fait accompli on the ground — technical and nuclear — and preserve the possibility of a negotiation.”
Tehran’s negotiating strategy has paralyzed the Biden administration, effectively deterring Washington from punishing the clerical regime for its nuclear activities. Rather, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on September 8 that America’s ability to rejoin the JCPOA “is not indefinite.” Special Representative for Iran Robert Malley commented on September 3 that America “can’t wait forever” but is “prepared to be patient.” Neither statement appears to have intimidated Tehran.
Given the possibility that America and Iran will ultimately resuscitate the JCPOA, other key stakeholders must intervene. U.S. governors and private attorneys, as well as Israel and the Gulf states, should use a combination of market and political deterrence to diminish the economic benefits to Tehran from an American return to the JCPOA. Some congressional Republicans have already signaled to the market — through legislation, resolutions, and open or personal letters — that when they take back power, they will reinstate sanctions and impose significant costs on anyone who has re-entered the Iranian market. Companies may thus enjoy only a few years of business opportunities before sanctions return.
U.S. governors can reinforce this market deterrence by expanding state laws to divest public pension funds from companies doing any business with the Islamic Republic. Private attorneys currently hold more than $50 billion in outstanding judgments against the clerical regime on behalf of victims of Iranian terrorism. They should seek to attach these judgments to transactions between international companies and Iranian entities.
These steps would help mitigate the deleterious effects of any revival of the JCPOA, denying Iran billions of dollars in cash that it would use to finance its malign activities.
Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Tzvi Kahn is a research fellow. Both contribute to FDD’s Iran Program and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from Mark, Tzvi, the Iran Program, and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow Mark and Tzvi on Twitter @mdubowitz and @TzviKahn. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP and @FDD_Iran. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Mark Dubowitz Chief Executive · October 7, 2021
16. Palestinian official: ‘China will lead the world and is on our side’
Palestinian official: ‘China will lead the world and is on our side’
(October 7, 2021 / MEMRI) China will soon lead the world, and it supports the “Palestinian position, whatever it may be,” according to Fatah’s Central Committee member Abbas Zaki.
In a public address that aired on Palestine TV on Sept. 29, Abbas Zaki called on the United States to “reconsider its stance” with regard to Israel or risk becoming irrelevant. The Israelis, he said, were “sons of bitches,” “murderers” and agents of instability, while the Palestinians are “messengers of peace.”
“I know that there is serious change in Europe and even in the United States,” said Zaki.
But, he added, “do not forget the emerging camp, which is on your side—the Chinese camp. China is going to lead the world, and it proclaims: ‘There can be no stability and progress without the liberation of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital.'”
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The Chinese, he continued, had said that they will accept whatever the Palestinians accept.
“In other words, if tomorrow we decide to be stubborn, and demand [Palestine from] the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea—it would be fine with them. But they know us, and they know that we are not suicidal and that we want to make Israel swallow the poison one drop at a time,” he said.
“[The Israelis] claimed that their army is a defensive force—oh, the wretchedness!—and that [Israel] is an oasis of democracy, but it turned out that they are sons of bitches, that they [practice] apartheid and that they are murderers, while we are the oppressed ones. The world will once again discover that we are the messengers of peace, whereas [the Israelis] are the messengers of instability. America should reconsider its stance or it will become irrelevant,” he said.
17. Majority supports American troop intervention if allies targeted: poll
Majority supports American troop intervention if allies targeted: poll
The Hill · by Lexi Lonas · October 7, 2021
A majority of Americans support U.S. troop intervention if allies are attacked, according to a survey from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Since 2019, the poll found, more than 50 percent of Americans support troop intervention if North Korea attacks South Korea, if China attacks Taiwan, if Israel was attacked or if Russia attacked a NATO ally.
With tensions between Taiwan and China at their highest point in 40 years, according to Taiwan’s defense minister, 52 percent of Americans would support troop intervention if China invaded.
Only 41 percent said the same thing in 2019.
Americans’ support for troop intervention is highest, at 63 percent, if North Korea ever attacks South Korea, where the U.S. has nearly 30,000 service members stationed.
The majority support for troop intervention between North and South Korea has been prevalent since 2017.
There is 53 percent support in U.S. intervention if Israel was attacked, which has been consistent since 2015.
Support for a NATO ally if Russia invades is at 59 percent, with a majority supporting the hypothetical move since 2017.
Minus Israel, support for U.S. intervention in these countries has gone up at least 14 points since 2015.
The survey was conducted between July 7 and July 26 with 2,086 adults. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.33 percentage points.
The Hill · by Lexi Lonas · October 7, 2021
18. As CBO Shows How to Cut $1 Trillion From Pentagon, Progressives Urge Spending on ‘True Security’
Dangerous analysis: "...it is possible to slash a trillion dollars in military spending over the coming decade without reducing force effectiveness."
As CBO Shows How to Cut $1 Trillion From Pentagon, Progressives Urge Spending on ‘True Security’
Progressive foreign policy experts say a new Congressional Budget Office report offering three options for slashing Pentagon spending by $1 trillion over the next decade underscores the imperative to invest in programs of social uplift and climate action. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“Saving a trillion dollars that could be devoted to preventing pandemics, addressing climate change, or reducing racial and economic injustice is no small matter.”
October 7, 2021
Progressive foreign policy experts on Thursday pointed to a new Congressional Budget Office report that concludes it is possible to slash a trillion dollars in military spending over the coming decade without reducing force effectiveness as further proof that the United States can and should prioritize investments in tackling pandemics, inequality, and the climate crisis.
“The U.S. military budget is now higher than it was at the peak of the Vietnam War, the Korean War, or the Cold War,” said Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS). “This report shows that there are viable options for immediate, substantial reductions to the Pentagon budget.”
“We are spending far too much on the Pentagon, and too little on everything else,” Koshgarian continued. “Facing a pandemic that is not yet over, decades of growing economic inequality, unaddressed systemic racism, and a climate crisis, the U.S. is in desperate need of reinvestment for true security.”
Asked to “examine the effects on U.S. forces of a substantially smaller defense budget,” the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said it “created three broad options to illustrate the range of strategies that the United States could pursue under a budget that would be cut gradually by a total of $1 trillion, or 14%, between 2022 and 2031.”
In all three options, the CBO slashed only full-time active forces, while leaving the less expensive reserves at their current levels. While acknowledging that “none of the plans are without risk,” the study concludes that the Pentagon can reduce spending without sacrificing security.
According to the report:
In all three of CBO’s options, units would be staffed, trained, and equipped at the same levels as they are today—there would simply be fewer units or a different combination of units. CBO did not explore approaches that would create what is called a hollow force or tiered readiness strategy, in which units are manned, equipped, or trained to lower levels than are needed to be fully operational. CBO chose to retain fully staffed units because, though personnel are expensive, partially staffed units would not be able to execute their missions, reducing the value of the U.S. threat to strike against an adversary.
William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, said in a statement that the new CBO report “is an extremely timely reminder that it is possible to provide a robust defense of the United States and its allies for considerably less money than is being contemplated by either Congress or the Biden administration.”
Hartung argued that “at a time when Congress is seeking to add $24 billion to a Pentagon budget proposal that far exceeds spending at the peak of the Korean or Vietnam wars, the CBO analysis offers an opportunity to step back and take a closer look at how much is actually necessary to protect the U.S. and its allies.”
“At a time when the greatest risks to our lives and livelihoods are not military in nature,” Hartung continued, “saving a trillion dollars that could be devoted to preventing pandemics, addressing climate change, or reducing racial and economic injustice is no small matter.”
Koshgarian at IPS added that “Pentagon cuts are eminently doable, but corporate interests and poor leadership have prevented us from making even the most obvious cuts. After 20 years of war, it’s time to reexamine our security priorities and stop writing blank checks for the Pentagon and its contractors.”
19. Addressing Biocrises After COVID-19: Is Deterrence an Option?
Excerpt:
For deterrence to work, there must be communication between the defender and attacker as to expectations and consequences, and it requires the accurate perception of both to maintain stability and a balance of power. A deterrence by denial strategy for countering biological threats will not work given the disparity between the significant number of biological warfare agents and hundreds of unprotected U.S. cities. U.S. political leaders have never formulated a deterrence by denial concept for biological attacks. Department of Defense leadership hasn’t advocated for this area as other government agencies already have the role for responding to deliberate biological incidents. As such, these reasons require that the United States retain deterrence by punishment as its primary approach to discouraging deliberate biological attacks.
Addressing Biocrises After COVID-19: Is Deterrence an Option? - War on the Rocks
Hollywood movies and fiction novels have long used disease outbreaks as a nation-ending threat to drive their plots. However, there is nothing like an actual pandemic to stir the concerns of the American public and politicians about the potential dangers of biological weapons and biological terrorism. A number of public health and national security professionals have pointed to the challenged U.S. response to COVID-19 as evidence that adversaries may be planning a deliberate biological attack against the nation. Given a poorly responding national public health system and recent advances in biotechnology, a nation-state or terrorist group could easily cause tens of thousands of deaths, if not millions. This hypothesis leads to urgings that the national security community needs to take steps to deter this threat if the public health community cannot protect Americans from contagious diseases.
What is Deterrence?
Determining if biological attacks can be deterred requires a quick review of two topics: First, what are the basic tenets of deterrence, and second, how does this theory apply to biological threats? While the national security community has talked about deterrence theory for decades, understanding deterrence still eludes many people who apply its concepts to contemporary security issues. Michael Mazaar defines deterrence as “the practice of discouraging or restraining someone … from taking unwanted actions, such as an armed attack.” The intent is to stop or prevent an action from occurring. This is in contrast to compellence, which is an effort to force an actor to do something, such as stopping its attacks on civilians. However, the two concepts are sometimes confused. For instance, cruise missile strikes against Syrian military bases were meant to compel Assad to stop chemical weapons attacks, but many political leaders and media termed these as deterrent strikes. While military force is often at the center of deterrence operations, this is a political concept that can involve diplomatic or economic threats and assurances as well.
Deterrence theory in the 1960s talked about “deterrence by punishment” and “deterrence by denial” as concepts on how nations might use nuclear weapons to protect against a strategic attack on the homeland. This is simple enough to envision — deterrence by punishment means that the defender will retaliate with force to cause significant damage to the attacker so that the costs exceed the value of its goals, while deterrence by denial posits that an attacker will fail in reaching its goals because of measures undertaken by the defender. To be successful in either case, the defender must demonstrate that the capability to deny benefits to the attacker exists, that the defender’s actions are credible given a particular context, and that the attacker perceives the probability of failure so as to be persuaded toward the defender’s preferred outcome. This last part is particularly important — the adversary, not the one threatening to use force, gets to decide whether deterrence is successful based on its views of cost and benefits. As Robert Jervis pointed out in 1982, deterrence can fail if there are misperceptions of the actors’ values, their credibility, or rationality.
There are ample academic writing and defense analyses on nuclear deterrence in particular, but this theory also applies to conventional weapons, space and cyber weapons, and chemical and biological weapons. Different contexts require different approaches — what works for nuclear weapons may not work for space and cyber weapons, but the general theory of how two actors perceive deterrence challenges is sound. Adding to this, there is a great deal of debate as to whether deterrence “works” during crises between two (or three) adversaries. Without going over this well-trodden trail, let’s look specifically at how deterrence theory works in confronting biological threats.
Does Deterrence Work Against Biological Threats?
The efficacy of deterrence against biological threats depends, of course, on what the biological threat is. “Biological threat” has been a catch-all phrase to include natural disease outbreaks, deliberate biological incidents, and accidental releases. The Biden, Trump, and Obama administrations have all used the term “biological threats” in their respective national biodefense strategies. While one can envision a common medical response to all biological threats, this should not be construed as one strategy to prevent or protect against all biological threats against the nation. Within the context of a national biodefense strategy, biological threats can take the form of anti-human, anti-crop, or anti-animal. The Federal Select Agent Program identifies 67 biological threats that pose a severe threat to humans, animals, and plants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have a prioritized list of about 20 biological threats for use in preparing for biological terrorism.
Assuming the political objective is to deter an actor from using biological threats against the nation to cause mass effect, we can rule out natural diseases and accidental releases in biological laboratories. Because a deterrence posture needs to be understood by a reasoning actor, one cannot deter natural disease outbreaks or accidents at biological research laboratories as they have no human actor with malign intent to cause harm. On one hand, there is no way to use force to deter or compel good behavior. You can’t win a war against a pandemic outbreak, but you can manage it. On the other hand, deterrence could reduce the possibility of deliberate biological incidents, since nation-states and terrorist groups both have leaders who might be persuaded by robust deterrent strategies.
Throughout history, U.S. policy has been to rely on deterrence by punishment to discourage nation-states from using chemical or biological weapons in strategic attacks against the nation and its military. In the opening phase of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced the policy of using biological weapons in retaliation against any Axis use. During the Cold War, every presidential administration developed policies on using chemical and biological weapons in retaliation to adversary use. Every president up through Nixon retained this retaliatory policy. Following the U.S. government’s unilateral abandonment of an offensive biological weapons program, the U.S. policy shifted to the threat of nuclear weapons as an option for retaliating against biological weapons. That was the policy in 1991 when U.S. forces were preparing to invade Iraq. This policy remains in place today.
Relying on deterrence by denial as a strategy to prevent biological weapons attacks has some significant problems because of technological challenges involved with biodefense. To be successful with a deterrence by denial approach, one would have to openly demonstrate that a nation or its military force is so resilient and has such a strong defensive posture that an adversary would not succeed through the use of biological weapons. The U.S. government has two FDA-approved vaccines against the top 10 list of biological warfare agents. Current biodetection capabilities remain limited to “detect to treat,” which means that a significant population cannot avoid exposure. “Early warning” actually means 24–48 hours after a biological release. There are so many biological weapons and so many scenarios for attacking critical infrastructure across the nation that this approach would be impossible to execute to the degree of convincing an adversary that any deliberate biological attack would fail.
The Right Funds to the Right Organization
The public health community likes to use the threat of bioterrorism as a rationale for asking for more funding. To that point, U.S. health care spending has risen to $3.8 trillion in 2019, while defense expenditures were about $1.2 trillion. Within those budgets, annual public health spending for infectious diseases is about $20 billion, as compared to about $2 billion in the U.S. defense program’s biodefense efforts. Obviously, this spending is not just about biological threats, and the public health community’s concerns are not soley focused on deliberate threats. This comparison should, however, demonstrate as to who in the federal government is leading the medical response to biological threats. The public health community has definite ideas as to where funding for bioterrorism should go, and it’s not to overseas laboratories working under the Biological Threat Reduction Program, a Department of Defense initiative that seeks to improve the security of medical biological research facilities in other countries.
For deterrence to work, there must be communication between the defender and attacker as to expectations and consequences, and it requires the accurate perception of both to maintain stability and a balance of power. A deterrence by denial strategy for countering biological threats will not work given the disparity between the significant number of biological warfare agents and hundreds of unprotected U.S. cities. U.S. political leaders have never formulated a deterrence by denial concept for biological attacks. Department of Defense leadership hasn’t advocated for this area as other government agencies already have the role for responding to deliberate biological incidents. As such, these reasons require that the United States retain deterrence by punishment as its primary approach to discouraging deliberate biological attacks.
Al Mauroni is the director of the U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies and author of the forthcoming book, BIOCRISIS: Defining Biological Threats for U.S. Policy. The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Air University, U.S. Air Force, or Department of Defense.
20. Hundreds of billions were spent by the US in Afghanistan. Here are 10 of the starkest examples of 'waste, fraud and abuse'
Perhaps our contracting officers are incentivized incorrectly. No one should ever be penalized for being good stewards of taxpayer money.
Excerpt:
3) The $36 million Marines HQ in the desert, neither wanted nor used
Sopko said in a speech this 64,000-square foot control center in Helmand epitomized how when a project starts, it often cannot be stopped.
In 2010, the Marines were surging troop numbers in Helmand, the deadliest part of Afghanistan. A command and control center on the main base of Camp Leatherneck was ordained as part of the effort, although Sopko recalled the base commander and two other marine generals said it was not needed as it would not be completed fast enough.
Sopko said the thought of returning the funds allocated to Congress was "was so abhorrent to the contracting command, it was built anyway. The facility was never occupied, Camp Leatherneck was turned over to the Afghans, who abandoned it."
It cost $36 million, was never used, and seems to have been later stripped by the Afghans, who also never appeared to use it.
Major Robert Lodewick, a DoD spokesman, said in a statement the SIGAR report contained "factual errors," objected to how it implied "malfeasance" by some officers, and said the $36 million figure included ancillary costs like roads to the HQ.
Hundreds of billions were spent by the US in Afghanistan. Here are 10 of the starkest examples of 'waste, fraud and abuse'
CNN · by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN
(CNN)Half a billion dollars of aircraft that flew for about a year. A huge $85 million hotel that never opened, and sits in disrepair. Camouflage uniforms for the Afghan army whose fancy pattern would cost an extra $28 million. A healthcare facility listed as located in the Mediterranean Sea.
These are part of a catalog of "waste, fraud and abuse" complaints made against the United States' reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan -- an effort totaling $145 billion over 20 years -- made by the United States' own inspector general into the war. But the in-depth audits detailing these findings have, for the most part, been taken offline at the request of the State Department, citing security concerns.
The total cost of the war, according to the Pentagon, was $825 billion, a low-end estimate: even President Joe Biden has cited an estimate that put the amount at over double that -- more than $2 trillion, a figure that factors in long-term costs such as veterans' care. The interest on the debt runs into hundreds of billions already.
The $145 billion reconstruction effort lacked oversight, leading to Congress to set up the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in 2008. SIGAR published quarterly reports that gained less attention at the time than was commensurate with the expenditure they addressed, critics said, and were sometimes denied the information they needed by the Pentagon -- especially when it came to assessing security in the country.
A State Department spokesperson told CNN they had asked SIGAR to "temporarily" remove the reports, owing "to safety and security concerns regarding our ongoing evacuation efforts." They added SIGAR had the authority to restore them "when it deems appropriate."
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What follows are 10 notable cases, stripped of identifying details, collated by CNN over the years.
1) Kabul's winter blanket
The Tarakhil power plant was commissioned in 2007 as a backup generator for the capital, in case electricity supply from Uzbekistan was compromised.
A vast, modern structure, it ran on diesel-fueled turbines, supplied by a brand-name engineering giant. There was one catch: Afghanistan had scant diesel supply of its own and had to ship the fuel in by truck -- making the plant too expensive to run.
The facility itself cost $335 million to build, and had an estimated annual fuel cost of $245 million. The most recent SIGAR assessment said at best it was used at just 2.2% capacity, as the Afghan government could not afford the fuel. USAID declined to comment.
Traffic passes by the Tarakhil power plant in September 2011.
2) A half-billion-dollar fleet of cargo planes that flew for a year
Afghanistan's fledgling air force needed cargo planes. In 2008, the Pentagon chose the G222 -- an Italian-designed aircraft designed to take off and land on rough runways. That first year, according to a speech made by SIGAR's chief John Sopko, citing a USAF officer, the planes were very busy.
But they would not be sustainable. The aircraft were only noticed by SIGAR when Sopko noticed them parked at Kabul airport and asked what they were doing there.
Six years after the procurement was launched, the 16 aircraft delivered to Afghanistan were sold for scrap for $40,257. The cost of the project: $549 million.
3) The $36 million Marines HQ in the desert, neither wanted nor used
Sopko said in a speech this 64,000-square foot control center in Helmand epitomized how when a project starts, it often cannot be stopped.
In 2010, the Marines were surging troop numbers in Helmand, the deadliest part of Afghanistan. A command and control center on the main base of Camp Leatherneck was ordained as part of the effort, although Sopko recalled the base commander and two other marine generals said it was not needed as it would not be completed fast enough.
Sopko said the thought of returning the funds allocated to Congress was "was so abhorrent to the contracting command, it was built anyway. The facility was never occupied, Camp Leatherneck was turned over to the Afghans, who abandoned it."
It cost $36 million, was never used, and seems to have been later stripped by the Afghans, who also never appeared to use it.
Major Robert Lodewick, a DoD spokesman, said in a statement the SIGAR report contained "factual errors," objected to how it implied "malfeasance" by some officers, and said the $36 million figure included ancillary costs like roads to the HQ.
US Marine MSgt. Charles Albrecht watches a construction crew working on a massive new base at Camp Letherneck, Helmand province, in March 2009.
4) $28 million on an inappropriate camouflage pattern
In 2007, new uniforms were being ordered for the Afghan army. The Afghan defense minister Wardak said he wanted a rare camouflage pattern, "Spec4ce Forest," from Canadian company HyperStealth.
A total of 1.3 million sets were ordered, costing $43-80 each, as opposed to $25-30 originally estimated for replacement uniforms. The uniforms were never tested or evaluated in the field, and there is just 2.1% forest cover across Afghanistan.
In testimony, Sopko said it cost taxpayers an extra $28 million to buy the uniforms with a patented pattern, and SIGAR projected in 2017 a different choice of pattern could have saved a potential $72 million over the next decade.
DoD spokesman Lodewick said the report "overestimated" the cost, and "incorrectly discredited the value of the type of pattern selected," adding a lot of the fighting in Afghanistan occurred in verdant areas.
5) $1.5 million daily on fighting opium production
The US spent $1.5 million a day on counter-narcotics programs (from 2002 to 2018). Opium production was, according to the last SIGAR report, up in 2020 by 37% compared to the year before. This was the third-highest yield since records began in 1994.
In 2017, production was four times what it was in 2002. A State department spokesperson noted "the Taliban have been the primary factor contributing to poppy's persistence in recent years" and "that the Taliban have committed to banning narcotics."
A tractor eradicates opium poppies in Nangarhar province in January 2007.
6) $249 million on an incomplete road
An extensive ring road around Afghanistan was funded by multiple grants and donors, totaling billions during the course of the war. Towards the end of the project, a 233-kilometer section in the North, between the towns of Qeysar and Laman, led to $249 million being handed out to contractors, but only 15% of the road being built, a SIGAR audit reported.
Between March 2014 and September 2017, there was no construction on this section, and what had been built deteriorated, the report concluded. USAID declined to comment.
7) $85 million hotel that never opened
An extensive hotel and apartment complex was commissioned next to the US Embassy in Kabul, for which the US government provided $85 million in loans.
In 2016, SIGAR concluded "the $85 million in loans is gone, the buildings were never completed and are uninhabitable, and the U.S. Embassy is now forced to provide security for the site at additional cost to U.S. taxpayers."
The audit concluded the contractor made unrealistic promises to secure the loans, and that the branch of the US government who oversaw the project never visited the site, and neither did the company they later hired to oversee the project. A State department spokesperson said they did not manage the construction and it was "a private endeavor."
8) The fund that spent more on itself than Afghanistan
The Pentagon created the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO) expanded from Iraq to include Afghanistan in 2009, for whose operations in Afghanistan Congress set aside $823 million.
Over half the money actually spent by TFBSO -- $359 million of $675 million -- was "spent on indirect and support costs, not directly on projects in Afghanistan," SIGAR concluded in an audit.
They reviewed 89 of the contracts TFBSO made, and found "7 contracts worth $35.1 million were awarded to firms employing former TFBSO staff as senior executives."
An audit also concluded that the fund spent about $6 million on supporting the cashmere industry, $43 million on a compressed natural gas station, and $150 million on high-end villas for its staff.
DoD spokesman Lodewick said SIGAR did not accuse anyone of fraud or the misuse of funds, took issue with "weaknesses and shortcomings" in the audit, and said "28 of TFBSO's 35 projects met or partially met their intended objectives."
9) The healthcare facility in the sea
A 2015 report into USAID's funding of healthcare facilities in Afghanistan said that over a third of the 510 projects they had been given coordinates for, did not exist in those locations. Thirteen were "not located in Afghanistan, with one located in the Mediterranean Sea." Thirty "were located in a province different from the one USAID reported."
And "189 showed no physical structure within 400 feet of the reported coordinates. Just under half of these locations, showed no physical structure within a half mile of the reported coordinates." The audit said that USAID and the Afghan ministry of Public Health could only provide "oversight of these facilities [if they] know where they are." USAID declined to comment.
10) At least $19 billion lost to "waste, fraud, abuse"
An October 2020 report presented a startling total for the war. Congress at the time had appropriated $134 billion since 2002 for reconstruction in Afghanistan.
SIGAR was able to review $63 billion of it -- nearly half. They concluded $19 billion of that -- almost a third -- was "lost to waste, fraud, and abuse."
DoD spokesman Lodewick said they and "several other U.S. Government departments and agencies are already on record as having challenged some of these reports as inaccurate and misleading" and that their conclusions "appeared to overlook the difference between reconstruction efforts that may have been mismanaged willfully/negligently and those efforts that, at the time of the report, simply had fallen short of strategic goals."
CNN · by Nick Paton Walsh, CNN
21. DOD Announces Plan to Tackle Climate Crisis
DOD Announces Plan to Tackle Climate Crisis
On Oct. 7, 2021, the White House released Climate Adaptation Plans from each agency, as required by Executive Order 14008, "Tackling the Climate Crisis At Home and Abroad." The Department of Defense Climate Adaptation Plan, released with these plans, articulates a bold vision for climate adaptation and aligns adaptation and resilience efforts with the department's warfighting mission. The DOD CAP is the culmination of more than 10 years of effort within the department to ensure that the military forces of the United States retain operational advantage under all conditions.
Hot and Dry
Soldiers from the 10th Special Forces Group look out over the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif, Aug. 17, 2021. The terrain and environment at the National Training Center closely matches the hot, dry conditions soldiers experience while on some deployments.
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Photo By: Army Spc. Steven Alger
VIRIN: 210817-A-AQ836-0658
DOD's Climate Adaptation Plan was approved by the Council on Environmental Quality and the Office of Management and Budget in June and signed by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on September 1, 2021. The DOD CAP lays out how operations, planning activities, business processes, and resource allocation decisions will include climate change considerations. No entity has the luxury of "opting out" of the effects of climate change, so no activity can "opt out" of the requirement to adapt to a changing climate.
DOD's Strategy to Tackle the Climate Crisis
DOD's efforts to "Ensure the Department of Defense can operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability and enhancing the natural and man-made systems essential to the Department's success" are outlined in the strategic framework graphic below.
Climate Change
The Department of Defense's line of effort for climate change.
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Photo By: DOD
VIRIN: 210922-D-D0439-001
To achieve the DOD's strategic outcomes, the plan first centers the integration of climate-informed decision-making using actionable science into all department processes. All other actions in this plan are dependent on the outcomes of this effort.
Second, the DOD will train and equip a climate-ready force by focusing on operating under the most extreme and adverse conditions and integrating climate adaptation concepts into existing major exercises and contingency planning.
Deep Freeze
Passengers exit an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, Sept. 14, 2020. The aircraft and its crew were ferrying passengers and cargo between New Zealand and Antarctica in support of the 2020-21 Operation Deep Freeze mission.
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Photo By: Air Force courtesy photo
VIRIN: 200914-F-XX000-0001C
Third, the DOD will ensure built and natural infrastructure are in place for successful mission preparedness, military readiness and operational success in changing conditions and will leverage the Defense Climate Assessment Tool to develop comprehensive installation resilience plans.
Fourth, the DOD will insert climate change considerations into supply chain management to both reduce vulnerabilities and create opportunities to leverage the DOD's purchasing power to advance the key technologies essential to a clean energy transformation.
Solar Array
A new 350 kilowatt-hour solar array was installed near the Hill Aerospace Museum at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, June 25, 2021. Rocky Mountain Power built the array and will own and operate it for the next 25 years as part of its Blue Sky program, but the base will add the energy generated to its power grid.
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Photo By: Cynthia Griggs, Air Force
VIRIN: 210625-F-EF974-1004C
And finally, the DOD will enhance adaptation and resilience through collaboration. The DOD recognizes the value of interagency and intergovernmental cooperation in meeting the challenges of climate change and reflects our commitment to working closely with other agencies in this room as well as our defense partners around the globe.
Four cross-cutting enablers will allow these efforts to succeed:
1Continuous Monitoring and Data Analytics
2Aligning Incentives to Reward Innovation
3Climate Literacy or Human Capital
4Environmental Justice
Climate change is a destabilizing force in the world, creating new missions and impacting the operational environment. Climate change can affect sources of raw materials, supplies, equipment, vehicles and weapons systems, as well as their distribution and storage. As DOD responds, it is critical that training, testing and acquisitions, not disproportionately impact low income and/or minority populations. The DOD's environmental justice strategy includes environmental equity and justice in department organizational structures, policies and implementation guidance through inclusive and equitable climate adaptation and resilience as well as in agile mission assurance.
22. Taiwan: how the ‘porcupine doctrine’ might help deter armed conflict with China
I like the "ham omelette dilemma."
Excerpts:
Taipei’s defence plan is based on a strategy of asymmetric warfare – what is known as the “porcupine doctrine”. This involves tactics for “evading enemy’s strengths and exploiting their weaknesses” and a set of escalating options that acknowledge China’s proximity to Taiwanese coast. The idea, according to the defence review, is to “resist the enemy on the opposite shore, attack it at sea, destroy it in the littoral area, and annihilate it on the beachhead”.
There have been several studies and simulations that concluded that Taiwan may at least contain a Chinese military incursion into the island. In a nutshell, the Taiwan’s porcupine doctrine has three defensive layers. The outer layer is about intelligence and reconnaissance to ensure defence forces are fully prepared.
Behind this come plans for guerrilla warfare at sea with aerial support from sophisticated aircraft provided by the US. The innermost layer relies on the geography and demography of the island. The ultimate objective of this doctrine is that of surviving and assimilating an aerial offensive well enough to organise a wall of fire that will prevent the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from successfully invading.
...
Another factor is what UK defence academic Patrick Porter calls the “ham omelette dilemma”, because to make the omelette, a pig needs to commit its life while a chicken only has to lay a few eggs. What this means is that Taiwan will see a conflict with its adversary across the strait as conflict for survival.
For China, meanwhile, the stakes aren’t as high, despite having wanted to incorporate Taiwan for pretty much its entire modern history. And there’s no knowing how facing this existential threat might spur the Taiwanese defenders on.
Taiwan: how the ‘porcupine doctrine’ might help deter armed conflict with China
Taiwan has been preparing for possible conflict with China for a long time. It has long acknowledged that China is too powerful to engage with in a conflict on equal terms. Accordingly, Taipei’s strategy has shifted to deterrence in terms of the human and therefore political costs making war would inflict on China. This thinking was confirmed in the recently published Quadriennal Defense Review 2021.
Taipei’s defence plan is based on a strategy of asymmetric warfare – what is known as the “porcupine doctrine”. This involves tactics for “evading enemy’s strengths and exploiting their weaknesses” and a set of escalating options that acknowledge China’s proximity to Taiwanese coast. The idea, according to the defence review, is to “resist the enemy on the opposite shore, attack it at sea, destroy it in the littoral area, and annihilate it on the beachhead”.
There have been several studies and simulations that concluded that Taiwan may at least contain a Chinese military incursion into the island. In a nutshell, the Taiwan’s porcupine doctrine has three defensive layers. The outer layer is about intelligence and reconnaissance to ensure defence forces are fully prepared.
Behind this come plans for guerrilla warfare at sea with aerial support from sophisticated aircraft provided by the US. The innermost layer relies on the geography and demography of the island. The ultimate objective of this doctrine is that of surviving and assimilating an aerial offensive well enough to organise a wall of fire that will prevent the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from successfully invading.
Guerrilla warfare at sea: Taiwanese special forces boarding a ‘hostile’ ship during an exercise in January 2021. EPA-EFE/Ritchie B. Tongo
Looking at these layers one by one, over the years Taiwan has developed and maintained a sophisticated early-warning system, to buy time should China launch an invasion. This aims to ensure that Beijing cannot get troops and transport ships ready to cross the Taiwan Strait in a surprise offensive. As a result, China would have to begin any invasion with an offensive based on medium-range missiles and air attacks aiming to eliminate Taiwan’s radar installations, aircraft runways and missile batteries.
If it succeeds in this, China would then have to break through the second layer of Taiwan’s defence plan in order for its troops to sail safely towards the island. But as it attempts to cross the strait, China’s navy would encounter guerrilla campaign at sea – what’s known as the “war of the flea”. This would be conducted with the use of agile, missile-armed small ships, supported by helicopters and missile launchers.
But breaking through this layer will not guarantee a safe landing for the PLA on to Formosa Island. Geography and the population are the backbone of the third defensive layer. The PLA has the capability to mount a large-scale bombing campaign on the Taiwanese island, but landing on it and deploying once there is another matter entirely.
Be prepared: Taiwanese M60A3 tanks in a recent drill. EPA-EFER/Ritchie B. Tongo
Taiwan’s short west coast, just 400km long, has only a handful of beaches suitable for landing troops on, meaning that Taipei’s military strategists would have a reasonably easy job when it comes to working out where the PLA would try to land – especially with the sophisticated reconnaissance technology it has acquired from its US ally.
This would allow the Taiwanese military to set up a deadly shooting gallery to prevent PLA’s amphibious forces from making their way into the island. Even once Chinese boots were on Taiwanese ground, the island’s mountainous topography and urbanised environment would give defenders an advantage when it comes to hampering the progress of an invasion.
Another factor is what UK defence academic Patrick Porter calls the “ham omelette dilemma”, because to make the omelette, a pig needs to commit its life while a chicken only has to lay a few eggs. What this means is that Taiwan will see a conflict with its adversary across the strait as conflict for survival.
For China, meanwhile, the stakes aren’t as high, despite having wanted to incorporate Taiwan for pretty much its entire modern history. And there’s no knowing how facing this existential threat might spur the Taiwanese defenders on.
The defence review also recommends the development of an indigenously produced long-range strike capability, part of a continuing move towards self-reliance for Taiwan’s defence forces. But in the meantime the country has steadily built its arsenal of defensive weapons over the past two decades, most recently agreeing the purchase of the latest patriot missiles from the US in a US$620 million (£455 million) deal agreed in 2019 between Taiwanese premier Tsai Ing-wen and Donald Trump.
Taiwan’s strategy to deter a Chinese invasion by threatening to impose major political costs is also informed by what it sees as the risk-averse nature of China’s leadership and its preference for long-term planning. And, no doubt, both sides will have taken lessons from the US experience in Afghanistan, where the political costs of taking on a small but determined and mobile enemy have recently become all-too clear.
23. The Rot of Democracies
An ominous warning from Eliot Cohen. But will it fall on deaf ears?
Excerpts:
The temptation for Americans today is to fight our internal fights and retreat, if not into isolation then into self-absorption. Many think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way an earlier generation thought about World War I, despite the differences in scale. And even more see in globalized trade and commerce only the current reality of fractured supply chains and lost manufacturing jobs. This is a danger not just for Americans but for a wider world, because without American muscle—financial, cultural, and military—politics defined by the rule of law, civil and religious liberty, and free and fair elections will come under strain. We know that freedom around the world, measured in various ways, has been in decline for a decade or more. What Roosevelt and his enlightened Republican opponents—including their 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie—understood is that American liberties would be profoundly less safe in an illiberal world. It is not clear that American politicians, or large swaths of the American public and its elites, grasp that today.
Zara Steiner diagnosed a significant part of the tragedy of the 1930s in the atomization of the international system. States “began to follow their own independent trajectories as they struggled to find their place in a weakened international order,” she wrote. Her account is more bloodless, but also yields more insight than those that focus exclusively on the rise of the great tyrants of the 1930s. An America consumed by internal strife will be a difficult enough place. Should it lead to a world in which an internally divided America does not or cannot exert global influence and pressure to sustain basic norms of decent behavior and governance, our lot will be immeasurably worse.
The Rot of Democracies
If America succumbs to its internal divisions, to its preoccupation with partisan feuding and its desire to withdraw from international politics, the world order, such as it is, will crumble.
Sitting on a shelf in my sunlit study are two massive works of history by the late, great scholar Zara Steiner, each dealing with the international politics of the 1920s and ’30s. The first volume is The Lights That Failed; the second is The Triumph of the Dark. They came particularly to mind when I learned of the latest poll results from the University of Virginia Center for Politics, in which about three-quarters of Joe Biden and Donald Trump voters say that representatives of the opposing party are “a clear and present danger to American democracy,” and that censorship should be introduced, the First Amendment to the Constitution notwithstanding.
Grim stuff, as the journalists David French and Robert Kagan both have argued in powerful essays that raise the specter of civil war and the collapse of American democracy. The available data tend to support their views, although arguably these essays underplay the resilience of the American political system. But there is enough going on in the United States and abroad to make one think of the interwar period, when, as Yeats wrote in his famous “Second Coming,” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
What Steiner has to teach us is that the issue goes beyond the United States. All historical analogies are suspect, and the argument ad Hitlerum is, as has often been pointed out, a polemicist’s mark of desperation. Let us stipulate, therefore, that at the moment, no Hitlers or Stalins are on the prowl in the world. But that is not the point of analogizing the present to the interwar years. There are thuggish regimes and ruthless dictators, to be sure, and they are armed with tools of repression that the totalitarians of almost a century ago could only dream about. It is, however, the rot of democracies that is more troubling, and in this respect the interwar period still has its lessons.
In that time, whose living memory has vanished with the passing of the older generation, cancel culture was real; George Orwell, among others, felt it. On one side, intellectuals infatuated with communism, or who were simply following the dictum that there are no enemies on one’s left, felt comfortable preventing critics from being able to publish or even getting jobs. On the other side, a minority, now somewhat forgotten but important at the time, became infatuated with toxic forms of nationalism, and not only among the future Axis powers.
Internal, politically driven violence was rife; in France it culminated in a riot in Paris on February 6, 1934, launched by an array of right-wing groups. (Many of their leaders subsequently found a home in the collaborationist Vichy regime.) More insidious, however, was the spreading belief that parliamentary democracy could not handle the challenges of the fractured post–World War I landscape. James Burnham, later an American conservative, declared that “the managers” would and should take over, because representative governments could not manage their countries. Plenty of reasonable people agreed that democracy could not cope with the era’s economics; even Winston Churchill had some doubts.
In a world racked by economic dislocation, demagogues flourished, and not just in Europe. Franklin D. Roosevelt declared “the Kingfish,” Louisiana Governor Huey Long, the most dangerous man in America. The shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, globalization, and the proliferation of information technologies are not yet equal to the Great Depression in human impact. But they have destroyed many jobs and deprived others (truck drivers, for example) of autonomy, and with it a kind of worker’s dignity. They have, in their own way, contributed to the radical discontent that has fueled Trumpism in the United States and its equivalents elsewhere.
In America, the 1930s were also the apogee of isolationism that had been born in part from disgust—excessive and ill-informed, but powerful nonetheless—over the conduct and outcome of the First World War. No surprise then that students at elite institutions such as Yale flocked to the original “America First” movement, vowing to keep the United States out of the Old World’s wars. Here, too, are echoes that we can yet hear today.
These phenomena were all understandable, and all products of a disjointed but interconnected world. And yet it was not nearly as interconnected a world as ours is today, when a group of South Asia scholars in the United States who criticize the government of India and some manifestations of Hindu nationalism can suddenly find themselves receiving hate emails and death threats. Worse, as Freedom House has recently documented, authoritarian governments can and do reach across international borders to punish, coerce, or even kill opponents of their domestic policies. And more and more, they have done so with impunity.
In short, liberal democracy feels as though it’s in a pretty bad way, and in many places, it is. No competing advanced ideologies as comprehensive and lethal as Nazism or communism are on offer, although that could conceivably change. What is certain is that dictators, whether Xi Jinping or Ayatollah Khamenei, Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un, have at their disposal devastating weapons of precision repression and murder. The repeated and generally successful crushing of dissident individuals and movements in their countries and elsewhere is remarkable. Even a profoundly corrupt and incompetent regime, such as that of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, can hang on despite multiple internal and external pressures, partly with the transnational assistance of governments and corporations eager to help.
It could get worse. We have yet to see where new technologies—targeted biological weapons, ubiquitous surveillance, drones of every type and kind—will take us. We have yet to experience the full external shocks of climate change, and we have yet, for that matter, to see what will happen when someone again lights off a nuclear weapon in anger. It was not without reason that Churchill spoke of the possibility of the world sinking “into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” It all could happen, and if the first half of the 20th century has anything to teach us, it is that calamitous misfortune and horrifying deeds can occur, a lesson viscerally absorbed by the statesmen who attempted to piece the world back together in the first decade after World War II.
Perhaps the biggest difference between that era and this one, however, lies in the United States’ role. It is no coincidence that at one of the bleakest moments in 1940, when Britain looked as though it might very well succumb to Nazi invasion, Churchill could speak of “the New World, with all its power and might” stepping forth “to the rescue and liberation of the Old.”
Churchill could pin his hopes on the world’s biggest economy and its liveliest (if turbulent) democracy, the United States. The problem today is that there is no United States behind the United States. If America succumbs to its internal divisions, to its preoccupation with partisan feuding and its desire to withdraw from international politics, the world order, such as it is, will crumble. The reverberations can already be felt: When the senior foreign-policy official of the United Arab Emirates, a close American ally, explains his country’s preliminary efforts to reach accommodations with an illiberal Turkey and an imperial Iran in terms of uncertainty about American purpose—“Afghanistan is definitely a test and to be honest it is a very worrying test”—there is reason for concern.
The temptation for Americans today is to fight our internal fights and retreat, if not into isolation then into self-absorption. Many think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the way an earlier generation thought about World War I, despite the differences in scale. And even more see in globalized trade and commerce only the current reality of fractured supply chains and lost manufacturing jobs. This is a danger not just for Americans but for a wider world, because without American muscle—financial, cultural, and military—politics defined by the rule of law, civil and religious liberty, and free and fair elections will come under strain. We know that freedom around the world, measured in various ways, has been in decline for a decade or more. What Roosevelt and his enlightened Republican opponents—including their 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie—understood is that American liberties would be profoundly less safe in an illiberal world. It is not clear that American politicians, or large swaths of the American public and its elites, grasp that today.
Zara Steiner diagnosed a significant part of the tragedy of the 1930s in the atomization of the international system. States “began to follow their own independent trajectories as they struggled to find their place in a weakened international order,” she wrote. Her account is more bloodless, but also yields more insight than those that focus exclusively on the rise of the great tyrants of the 1930s. An America consumed by internal strife will be a difficult enough place. Should it lead to a world in which an internally divided America does not or cannot exert global influence and pressure to sustain basic norms of decent behavior and governance, our lot will be immeasurably worse.
24. Zignal Labs Announces Public Sector Advisory Board
I am proud to join these distinguished colleagues on the advisory board for a cutting edge organization.
Zignal Labs Announces Public Sector Advisory Board - Zignal Labs
Zignal Labs is thrilled to announce our Public Sector Advisory Board. Read our press release below to learn more.
Zignal Labs Announces Public Sector Advisory Board with Top National Security Experts
Advisors will guide strategy for company’s public sector business, which already supports over 1,400 analysts at over 25 U.S. federal agencies
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 7, 2021 — Zignal Labs, developer of narrative intelligence solutions used by the world’s largest enterprise and public sector organizations, today announced its Public Sector Advisory Board with nine top national security experts. The advisors bring decades of combined government experience to the company, having navigated the most pertinent U.S. national security issues and pioneered operational and technical advancements still in place at public sector agencies today.
Zignal Labs has supported the missions of U.S. national security and civilian agencies since 2013. The company’s leading narrative intelligence platform provides AI-enabled analysis and assessment of foreign adversarial influence campaigns, and has been used as a critical early warning system for pervasive online narratives that threaten offline safety and security.
The company is now joining forces with top national security experts to meet the rapidly escalating challenges of today’s information environment and continue to deliver best-in-class analytical solutions. Zignal’s Public Sector Advisory Board members include:
- Charles Cleveland: Retired Commanding General, U.S. Army Special Operations Command
- Chris Fussell: President of McChrystal Group and Former Navy SEAL
- Doowan Lee: CEO of VAST-OSINT and Chinese and Russian Influence Expert
- David Maxwell: Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and Former U.S. Army Special Forces Colonel
- John Rendon: President and CEO at The Rendon Group
- Stephen Rodriguez: Managing Partner at OneDefense
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P.W. Singer: Defense Strategist and Author of LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
- Dr. Rand Waltzman: Adjunct Senior Information Scientist at the RAND Corporation
- Vera Zakem: Senior Technology and Policy Advisor, IST, CEO of Zakem Global Strategies, and Member of the Bipartisan Task Force on U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism
“Our Advisory Board brings an incredible depth of practitioner expertise and academic insight to our public sector business,” said Alex del Castillo, Vice President of Public Sector at Zignal Labs. “Together, we plan on driving further adoption of Zignal’s mission-critical technologies the U.S. government needs to assess the impact of malign influence campaigns and gain a true information advantage.”
Earlier this year, the company announced the release of Zignal Emerging Narratives, the world’s first solution for automatically detecting and assessing narratives emerging across publicly available social, broadcast, traditional, and alternative media. To learn more about Zignal Labs, please visit https://zignallabs.com/.
About Zignal Labs
Zignal’s Narrative Intelligence Cloud analyzes billions of digital stories in real time to help customers discover and manage the narratives that can help or harm them. Used by the world’s largest companies and public sector organizations, Zignal’s natural language processing and machine learning algorithms identify risks and opportunities as they emerge, and provide insight into how to shape the narratives that matter. Headquartered in San Francisco, Zignal serves customers around the world, including Expedia, Synchrony, Prudential, and The Public Good Projects.
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.
