9/7/2021 National. Security News and Commentary

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Insanity in individual is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule"

- Nietzsche

“It is not to political leaders our people must look, but to themselves. Leaders are but individuals, and individuals are imperfect, liable to error and weakness. The strength of the nation will be the strength of the spirit of the whole people.”

- Michael Collins

“What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.”

- Lord Melbourne (1779-1848)

1. Americans Stretch Across Political Divides to Welcome Afghan Refugees

2. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: How '9/11 mastermind' slipped through FBI's fingers

3. US helped 4 US citizens leave Afghanistan overland, official says

4. U.S. helps American family cross Afghanistan border to safety

5. Pentagon restarts 16 advisory boards after 7-month pause

6. China’s Industrial Planning Evolves, Stirring U.S. Concerns

7. The US military needs a seventh branch: The Cyber Force

8. Fascinating Infantry/Ranger Video

9. Joe Biden's Afghanistan Withdrawal: What Will History Say?

10. 9/11: The Way We Thought Then by Robert D. Kaplan

11. Kill Terrorists in Afghanistan from 'Over the Horizon'? Good Luck.

12. After Afghanistan: time for the Quad to take centre stage

13. Credibility Controversies: The Implications of Afghanistan for the Indo-Pacific

14. State Department accused of trying to take credit for rescue of 4 Americans from Afghanistan

15. US-built databases a potential tool of Taliban repression

16. The Latest: Blinken says US working with Taliban on flights

17. U.S. Working With Taliban on Flying Remaining Americans Out of Afghanistan

18. Taliban poised to unveil new government after claiming Panjshir

19. From Kabul to Kyiv: Strengthening Deterrence Amid Questions About American Resolve

20. There Is More War in the Classroom Than You Think

21. What Afghanistan Cost the CIA (book review)

22. How Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban increases the global terrorism threat

23. It Is Time for Senior Military Reform

24. Taliban completes conquest of Afghanistan after seizing Panjshir

25. Afghanistan: The Warlords Who Will Decide Whether a Civil War Is Likely

26. America's Return to Realism

27. 'Keep your head on a swivel': FBI analyst circulated a prescient warning of Jan. 6 violence

28. Planes Chartered To Evacuate Americans And Others From Afghanistan Remain Grounded

1. Americans Stretch Across Political Divides to Welcome Afghan Refugees

Great Americans doing great things that truly make America great. Or as Kant said - doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do.

Americans Stretch Across Political Divides to Welcome Afghan Refugees

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists” are coming forward to help those fleeing Afghanistan, a pastor said. A mass mobilization is underway.

By Miriam Jordan and Jennifer Steinhauer

Sept. 6, 2021
Updated 3:01 p.m. ET

The New York Times · by Jennifer Steinhauer · September 6, 2021

Preparing kits of essentials that will be given to an Afghan families being resettled in the United States.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists” are coming forward to help those fleeing Afghanistan, a pastor said. A mass mobilization is underway.

Preparing kits of essentials that will be given to an Afghan families being resettled in the United States.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times

By Miriam Jordan and

Sept. 6, 2021Updated 3:01 p.m. ET

PHOENIX — The hundreds of parishioners at Desert Springs Bible Church, a sprawling megachurch in the northern suburbs of Phoenix, are divided over mask mandates, the presidential election and what to do about migrants on the border. But they are unified on one issue: the need for the United States to take in thousands of Afghan evacuees, and they are passing the plate to make it happen.

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists within our sphere recognize the level of responsibility that America has to people who sacrificed for the nation’s interest,” said Caleb Campbell, the evangelical church’s lead pastor.

Last weekend, the church inaugurated a campaign to raise money for the dozens of Afghan families who are expected to start streaming into greater Phoenix in the next several weeks. Already, thousands of dollars have flowed into the church’s “benevolence fund.”

“This is a galvanizing moment,” said Mr. Campbell, 39.

Throughout the United States, Americans across the political spectrum are stepping forward to welcome Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort in one of the largest mass mobilizations of volunteers since the end of the Vietnam War.

In rural Minnesota, an agricultural specialist has been working on visa applications and providing temporary housing for the newcomers, and she has set up an area for halal meat processing on her farm. In California, a group of veterans has sent a welcoming committee to the Sacramento airport to greet every arriving family. In Arkansas, volunteers are signing up to buy groceries, do airport pickups and host families in their homes.

“Thousands of people just fled their homeland with maybe one set of spare clothes,” said Jessica Ginger, 39, of Bentonville, Ark. “They need housing and support, and I can offer both.”

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists within our sphere recognize the level of responsibility that America has to people who sacrificed for the nation’s interest,” Caleb Campbell, an evangelical pastor, said.Credit...Ash Ponders for The New York Times

Goods collected for Afghan evacuees inside Mission Community Church in Gilbert, Ariz.Credit...Ash Ponders for The New York Times

Donations are pouring into nonprofits that assist refugees, even though in most places few Afghans have arrived yet. At Mission Community Church in the conservative bedroom community of Gilbert outside Phoenix, parishioners have been collecting socks, underwear, shoes and laundry supplies.

Mars Adema, 40, said she had tried over the past year to convince the church’s ministries to care for immigrants, only to hear that “this is just not our focus.”

“With Afghanistan, something completely shifted,” Ms. Adema said.

In a nation that is polarized on issues from abortion to the coronavirus pandemic, Afghan refugees have cleaved a special place for many Americans, especially those who worked for U.S. forces and NGOs, or who otherwise aided the U.S. effort to free Afghanistan from the Taliban.

The moment stands in contrast to the last four years when the country, led by a president who restricted immigration and enacted a ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries, was split over whether to welcome or shun people seeking safe haven. And with much of the electorate still deeply divided over immigration, the durability of the present welcome mat remains unknown.

Polls show Republicans are still more hesitant than Democrats to receive Afghans, and some conservative politicians have warned that the rush to resettle so many risks allowing extremists to slip through the screening process. Influential commentators, like Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, have said the refugees would dilute American culture and harm the Republican Party. Last week, he warned that the Biden administration was “flooding swing districts with refugees that they know will become loyal Democratic voters.”

But a broad array of veterans and lawmakers have long regarded Afghans who helped the United States as military partners, and have long pushed to remove the red tape that has kept them in the country under constant threat from the Taliban. Images of babies being lifted over barbed-wire fences to American soldiers, people clinging to departing planes and a deadly terrorist attack against thousands massed at the airport, desperate to leave, have moved thousands of Americans to join their effort.

“For a nation that has been so divided, it feels good for people to align on a good cause,” said Mike Sullivan, director of the Welcome to America Project in Phoenix. “This country probably hasn’t seen anything like this since Vietnam.”

Federal officials said this week that at least 50,000 Afghans who assisted the United States government or who might be targeted by the Taliban are expected to be admitted into the United States in the coming month, though the full number and the time frame of their arrival remains a work in progress. More than 31,000 Afghans have arrived already, though about half were still being processed on military bases, according to internal government documents.

Tens of thousands of Americans are helping to prepare, donating lamps, dishes and blankets, assembling beds and signing on to volunteer. There has been so much good will that some groups are struggling to handle it.

“We are telling people, ‘Hold on, we are going to let you know as soon as we need the furniture,’” said Aimee Zangandou, director of refugee and immigrant services at Inspiritus, a resettlement agency in Atlanta and Savannah.

The national infrastructure for resettling refugees has shrunk drastically over the last five years as the Trump administration slashed refugee admissions and cut federal funding to the nine contracted resettlement agencies whose caseworkers help arrivals enroll children in school, find jobs and become self-sufficient.

June Hoffman, 10, helped pack kits for Afghan families with Miry’s List, a Los Angeles-based national nonprofit that helps refugees. “I like to volunteer because I feel people from different countries should be treated equal,” she said.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times

Miry Whitehill, founder of Miry’s List, packing kits for Afghan families arriving across the country. “We truly are busier than ever, not only providing direct services but managing an unprecedented number of volunteers. People are donating, writing welcome letters, helping in every possible way,” said Ms. Whitehill.Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times

More than 100 offices where refugees seek help when transitioning to their adopted homes had shuttered by 2019.

Now, as agencies scramble to staff up, they are leaning heavily on nonprofits like the Welcome to America Project to set up homes for arrivals, and those groups in turn are tapping into a network of churches, synagogues, Girl Scout troops and neighborhood groups whose members provide furnishings, gift cards and cash as well as volunteer hours.

Public opinion surveys have shown broad support for resettling Afghan refuges. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released on Friday, 68 percent said they supported taking in refugees who had been subjected to security review, and 27 percent opposed it. The support included 56 percent of Republicans. Volunteer agencies said the community mobilization has crossed traditional political dividing lines.

“We have never seen anything like it,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the chief executive of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, a resettlement agency that has affiliates in 22 states.

Many Afghans are expected to join family and friends in established communities in California, Texas and the Washington, D.C., metro region. But, given the large volume of arrivals, they are likely to land in any corner of the country where jobs are plentiful, housing is affordable and there is a resettlement infrastructure.

On a recent rainy day in Prince George’s County, Md., Laura Thompson Osuri, executive director of Homes Not Borders, a small nonprofit, was racing between the group’s storage unit to two apartment complexes where two new families would be housed. In the car, she was zipping through frantic queries on her cellphone: Where was the stuff for the crib? Who needed the table? Yikes, was that my exit?

Caroline Clarin, who lives in a conservative rural county in northern Minnesota, said she was deeply affected by her two-year experience in eastern Afghanistan teaching families agricultural techniques through an Agriculture Department program.

She has helped to relocate five families from the region, sometimes paying for their passage and temporarily housing them. Two families chose to stay near her in the Fergus Falls area, where she turned a corner of her farm into an area to process halal meat, an exercise that recently led Ms. Clarin, 55, to chase a cow three miles down a country road.

“I was concerned. I am in an absolutely fire-red area,” she said. But the community, she said, “has been extremely welcoming to them.”

Six years ago in September, the image of a drowned Syrian boy, face down on a beach in Turkey, awakened many Americans to the Syrian refugee crisis. But the terrorist attacks in Paris three months later, which killed 130 people and wounded hundreds, fueled a political backlash and undermined public support for refugees.

Ihsanullah Patan, center, met Caroline Clarin, left, while she was in Afghanistan with the Agriculture Department. Mr. Patan immigrated to the United States with his wife and four children in May.Credit...Antranik Tavitian for The New York Times

Ms. Clarin poured Mr. Patan a cup of tea in her home in Dalton, Minn.Credit...Antranik Tavitian for The New York Times

“There is a momentum now that I have not seen since 2015,” said Mary Kaech, who leads Phoenix Refugee Connections and advocates evangelical involvement with refugees. “I’m hoping that momentum will sustain,” she said.

But will it?

Tiffany Kapadia, 38, a realtor and mother of two young children in Phoenix, said she had seen the news from Afghanistan and had tried to put herself in the shoes of families fleeing for their lives. She has donated money to the fund-raising effort at her church.

“I am trying to peel away the negative rhetoric that comes from some news outlets and people,” she said, including from her brother, Josh Davies, who said he worried about terrorists and other criminals infiltrating the mass of arrivals, and about the impact of so many new immigrants on American culture and politics.

“Who are these people? If 1 percent of them are ISIS, it’s all it takes,” Mr. Davies said.

Kari Lake, a former television anchor who is running for governor, tweeted a warning: “Unvetted refugees incoming.”

But Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a Republican, said recently that the state welcomed Afghan evacuees and was working to offer them “safety in Arizona.”

Chris St. John, a vice president at the Center for Arizona Policy, an advocacy organization that promotes conservative values, said in a blog post that he applauded the governor.

“I am not looking at this from a political perspective; I’m coming from a decidedly biblical perspective,” he said in an interview. “Could someone dangerous come? Perhaps. It is still worth the risk.”

Jason Creed, chairman of the board of Desert Springs Bible Church, said he had not heard complaints about the fund-raising drive for refugees.

“This is an issue where vaxxers and anti-vaxxers meet,” said Mr. Creed, a tax lawyer.

The church is part of a newly formed coalition of churches in Phoenix that has committed to provide families with groceries, household supplies and furniture as well as assistance navigating the bus system and filling out job applications.

“At the core of our mission is loving our neighbors,” Pastor Campbell said. “Which is not a one-time event.”

Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

The New York Times · by Jennifer Steinhauer · September 6, 2021

2. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: How '9/11 mastermind' slipped through FBI's fingers

Another fascinating story.

Excerpts:

Another reason he believes the tribunal has dragged on is because it's a death penalty case and that raises the stakes. "It would have been over long ago if the government weren't seeking to execute these men."

Pellegrino delayed his retirement from the FBI by three years in the hope that Mohammed's military tribunal at Guantanamo, which he expects to testify at, would be completed. "It would have been nice to see this through while I still had the badge."

But the veteran special agent hit retirement age and has just left the bureau.

Having crossed the world pursuing leads on Mohammed, he now feels a strong sense of failure, wondering whether capturing him in the 1990s might have prevented 9/11.

"His name comes up in my head every day and it's not a pleasant thought," he says.

"Time helps heal things. But it is what it is."

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: How '9/11 mastermind' slipped through FBI's fingers

BBC · by Menu

By Gordon Corera & Steve Swann

BBC News

The man accused of hatching the devastating plot to fly hijacked passenger planes into US landmarks 20 years ago is locked up awaiting trial. But could he have been stopped years before?

"He was my guy."

Frank Pellegrino was sitting in a hotel room in Malaysia when he saw the television pictures of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. The first thing he thought was: "My God, it's got to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed."

The target and the ambitions were a match and Pellegrino was in a unique position to know.

The former FBI special agent had pursued Mohammed for nearly three decades, yet the alleged 9/11 mastermind is yet to face justice.

A lawyer for Mohammed has told the BBC it may be another 20 years before the case is concluded.

image sourceGetty Images

image captionPresident Bush joins firefighters clearing rubble days after the attack

Osama Bin Laden, at the time the leader of al-Qaeda, is the man most closely associated with the 9/11 attacks. But the reality was that Mohammed - or "KSM" as he became known - was the "principal architect", according to the 9/11 Commission which investigated the attacks. He was the man who came up with the idea and took it to al-Qaeda.

Born in Kuwait, he studied in America before fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Years before the 9/11 attack, FBI Agent Frank Pellegrino had been on the trail of the jihadist.

Pellegrino had been assigned by the FBI to investigate the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. That was where Mohammed's name first came to the attention of US authorities because he had made a money transfer to one of those involved. The FBI agent realised the scale of Mohammed's ambition in 1995 when he was linked to a plot to blow up multiple international airliners over the Pacific. In the mid-1990s, Pellegrino had come close to getting his man, tracking him to Qatar.

He and a team went to Oman from where they planned to cross into Qatar and arrest Mohammed. A plane was ready to bring the suspect back. But there was resistance from US diplomats on the ground. Pellegrino went to Qatar and told the ambassador and other officials at the embassy that he had an indictment against Mohammed for the plot involving airliners. But he says they seemed wary of causing trouble in the country.

"I guess they thought maybe this was rocking the boat," Pellegrino recalls.

image sourceFrank Pellegrino

image captionPellegrino in 1987 and in 2020

Eventually the ambassador informed Pellegrino that Qatari officials claimed to have lost Mohammed. "There was angst and there was anger and frustration," he says. "We knew at the time it was a missed opportunity."

But he acknowledges that in the mid-90s Mohammed was not seen as a high-priority target. Pellegrino could not even get him listed on America's Top Ten Most Wanted. "I was told there's too many terrorists in there already."

Mohammed seems to have been tipped off about the US interest in him and fled Qatar, ending up in Afghanistan.

Over the next few years KSM's name kept cropping up, often in phone books of terror suspects arrested across the world, making clear he was well connected. It was during these years that he went to Bin Laden with the idea of training pilots to fly planes into buildings inside the US.

And then 9/11 happened. Pellegrino's suspicions of KSM's role would be proven right when a key al-Qaeda figure in custody identified him. "Everybody realised it was Frank's guy that did it," Pellegrino recalls. "When we found out he was the guy, there was nobody more miserable than me."

image sourceGetty Images

image captionThe 1993 World Trade Center bombing killed six and wounded over 1,000

In 2003, Mohammed was tracked down and arrested in Pakistan. Pellegrino hoped he would stand trial under the indictment he had worked on. But then he disappeared. The CIA had taken him to a "black site" where "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used.

"I want to know what he knows, and I want to know it fast," a senior CIA official said at the time.

Mohammed was waterboarded at least 183 times, something described as "near drownings". He was subjected to rectal rehydration, stress positions, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and told his children would be killed.

He would confess to multiple plots during that time. But a Senate report later found that much of the intelligence supposedly produced had been made up by the detainee.

image sourceGetty Images

image captionInformation from Mohammed led to an intensified search for Bin Laden on the Pakistani border

After details of the CIA's detention programme were revealed, "high value detainees" like Mohammed were moved to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. The FBI were finally allowed access.

In January 2007 Frank Pellegrino came face-to-face with the man he had pursued for so long.

The men sat across the table from each other.

"I wanted to let him know I'd been involved in indicting him in the 90s," he says, in the hope of opening up the conversation to extract information about 9/11.

The former FBI man won't disclose the details of what was said but conceded "he's a very engaging guy with a sense of humour, believe it or not".

KSM has often been seen "grandstanding" at hearings in Guantanamo and Pellegrino describes the world's most infamous terrorist suspect as "Kardashian" in his craving for attention but says he shows no remorse.

Would he confess or want to make the most of a trial? "I certainly think he's OK with what he did, but he likes the show," he says.

After six days of talking Mohammed finally said he had had enough. "And that was it," recalls Pellegrino.

Subsequent attempts to deliver justice for 9/11 have floundered. A plan to hold a trial in New York faltered after public and political opposition. "Everyone was screaming 'I don't want this guy in my backyard. Keep him down in Guantanamo,'" says Pellegrino, himself a New Yorker.

media captionInside Guantanamo Bay

Next came a military tribunal at Guantanamo. But procedural delays, compounded by the Covid pandemic closing the base, have made it a long-drawn out process. More hearings are taking place this week but an end looks a long way off.

Mohammed's lawyer believes the latest hearings are timed to show the media that something is happening on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. David Nevin told the BBC he expects "something in the order of 20 years for a complete resolution of the process."

The criminal defence lawyer has been on the case since it began in 2008. The original plan was to begin trials almost immediately. But they are still not even close to starting, he says, noting a newly appointed judge is "the eighth or ninth judge that we have had" depending on how you count.

image sourceGetty Images

image captionA wanted poster released by President Bush in 2001

The judge has to familiarise himself with around 35,000 pages of transcripts of previous hearings and thousands of motions in what Nevin describes as the "largest criminal trial in the history of the United States".

And it is the most controversial.

That is primarily because the five defendants were all held in secret detention by the CIA and subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques."

image sourceGetty Images

image captionCamp Justice in Guantanamo where some early hearings took place

That has led to arguments over evidence being contaminated by what happened at the so-called black sites.

The United States "organised and implemented a clearly defined programme to torture these men," says Nevin. Those methods provide plenty of scope for potential appeals against any convictions dragging on for years.

Nevin won't disclose details of what it's like to represent one of the world's most notorious defendants. He says initially his client was "deeply sceptical" of being represented by an American lawyer so there was a long process of getting to know each other.

When Mohammed was held in a top-secret part of the naval base the lawyers were put in a van with the windows blacked out and driven around for 45 minutes to disorient them, he says. But now his client is held in the less secret Camp 5.

The legal team are alive to the sensitivities of the 9/11 victims' families who are flown out to attend tribunal hearings. At meetings some family members will challenge lawyers like Nevin about representing defendants, but others will ask questions about how the process works.

image sourcePool

image captionBereaved 9/11 families gave a press conference when Mohammed had his first pre-trial hearing

"We work awfully hard to not do anything that will exacerbate the pain and suffering they've experienced over the years," says Nevin.

But the veteran special agent hit retirement age and has just left the bureau.

Having crossed the world pursuing leads on Mohammed, he now feels a strong sense of failure, wondering whether capturing him in the 1990s might have prevented 9/11.

"His name comes up in my head every day and it's not a pleasant thought," he says.

"Time helps heal things. But it is what it is."

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Under AI’s Watchful Eye, China Wants to Raise Smarter Students

A growing number of classrooms in China are equipped with artificial-intelligence cameras and brain-wave trackers. While many parents and teachers see them as tools to improve grades, they’ve become some children’s worst nightmare. Video: Crystal Tai

Write to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com

Appeared in the September 7, 2021, print edition as 'A Shift by China Raises Alarm in U.S..'

7. The US military needs a seventh branch: The Cyber Force

Everybody wants a new service branch!

The US military needs a seventh branch: The Cyber Force

The Hill · by Michael Curley, opinion contributor · September 2, 2021

A U.S. Army unit in Syria comes under heavy fire from the forces of the Islamic State. As the company commander and his men hunker down, he reaches for his radio to call for back-up. When he touches the button, nothing happens. His radio has been hacked.

At a local electric utility in Ohio, the controller gets a routine notice that power from other companies’ generators will be cut back in 10 minutes. No problem. This happens every day at this time. Power companies share responsibility for generating electricity for the grid. So, according to company policy, the controller activates the generators within his own system. As he pushes the control switches, nothing happens. The utility has been hacked. Minutes later a blackout occurs. The community is in total darkness. No heat. No lights. No internet. Uncle Joe’s dialysis machine shuts off. Aunt Jane’s respirator stops.

Despite the above anecdotes, cyberattacks aren’t fiction. In July, the United States, the European Union and NATO issued joint statements condemning the Chinese government for a series of malicious cyber activities.

In April, Colonial Pipeline was hit with a cyberattack that shut down a major national gas line and crippled the fuel industry, causing backups at gas stations across America.

Many people think cyberattacks just involve the internet, or malware, or getting codes to access electronic equipment like radios and power switches. Wrong. That’s just one part of a bigger story.

Let us say an enemy country realizes that they could never physically invade the United States, but they could bring the country to its knees by detonating nuclear weapons overhead at high altitude, creating electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that would cripple our power grid. Best selling author, Brad Thor writes about this scenario in his 2014 novel, “Act of War”. Over 30 years ago, another novel, “Warday,” dealt with a similar scenario. Today, we have a new book called, “2034: A Novel of the Next World War,” coauthored by a heavily decorated former Marine and four-star Admiral James Stavridis, who was the supreme commander of NATO. It claims to be a novel. But it looks like a prediction of what will happen if we don’t take cyberattack defense seriously.

The Federal Power Act gives the president the authority to declare a grid emergency and to delegate the authority to deal with it to the secretary of Energy. In 2015, Congress passed a law with a delightful acronym: FAST, the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act. This law authorizes the Energy Department to issue rules governing the secretary’s actions in a cyberattack. After deliberating for about three years, the U.S. Department of Energy finally issued a rule defining the powers of the secretary if the president declares a grid emergency. In addition, we have a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security.

That might turn our electricity back on after a disaster strikes — but what about prevention? We clearly need a United States Cyber Force to stop disasters from happening in the first place.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first airplane flight. It only took the United States 44 years to figure out the enormous impact aircraft have in defending our country. So, in 1947, we formed the United States Air Force as the fifth branch of service.

On April 12, 1961, Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made the first manned space flight. Twenty-three days later, on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Since then, citizens from 37 countries have flown in space and 11 countries reputedly have the ability to launch their own spacecraft. After watching the Russians and the Chinese and the other nations get into the space game, it only took official Washington 58 years to realize space was the new frontier of defense. Finally, on December 20, 2019, they created a new sixth branch of our armed forces, the United States Space Force.

During World War II, we had the Army Air Corps. Today, we have a Cyber Command. We needed a U.S. Air Force then; and we need a U.S. Cyber Force now. We must establish a seventh branch of our armed forces today to protect us from cyberattacks.

We can’t afford to wait 44 or 58 years this time. We need Congress and our government to create a United States Cyber Force now.

Michael Curley is a visiting scholar at the Environmental Law Institute and is on the advisory board of the cybersecurity organization, Protect Our Power.

The Hill · by Michael Curley, opinion contributor · September 2, 2021

8. Fascinating Infantry/Ranger Video

A very hooah video. CPT Coss appears to be an outstanding infantryman and Ranger leader. and has an outstanding story.

Video at the link.

https://twitter.com/USArmy/status/1435045537074585604

U.S. Army

@USArmy

The journey to become an infantry leader.

This is Capt. Shaina Coss' story.

Movie camera by Capt. Thomas Stanford

#PeopleFirst | #ArmyTeam

9. Joe Biden's Afghanistan Withdrawal: What Will History Say?

Conclusion:

The broad scope of ramifications flowing from America’s Afghanistan withdrawal is only starting to surface in the media, although the consequences were always there for policymakers and analysts to see and understand. Are we more secure today than before withdrawal? The final results are not yet in, but the early returns are decidedly negative.

Joe Biden's Afghanistan Withdrawal: What Will History Say?

19fortyfive.com · By John Bolton · September 6, 2021

Debates about America’s exit from Afghanistan, both the underlying withdrawal decision and its execution, will, with good reason, roil U.S. politics for years. Starting now, however, the critical question is: are we more secure today than before the departure became fait accompli.

The immediate danger is Afghanistan itself, where Biden Administration policies are enabling the victors and increasing threat levels. Secretary of State Blinken wants a Taliban government of “real inclusivity,” as if the presence of other Afghan factions will somehow dilute the impact of Taliban rule. The terrorists’ media charmers have surely learned from post-World War II “coalition” governments in Soviet-dominated Europe how to conceal political reality with make-believe “inclusivity.” If Taliban deigns to play this game, their siloviki will control the key security agencies, such as defense, police, and intelligence. The rest is window-dressing, mere pretense for a White House reluctant to face the consequences of its own mistakes.

So too for repeated White House assertions that it will “marshal the international community” to influence Taliban decisions. From what alternative universe does such language come? The “international community” for the Taliban consists of Russia and China, abstainers on the Security Council’s recent toothless resolution on Afghanistan, a clear signal of coming vetoes on anything beyond UN pablum. Pakistan’s head of Inter-Services Intelligence, Taliban’s long-time paymaster, just visited Kabul. More international community. This list will not get shorter, even as terrorists worldwide seek to establish sanctuaries in Taliban-led Afghanistan, and confirms why we should provide no political or economic sustenance to the terrorist regime.

The legitimate opposition to the Taliban is now fighting for survival in the Panjshir Valley, reminiscent of earlier battles against the Red Army and Taliban itself in the 1990s. We should assist this opposition to help provide at least an indirect U.S. presence in-country, to monitor and hinder the establishment of terrorist basecamps. Of course, much more is needed against a newly resurgent terrorist threat, and Biden’s blithe assurances about the efficacy of “over the horizon” capabilities should fool no one. U.S. operatives will do what they can from remote locations, but those efforts cannot suffice without on-the-ground capabilities.

Security threats to America post-withdrawal extend well beyond the direct consequences in Afghanistan. The risk of a full terrorist takeover in Pakistan has significantly increased. China and Russia will move aggressively to enhance their positions in Central Asia and the Middle East, where Iran will also pursue new opportunities. In short, our adversaries will see withdrawal as a signal of U.S. weakness and proceed accordingly.

But Washington’s friends are the most surprised and most disconcerted, starting with NATO. After the Trump-era chaos, allies believed Joe Biden’s soothing bromides indicated a kind of “normalcy” in U.S. attitudes toward NATO, perhaps not too warm but certainly not too cold. Then, he blindsided them, without prior notice, saying publicly the U.S. was indeed exiting Afghanistan. For well or ill, this is nothing new in NATO, as members often asked America, “are we being consulted or being informed?” This time, however, the response was stronger than usual. European Union leaders raised yet again the notion that the EU itself needed independent military capabilities.

Such EU-based blustering about no longer depending on NATO or the United States is also nothing new; the current furor may be purely for domestic political effect. But if, this time, a line has been crossed, it is potentially quite serious. Few Europeans realize how the idea of an independent EU force (or even an EU “pillar” within NATO) constitutes a dagger pointed at NATO’s heart. If Europeans still want collective-defense relations with the United States, questioning their reliance on NATO is a severe mistake, dangerous for all the parties involved.

Europe should have learned more from the Trump experience. There is a strain in American politics fully content immediately to “let Europe take care of itself.” And below that, there is a potentially even stronger current, resenting constant European carping about U.S. policy, that could without much further provocation transform itself into a more-fully unilateralist policy approach. Obviously, those most deeply threatened by Russia, particularly in central and eastern Europe, want no part of undercutting NATO. They need to speak up now, loudly, and effectively.

Bilateral meeting between NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and then-US Vice President Joe Biden in 2015. Image Credit: NATO Flickr.

The broad scope of ramifications flowing from America’s Afghanistan withdrawal is only starting to surface in the media, although the consequences were always there for policymakers and analysts to see and understand. Are we more secure today than before withdrawal? The final results are not yet in, but the early returns are decidedly negative.

Ambassador John R. Bolton served as national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump. He is the author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” You can follow him on Twitter: @AmbJohnBolton.

Image: A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team pulls security during a combat operation June 2, 2012, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan. His fellow paratroopers and Afghan soldiers inserted into the rugged mountain terrain via helicopter. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael J. MacLeod.

19fortyfive.com · by ByJohn Bolton · September 6, 2021

10. 9/11: The Way We Thought Then by Robert D. Kaplan

A "head-fake" between great power competition?

Many people may still consider Islamic terroism as "new" (now old) the global struggle.

Excerpts:

Too many, including me, believed that Islamic terrorism was now the new global struggle: a successor to World War II and the Cold War. After all, on September 11, 2001, Russian president Vladimir Putin had only been in power in Russia a short time and had yet famously to define himself. On 9/11, Xi Jinping was still years away from assuming power in China.

In grand historical terms, 9/11 might be considered a head-fake, representing a mere interregnum between one period of great-power conflict and another. But in the literal heat of the burning towers, it seemed real enough.

9/11: The Way We Thought Then

The National Interest · by Robert D. Kaplan · September 4, 2021

Context is everything in history, and hindsight is cheap. To grapple with a historical event one must put oneself into the thinking and assumptions of the time, which in turn are based on what people knew back then; not what they know now.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, on the Pentagon and the two World Trade Center buildings were unprecedented, overwhelming, and an absolute surprise. In Manhattan, a person could smell the fumes as far away as Midtown. It was the nearest that the inhabitants of New York and Washington would ever come in their lives to massive, flesh-incinerating violence. Comparisons were difficult, but Pearl Harbor was not a bad one: a surprise attack of vast proportions by an enemy.

For policy purposes, it was a toxic mix. On the one hand, there was the immediate feeling of stark vulnerability. In those autumn weeks, all sorts of related terrors, including nuclear and chemical weapons attacks, became less impossible to imagine. Nothing could be taken for granted. On the other hand, there was the warm feeling of national unity, along with the conviction that America could accomplish anything it set out to do. Remember, the United States had just closed a decade of successful military interventions in Panama, Bosnia, and Kosovo, which were all more-or-less wars of choice. Such adventures and the way they turned out subtly encouraged more adventures to come. And then there was the necessary war to eject Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which ended in triumph. America was invincible, even as it had just been seriously wounded. The result: the psychological need for revenge, and on a grand scale, no less—as grand as the attacks themselves.

Thus, in those autumn weeks, the post–Cold War era came to an end and the Global War on Terror began. The first era was a triumphal valediction to a half-century-long struggle to liberate the world from Nazism and Communism. That had been a conventional military and ideological labor for which America proved up to the task. The second era was ultimately about changing complex Islamic societies from within—for which America would turn out not to be up to the task. The first task was essentially geopolitical and the second task was essentially cultural. That’s why we succeeded in the first and failed in the second.

A number of people vaguely intuited this at the time. Because they had no specific knowledge of the future, they could only warn in general terms about over-burdening ourselves in one region when we didn’t know what challenges were yet to appear in other regions of the world. I wish I had been one of them. I was not.

Robert D. Kaplan holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His most recent book is “The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U. S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian.”

Image: Reuters

The National Interest · by Robert D. Kaplan · September 4, 2021

11. Kill Terrorists in Afghanistan from 'Over the Horizon'? Good Luck.

Excerpts:

At best the diplomatic challenge of securing access to Pakistani airspace will prove more vexing than in the past. South Asian skies may not be so friendly for U.S. aviators in the coming years. If not, mounting effective counterterrorist operations will be that much harder.

Geographic reality and kaleidoscopic geopolitical realignments now conspire against any American air war against terror. Best to acknowledge grim realities than wish them away.

Kill Terrorists in Afghanistan from 'Over the Horizon'? Good Luck.

19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · September 4, 2021

You have to be there to combat terrorism—or any other martial challenge for that matter. This is Strategy 101: the likely victor is the contender that amasses superior strength at the place and time of battle. It overpowers its foe. That being the case, the combatant that resides near likely battlegrounds commands an advantage over a rival that must come from far away and can mount only an episodic presence in the theater.

That’s why claims that America can duel terrorists in Afghanistan with success from “over the horizon” warrant skepticism. Over-the-horizon operations—operations in which a contender harnesses air and sea power to project forces into an embattled theater for action and retrieve them afterward—may be the best option left after the flight from Afghanistan. They probably are.

That doesn’t make them a savory option.

There are geographic and political grounds for skepticism. First, geography. Over-the-horizon operations work well when the battlefield lies within easy reach of sea or air forces. Coastal states are optimal. Fighting fleets can stage serious air, missile, and amphibious power in littoral zones from just offshore. States adjoining states that host U.S. air or ground forces make viable battlefields as well.

But what about remote reaches like Afghanistan—places that interpose the tyranny of distance between U.S. warriors and designated scenes of action?

That changes things. Parsing the metaphor of the horizon reveals military reality. The visible horizon lies just a few miles away depending on your height of eye. Military forces can be effective when the metaphor roughly corresponds to reality—when they’re coming from nearby bases and flight or at-sea times are short. Forces can reach the scene without undue logistical strain and linger there long enough to prevail.

The metaphor doesn’t remotely correspond to reality in Afghanistan, where the “horizon” lies hundreds of miles distant.

Think about the operational conundrum confronting U.S. airmen deprived of airfields in Afghanistan. Land-based aircraft flying from Persian Gulf airstrips must detour southward around hostile Iranian airspace, into the Arabian Sea, and northward through Pakistani airspace to strike targets in Afghanistan. Sorties consume hour upon hour, not to mention manpower, fuel, and other resources needed to keep planes aloft.

Carrier aircraft have it easier from a distance standpoint since their mobile airfield can linger in the Arabian Sea. But even so, the Afghan capital of Kabul lies close to 700 miles from the closest point along the Pakistani seacoast. That’s well beyond the combat radius of, say, a carrier-based F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, meaning inflight refueling will be a must. U.S. Air Force warplanes have it even worse with longer-range missions to contend with.

In short, geography will impose severe logistical stresses on any over-the-horizon air campaign. It will limit an individual aircraft’s time over target zones, meaning airborne counterterrorist operations will have a come-and-go character. Meanwhile, successful competitors—the Taliban, ISIS, al Qaeda—go and stay. Advantage: the wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Showing up in the right place—and staying there until the battle is won—is an underappreciated ingredient of strategy. You have to be there.

Second, politics. In the brave new world following the exit from Afghanistan, is it safe to assume U.S. air and sea forces will have any route into Afghanistan? I don’t think so. Pakistan has always been an uncertain ally for the United States, while Pakistan’s other ally, China, has been making friendly noises toward Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban. Islamabad may place a higher premium on pleasing Beijing than Washington.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center, U.S. Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.

19fortyfive.com · by ByJames Holmes · September 4, 2021

12. After Afghanistan: time for the Quad to take centre stage

Go Quad (and Quad Plus).

Excerpts:

Yet enlargement of the Quad is an entirely reasonable response to China’s predatory and threatening attitude towards powers including the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam. The time for appeasement and ambivalence is past. The complex global environment—including the evolving China–Russia axis—now requires an expanded Quad to balance the activities of authoritarian powers.

Perhaps significantly, the Quad has already cautiously started to consider wider challenges by pledging this year to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. It also has obvious interests in building cooperation on addressing global warming, terrorism and other issues haunting the international order.

Forging an expanded Quad will be difficult given China’s predictable coercive responses. But in Paine’s words, this is no time for liberal powers to shrink from service to country and (he might add) to human rights. Nor may Western powers seek the love and triumph evoked in ‘Common sense’, but the loss of Afghanistan magnifies the need for a free and open Indo-Pacific and a rules-based maritime order in a chaotic world.

International security relations have always been anarchic terrain. There is no Leviathan to keep order, but now, post-Afghanistan, an expanded Quad could help modify, perhaps ameliorate, the multiple threats that are trying people’s souls in a troubled world.

After Afghanistan: time for the Quad to take centre stage | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Geoffrey Barker · September 6, 2021

The defiant words of that old rabble-rouser Thomas Paine provide a fitting rallying cry for Western leaders after the US-led retreat from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban.

The West now faces a witches’ brew of complex and daunting strategic problems crowding in on it, magnifying and deepening Western anxieties. So leaders might take comfort from Paine’s famous ‘Common sense’ pamphlet addressed to the continental army fighting for American independence in 1776.

‘These are the times that try men’s souls,’ Paine wrote. ‘The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph’.

Certainly US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Australian PM Scott Morrison and those of their ilk have faced times that have tried their strategic souls. They have faced a devastating pandemic and accelerating climate change while fighting the Taliban in vain for the future of Afghanistan. At the same time, violent Islamist terrorism has been an ongoing, often bloody, threat.

And throughout it all the United States, leader of the liberal democratic West, has been increasingly mired in deep political divisions that brought the country close to violent insurrection and political gridlock in the dying hours of the appalling Donald Trump presidency.

At the same time, China’s coercive military, political, diplomatic and economic policies have complicated the democratic will. While resisting China’s efforts to dislodge US-led power in the Indo-Pacific region, Western leaders and their Asian allies have struggled to manage other challenges clearly beyond the capabilities of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.

For Australia, and others, threats posed by Chinese aggression and by America’s domestic difficulties are the gravest of these challenges. But the cumulative effect of the challenges, and their tendency to act on each other with unexpected consequences, makes the current global environment especially perturbing. A question arises: how many such crises can modern nations, with all of their political, diplomatic, economic and military resources, handle simultaneously before a fatal miscalculation occurs?

Among other things, largely futile international efforts to trace the origins of the Covid-19 virus from Wuhan in China have increased tensions between Beijing and Western powers. Now the US retreat from Afghanistan, and US dysfunctional domestic politics, have inevitably raised doubts about the future value of Australia’s alliance with the US. The international push to cut carbon emissions has intensified the effects of China’s economic bullying of Australia, notably its trade sanctions against Australian coal exports.

At the same time, a surge in Islamist terror attacks worldwide is being widely predicted following the US retreat from Afghanistan. Whatever the incoming Taliban regime says about ruling peacefully, it is a vicious movement with a record of shameless oppression and violence;. The Taliban respects no human rights and will do nothing to oppose Islamist terror that is not directed at themselves.

Tyranny, as Paine said, is not easily conquered. So how might democracies and their allies most effectively resist and contain the threat from bullies and extremists now strutting the global stage? In fact, the democracies are well placed to push back if they can muster the will to expand embryonic institutions that are already in place and (most importantly) if they can gain the active engagement of the US after the Afghanistan debacle and Trump’s dangerous post-election lies.

Buoyed by its rising power, China rejected the authority of liberal international forums when it dismissed the 2016 ruling by the Hague-based Permanent Court of Arbitration that Beijing’s claims to most of the South China Sea lacked any basis in international law.

Since then, there has been an international tendency especially by timid Indo-Pacific states to appease China by maintaining silence about the 2016 judgement. The alternative (provided that the US and its allies and friends are prepared to be more than sunshine patriots) is to balance China’s power by creating an alliance so formidable that Beijing will realise that its interests will be better served by moderating its attacks on the rules-based global order, the liberal trading system and freedom of navigation through the Indo-Pacific region.

Such an alliance, happily, exists already in embryo. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between the US, Japan, Australia and India is an initiative created to balance Chinese aggression, but it needs to be larger, stronger and more focused. First proposed in 2007 by Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the Quad has conducted joint military exercises and held meetings with New Zealand, South Korea and Vietnam. Its creation and doubtless its potential military strength prompted China to declare that it ‘openly incites discord’.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Geoffrey Barker · September 6, 2021

13. Credibility Controversies: The Implications of Afghanistan for the Indo-Pacific

Excerpts:

After the withdrawal from Afghanistan, there are likely to be fewer questions about what the United States is willing to do in other theaters when push comes to shove and more questions about what it can accomplish against its rivals when put to the test. If so, policymakers should not expect measures that are aimed at improving perceptions of U.S. interests and resolve to repair or improve American credibility, at least not on their own. Instead, they should focus their attention on practical steps to create and communicate military power — two closely related but distinct objectives.

For example, the Biden administration should use the upcoming global posture review to begin enhancing presence and addressing operational challenges in the Indo-Pacific — and not make the mistake of assuming that subtraction in Central Asia equals addition elsewhere or that an unchanged air and naval footprint in the Middle East represents a sustainable situation. It also means making tangible progress in preparing for major conventional conflicts against well-armed state rivals, especially China, whether through near-term programs like the Pacific Deterrence Initiative or longer-term efforts like the joint warfighting concept — each of which got off to a rocky start and needs to find its footing. Policymakers should consider selectively easing restrictions on classification to create opportunities for revealing new systems rather than just concealing them — even, in some cases, at the cost of sacrificing a potential future warfighting advantage in exchange for current gains to deterrence and assurance. Lastly, they should develop a portfolio of capability demonstration options that showcase progress in developing new operational concepts and that unveil new systems — not simply options that increase the visibility or frequency of military activities involving legacy concepts and forces.

Credibility Controversies: The Implications of Afghanistan for the Indo-Pacific - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Evan Montgomery · September 7, 2021

Should policymakers be worried about the credibility of American security commitments now that the war in Afghanistan has come to an end? Amid the Taliban’s rapid takeover and Washington’s chaotic departure, many pundits and some politicians quickly struck a cynical tone. Echoing longstanding tropes, they declared that losing and leaving would wreck trust in U.S. promises and weaken respect for U.S. threats. That could push allies to go their own way and prompt adversaries to go on the march.

Academics and analysts, by contrast, have drawn very different and much more sanguine conclusions. Building on recent research, most argue that Washington’s security commitments are unlikely to suffer. If anything, the United States might benefit from a credibility boost following its withdrawal. Relieved of the operational burdens that Afghanistan imposed and free of the strategic distraction that it represented, Washington can devote greater attention and additional resources to more serious threats from China and Russia. That should inspire confidence in allies and instill caution in adversaries.

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Optimistic takes are a useful corrective to the doom and gloom that often pervade discussions of credibility, especially if a dose of optimism dissuades policymakers from adopting costly but unnecessary steps to fix something that is not badly broken. Yet they also risk going too far in the opposite direction. That could undermine the case for reasonable measures to repair any harm. It could also dampen the urgency to exploit opportunities the withdrawal creates.

Although some aspects of U.S. credibility might come through unscathed, the potential for damage is real and the prospect for gains is tenuous, at least when it comes to one critical factor: perceptions of military power and effectiveness. Optimists may underestimate the degree to which past operations could influence assessments of future performance and overestimate the extent to which the United States will reorient its strategic focus after the withdrawal. This has significant implications for Washington’s next steps, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, which is now its highest-priority theater. Dealing with any credibility damage and making any credibility gains after the war in Afghanistan will require concrete steps that not only enhance U.S military power, but also demonstrate those improvements.

Why Worry?

In the recurring debate over U.S. credibility, pessimistic voices often command the most attention. Today, there is a surplus of commentators who assume that the withdrawal from Afghanistan will have dire consequences by casting doubt on America’s willingness and ability to stand up to adversaries, stand alongside allies, and stand firm when challenged.

In their view, opportunistic rivals like China and Russia, sensing weakness and seeing a window of opportunity, could go on the offensive by provoking crises or starting conflicts. Concerns about the erosion of U.S. deterrence are hardly new. But these warnings come at a time when threats like a Chinese assault on Taiwan are now being discussed as near-term challenges, even by some senior U.S. officials. Meanwhile, apprehensive U.S. partners might lose faith in American security commitments, which could lead them to break away from the United States or bandwagon with its competitors. The need to assure allies is also a longstanding source of anxiety. Nevertheless, that anxiety is arguably becoming more pronounced now that Chinese and Russian defense modernization efforts are undercutting American military advantages.

The specter of crises, conflicts, and strategic realignments is guaranteed to grab attention, but an emphasis on rare events almost certainly inflates the potential consequences of credibility damage. In reality, Washington is unlikely to face newly emboldened adversaries poised to test its mettle or increasingly fickle allies on the verge of jumping ship. Nevertheless, it should still be concerned about adversaries attempting to extend their influence quietly, as well as allies trying to insulate themselves from abandonment gradually. That makes it important to understand the sources and severity of any credibility damage, even if the dangers are less immediate or more subtle than some pessimists suggest.

Most of those who have taken up this task have poured cold water on the notion that U.S. credibility will be worse off with the end of the war in Afghanistan. From their perspective, the factors that most influence credibility are likely to be just fine and could even improve, notwithstanding the difficulties associated with Washington’s departure, or the broader failures of the past twenty years that are back in the spotlight.

For instance, recent events should do little to harm perceptions of U.S. interests, or how much Washington seems to care about its obligations in other parts of the world. As many scholars note, credibility is often context-specific and security commitments are not necessarily interdependent. Consequently, allies and adversaries in regions like the Indo-Pacific should not conclude that the United States is less determined to support or stop them, respectively. In fact, departing from Afghanistan could clarify U.S. interests by demonstrating that policymakers have their priorities in order and finally are prepared to emphasize the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, the Biden administration has tried to send this message by linking the withdrawal to a looming competition with China.

At the same time, Washington’s reputation for resolve, or inherent willingness to use force and absorb costs in defense of its interests, should also be in good shape. This controversial element of credibility has reemerged as an important one in recent years. Not surprisingly, many commentators have claimed that the departure from Afghanistan will raise doubts about U.S. reliability and resilience. Rather than being tarred with the brush of backing down from a fight, though, Washington can stake a claim to sustaining a military intervention for nearly two decades and stubbornly refusing to admit defeat. It also managed to avoid any serious domestic opposition to its presence in Afghanistan despite the passage of time and limited progress. Those considerations alone showcase its steadfastness and stamina.

Finally, scholars suggest that the departure from Afghanistan might not hurt estimates of American capabilities, or Washington’s capacity to enforce threats and uphold promises. Of course, the previous two decades of conflict had already lowered the bar by creating a more permissive environment for competitors to improve their relative military power. If context matters, however, then the type of counter-insurgency operations that characterized the Afghanistan campaign, as well as the evacuation efforts that characterized the American departure, should offer few meaningful lessons for audiences that are more concerned about a major conventional conflict — whether those audiences are prospective instigators or possible victims. In fact, there is an argument to be made that U.S. capabilities, and thus its credibility, will improve going forward, perhaps by a significant margin. Now that Washington no longer needs to devote as much attention to Afghanistan, it can emphasize building up military strength in the Indo-Pacific and developing tools to deal with China. Consequently, U.S. allies in the region should be more confident that it will have their back, while Beijing should be on its guard.

Power Problems

In sum, research suggests there are many reasons not to worry about U.S. credibility after Afghanistan and, if these arguments are correct, few reasons to set about restoring it. This conclusion may be overly optimistic, however, particularly when it comes to the capability piece of the credibility equation, for two main reasons.

First, it prematurely discounts the notion that Washington’s involvement in Afghanistan, up to and including its departure, could damage estimates of its military power. As Paul Huth explains, when it comes to deterrence and assurance, “States can develop reputations along two dimensions. One would be a reputation for a willingness to use force to protect the state’s foreign-policy interests, and the second would be a reputation for having powerful military capabilities.” Put another way, states don’t just have reputations for resolve, they also have reputations for strength, which can compensate for ambiguity over how well their forces would actually fight. Notably, even scholars who downplay past behavior as a predictor of current credibility acknowledge that previous military performance can influence projections of military power.

In the case of the war in Afghanistan, the United States could not raise effective local security forces despite an enormous effort over many years. It struggled to implement a quick and orderly departure for its personnel, citizens, and partners on the ground once the Afghan government fell. And, most importantly, it was unable to defeat a far weaker opponent, even though it dedicated enormous human, material, and financial resources to the cause. Those failures could tarnish Washington’s image as the world’s most capable military power and leave audiences wondering how it would hold up against a much more serious rival under much more difficult circumstances.

Admittedly, the connection between a counter-insurgency campaign and a major conventional conflict might seem strained at first glance given the unique political and military dynamics associated with the former. Yet analysts and officials often make this connection by touting combat experience as a critical factor that differentiates American forces from those of U.S. rivals, particularly China, as well as an important contributor to military effectiveness. Much of that hard-won experience came in Afghanistan, however, not in high-end fights.

Second, regardless of whether allies or adversaries have downgraded their assessments of U.S. military strength, optimistic claims about credibility gains come with a major caveat. Specifically, this argument assumes that the United States is on the verge of a strategic adjustment that will enhance its capabilities, particularly in and for the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, key audiences expect Washington to do just that. This assumption might not be correct, though.

Although the war in Afghanistan is certainly one reason why the Department of Defense has been slow to adjust force structure, basing posture, and operational concepts for competition with China, it is not the only reason, and many of the other organizational, political, and technical obstacles that have been in the way still remain. More practically, the prior reduction of U.S. troops in Afghanistan leaves few opportunities to expand military presence in the Indo-Pacific as a direct result of the withdrawal. Meanwhile, the adoption of an over-the-horizon counter-terrorism strategy could prevent Washington from repurposing surveillance and strike assets for other theaters, and may provide a rationale for a significant military footprint in the Middle East. That could include continued aircraft carrier deployments to the Arabian Sea. Simply put, the barriers to rebalancing might be lower, but they have not gone away.

Signals of Strength

In the end, Washington’s involvement in Afghanistan might not influence the credibility of its other security commitments nearly as much, or as adversely, as many pessimists maintain. But any influence the Afghanistan experience does have might not be as negligible, or as beneficial, as more optimistic assessments suggest. Rather, it could turn out to be a case of mixed signals and missed opportunities. Policymakers have incentives, therefore, to take steps that mitigate potential credibility damage, leverage the withdrawal to realize credibility gains, and avoid a situation where Washington fails to meet the expectations it has set for itself.

What would that look like?

When policymakers fear that a state’s credibility is in doubt, they usually turn to a standard playbook of corrective actions: making public statements that reaffirm existing security commitments, offering quiet assurances to allies and private warnings to adversaries, launching high-profile diplomatic engagements with strategically important partners, ramping up arms sales to keep those partners close, and deploying military forces to show the flag near potential flashpoints. The problem, though, is that these measures are often designed to combat skepticism about interests and questions about resolve, not questions about capabilities and skepticism about strength. Addressing the latter set of concerns requires a very different set of actions: successfully employing forces in operations that are relevant to the commitments in question, holding exercises that simulate those operations, conducting experiments that showcase emerging technologies or the novel application of existing technologies, and deliberately releasing information about new or sensitive systems through exhibitions of various sorts.

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Evan Braden Montgomery is the director of research and studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the author of In the Hegemon’s Shadow: Leading States and the Rise of Regional Powers. This piece draws on his recent Journal of Strategic Studies article, “Signals of Strength: Capability Demonstrations and Perceptions of Military Power.”

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Evan Montgomery · September 7, 2021

14. State Department accused of trying to take credit for rescue of 4 Americans from Afghanistan

This is not helpful. I am reminded of Ronald Reagan saying: "It is amazing what can be accomplished when you do not care who gets the credit."

We should not have "competition" between State and veteran, NGOs, and private organizations. We need a collaborative process.

We need an organization to do this: compete with no one - enable legitimate organizations - share information and best practices - fill gaps and seams - expose bad actors.

State Department accused of trying to take credit for rescue of 4 Americans from Afghanistan

foxnews.com · by David Aaro | Fox News

Good morning and welcome to Fox News First. Here's what you need to know as you start your day …

State Department trying to steal credit for rescue of 4 Americans from Afghanistan, organizer says: 'Total lie'

The organizer of a private mission to rescue an American mom, Mariam, and her three children from Afghanistan says the U.S. State Department is now trying to insert itself into the story of her evacuation, despite playing little to no role for much of the rescue effort.

Senior State Department officials on Monday announced that the "U.S. has facilitated the safe departure of four US citizens by overland route from Afghanistan. Embassy staff was present upon their arrival."

But those actually involved in the dangerous rescue operation say the State Department deserves little to no credit for Mariam's escape from Afghanistan.

Video

Cory Mills and a private team of military veterans, drawing on funding by private donors including the Sentinel Foundation, led the effort to rescue Mariam and her three children from Afghanistan, where they had been left behind by the Biden administration, multiple sources with knowledge of Mariam's evacuation confirmed to Fox News.

The State Department's public posture about Mariam's rescue is "absolute nonsense," Mills told Fox News in an exclusive interview Monday. "The fact that they're spinning this, trying to take 100% credit when they didn't track this family, when they placated this family, when the mother, who was under extreme stress and extreme pressure, reached out to the State Department multiple times and got no help."

A State Department spokesperson, when asked whether the agency is overselling its role in Mariam's rescue, told Fox News in an email: "The Department assisted four Americans depart Afghanistan via an overland route on Monday. We provided guidance to them, worked to facilitate their safe passage, and Embassy officials greeted the Americans once they had crossed the border."

But Mills and others with knowledge of the operation say the State Department is exaggerating its role and had little to do with the rescue mission until the most dangerous part – getting Mariam and her children across the border – was completed. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ON OUR TOP STORY.

In other developments:

- Blinken to testify before Senate panel next week about Afghanistan withdrawal

- State Department, White House holding up charter planes in Afghanistan, top New Yorker editor says

- Rep. Gallagher slams Biden for 'lying' about crisis in Afghanistan

- NY Times mocked for piece on 'Biden doctrine' following Afghanistan exit: 'Is this a WH press release?'

- US facilitates Afghanistan evacuation of 4 Americans by overland route

- Son of 9/11 victim to Biden: Do not come to Ground Zero memorials

15. US-built databases a potential tool of Taliban repression

The Taliban probably cannot exploit these without outside expertise such as from China or Russia. And what will China and Russia mine from these data bases and techniques?

US-built databases a potential tool of Taliban repression

AP · by FRANK BAJAK · September 7, 2021

BOSTON (AP) — Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases for the Afghan people. The nobly stated goal: Promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-ravaged land.

But in the Taliban’s lightning seizure of power, most of that digital apparatus — including biometrics for verifying identities — apparently fell into Taliban hands. Built with few data-protection safeguards, it risks becoming the high-tech jackboots of a surveillance state. As the Taliban get their governing feet, there are worries it will be used for social control and to punish perceived foes.

Putting such data to work constructively — boosting education, empowering women, battling corruption — requires democratic stability, and these systems were not architected for the prospect of defeat.

“It is a terrible irony,” said Frank Pasquale, Brooklyn Law School scholar of surveillance technologies. “It’s a real object lesson in ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’”

Since Kabul fell Aug. 15, indications have emerged that government data may have been used in Taliban efforts to identify and intimidate Afghans who worked with the U.S. forces.

People are getting ominous and threatening phone calls, texts and WhatsApp messages, said Neesha Suarez, constituent services director for Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, an Iraq War veteran whose office is trying to help stranded Afghans who worked with the U.S. find a way out.

A 27-year-old U.S. contractor in Kabul told The Associated Press he and co-workers who developed a U.S.-funded database used to manage army and police payrolls got phone calls summoning them to the Defense Ministry. He is in hiding, changing his location daily, he said, asking not to be identified for his safety.

In victory, the Taliban’s leaders say they are not interested in retribution. Restoring international aid and getting foreign-held assets unfrozen are a priority. There are few signs of the draconian restrictions – especially on women – they imposed when they ruled from 1996 to 2001. There are also no indications that Afghans who worked with Americans have been systematically persecuted.

Ali Karimi, a University of Pennsylvania scholar, is among Afghans unready to trust the Taliban. He worries the databases will give rigid fundamentalist theocrats, known during their insurgency for ruthlessly killing enemy collaborators, “the same capability as an average U.S. government agency when it comes to surveillance and interception.”

The Taliban are on notice that the world will be watching how they wield the data.

All Afghans — and their international partners — have an obligation together to ensure sensitive government data only be used for “development purposes” and not for policing or social control by the Taliban or to serve other governments in the region, said Nader Nadery, a peace negotiator and head of the civil service commission in the former government.

Uncertain for the moment is the fate of one of the most sensitive databases, the one used to pay soldiers and police.

The Afghan Personnel and Pay System has data on more than 700,000 security forces members dating back 40 years, said a senior security official from the fallen government. Its more than 40 data fields include birth dates, phone numbers, fathers’ and grandfathers’ names, fingerprints and iris and face scans, said two Afghan contractors who worked on it, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Only authorized users can access that system, so if the Taliban can’t find one, they can be expected to try to hack it, said the former official, who asked not to be identified for fear of the safety of relatives in Kabul. He expected Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, long the Taliban’s patron, to render technical assistance. U.S. analysts expect Chinese, Russian and Iranian intelligence also to offer such services.

Originally conceived to fight payroll fraud, that system was supposed to interface eventually with a powerful database at the Defense and Interior ministries modeled on one the Pentagon created in 2004 to achieve “identity dominance” by collecting fingerprints and iris and face scans in combat areas.

But the homegrown Afghanistan Automated Biometric Identification Database grew from a tool to vet army and police recruits for loyalty to contain 8.5 million records, including on government foes and the civilian population. When Kabul fell it was being upgraded, along with a similar database in Iraq, under a $75 million contract signed in 2018.

U.S. officials say it was secured before the Taliban could access it.

Before the U.S. pullout, the entire database was erased with military-grade data-wiping software, said William Graves, chief engineer at the Pentagon’s biometrics project management office. Similarly, 20 years of data collected from telecommunications and internet intercepts since 2001 by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency were wiped clean, said the former Afghan security official.

Among crucial databases that remained are the Afghanistan Financial Management Information System, which held extensive details on foreign contractors, and an Economy Ministry database that compiled all international development and aid agency funding sources, the former security official said.

Then there is the data — with iris scans and fingerprints for about 9 million Afghans — controlled by the National Statistics and Information Agency. A biometric scan has been required in recent years to obtain a passport or a driver’s license and to take a civil service or university entrance exam.

Western aid organizations led by the World Bank, one of the funders, praised the data’s utility for empowering women, especially in registering land ownership and obtaining bank loans. The agency was working to create electronic national IDs, known as e-Tazkira, in an unfinished project somewhat modeled on India’s biometrically enabled Aadhaar national ID.

“That’s the treasure chest,” said a Western election assistance official, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize future missions.

It is unclear whether voter registration databases — records on more than 8 million Afghans — are in Taliban hands, the official said. Full printouts were made during the 2019 presidential elections, though the biometric records used then for anti-fraud voter verification were retained by the German technology provider. After 2018 parliamentary elections, 5,000 portable biometric handhelds used for verification went inexplicably missing.

Yet another database the Taliban inherit contains iris and face scans and fingerprints on 420,000 government employees — another anti-fraud measure — which Nadery oversaw as civil service commissioner. It was eventually to have been merged with the e-Tazkira database, he said.

On Aug. 3, a government website touted the digital accomplishments of President Ashraf Ghani, who would soon flee into exile, saying biometric information on “all civil servants, from every corner of the country” would allow them to them to be linked “under one umbrella” with banks and cellphone carriers for electronic payment. U.N. agencies have also collected biometrics on Afghans for food distribution and refugee tracking.

The central agglomeration of such personal data is exactly what worries the 37 digital civil liberties groups who signed an Aug. 25 letter calling for the urgent shutdown and erasure, where possible, of Afghanistan’s “digital identity tool,” among other measures. The letter said authoritarian regimes have exploited such data “to target vulnerable people” and digitized, searchable databases amplify the risks. Disputes over including ethnicity and religion in the e-Tazkira database — for fear it could put digital bullseyes on minorities, as China has done in repressing its ethnic Uyghurs — delayed its creation for most of a decade.

John Woodward, a Boston University professor and former CIA officer who pioneered the Pentagon’s biometric collection, is worried about intelligence agencies hostile to the United States getting access to the data troves.

“ISI (Pakistani intelligence) would be interested to know who worked for the Americans,” said Woodward, and China, Russia and Iran have their own agendas. Their agents certainly have the technical chops to break into password-protected databases.

AP · by FRANK BAJAK · September 7, 2021

16. The Latest: Blinken says US working with Taliban on flights

The Latest: Blinken says US working with Taliban on flights

By The Associated Press The Associated Press2 min

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DOHA, Qatar — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the State Department is working with the Taliban to facilitate additional charter flights from Kabul for people seeking to leave Afghanistan after the American military and diplomatic departure.

Blinken was speaking on Tuesday at a joint news conference with Qatar’s top diplomats and defense officials. He said the U.S. has been in contact with the Taliban “in recent hours” to work out arrangements for additional charter flights from the Afghan capital.

Blinken said the Taliban have given assurances of safe passage for all seeking to leave Afghanistan with proper travel documents. He said the United States would hold the Taliban to that pledge.

Blinken said the United States believes there are “somewhere around 100” American citizens still in Afghanistan who want to leave. The State Department had previously put that estimate at between 100 and 200.

Blinken and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin are in Qatar to thank the Gulf Arab state for its help with the transit of tens of thousands of people evacuated from Afghanistan after the Taliban took control of Kabul on Aug. 15.

___

MORE ON AFGHANISTAN:

— Blinken and Austin to visit Gulf to address postwar stresses

— Taliban say they took Panjshir, last holdout Afghan province

— Over 24 hours in Kabul, brutality, trauma, moments of grace

— US: Afghan evacuees who fail initial screening Kosovo-bound

— Rescue groups: US tally misses hundreds left in Afghanistan

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— Find more AP coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/afghanistan

___

HERE’S WHAT ELSE IS HAPPENING:

BOSTON — Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases for the Afghan people. The nobly stated goal: Promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-ravaged land.

“It is a terrible irony,” said Frank Pasquale, Brooklyn Law School scholar of surveillance technologies. “It’s a real object lesson in ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’”

Since Kabul fell Aug. 15, indications have emerged that government data may have been used in Taliban efforts to identify and intimidate Afghans who worked with the U.S. forces.

17. U.S. Working With Taliban on Flying Remaining Americans Out of Afghanistan

I am seeing other reports on social media that the Taliban are saying they will not allow any fights to leave.

From one report: “TB Spokesperson announced that they will not allow anyone to leave Afghanistan until a new government is formed, spokesperson said anyone who wants to leave should have proper documentation and go through AFG customs.”

U.S. Working With Taliban on Flying Remaining Americans Out of Afghanistan

Washington sees safe passage as a first step to rolling back sanctions on a Taliban-led government

WSJ · by William Mauldin and Nancy A. Youssef

Mr. Blinken said the latest indications from the Taliban are that they would allow American citizens or others to leave on charter flights if they all have proper documents, but flights with mixed groups with and without proper identification won’t be allowed to depart. “Because all of these people are grouped together, that’s meant that flights have not been allowed to go,” Mr. Blinken told reporters.

The Biden administration has faced criticism from Republican lawmakers over American citizens being left behind, but Mr. Blinken rejected the idea of “a hostage situation,” with Americans being prevented from leaving. Somewhere around 100 American citizens who want to leave are left inside Afghanistan, he said.

U.S. officials say that allowing the exit of Americans and vulnerable Afghans is the primary requirement for the U.S. to consider rolling back sanctions on Taliban officials, restarting government aid, freeing up funds and potentially normalizing relations with a Taliban-led government someday. Other U.S. requests include forming a government that includes other groups and respecting human rights.

Officials on all sides are worried about security, including processes to verify flight plans and passengers.

Qatari officials said they believed international flights from Hamid Karzai International Airport, a key gateway for U.S. efforts to evacuate remaining Americans and Afghan allies, could begin within days.

But the primary challenge to reopening the airport was security for those trying to enter, said Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani. Thirteen U.S. troops were killed and 20 were injured during a suicide bombing at the airport on Aug. 26, the deadliest attack in Afghanistan for U.S. forces in a decade. Scores of Afghans were killed.

Last week, Qatar and Turkey sent technicians to the airport to determine how to reopen the facility. The U.S. controlled the airport in the final days of its nearly 20-year war as it evacuated Americans and Afghan allies, before the Taliban took control of it Aug. 31.

Sheikh Mohammed said there was no agreement with the Taliban to operate the airport in Kabul but that teams had made progress on restoring the facility to allow international flights in coming days. “We have fixed a lot of the elements which are over there, and we are about to get everything operational very soon,” he said.

The quick visit to Qatar, the site of negotiations with the Taliban, and a major U.S. air base showed the importance of the Persian Gulf country to past and future work with Afghanistan. The U.S. is relying on Qatar to host a diplomatic office that functions as an embassy for Afghanistan, to facilitate the arrival of refugees leaving Kabul, and to allow potential reconnaissance flights and counterterrorism strikes.

“There isn’t a scrap of ground that we can’t reach out and touch if we need to,” Mr. Austin said.

Yet the focus on shoring up ties with Gulf countries after a chaotic military withdrawal also shows the limits of Washington’s ability to influence policy in the Middle East after leading an exit by North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries and seeing other powers boost their influence with the Taliban.

Mr. Blinken said it was wrong to equate the number of boots on the ground in the region with the overall level of engagement, a view echoed by Qatar.

Qatari officials said they believed Hamid Karzai International Airport could begin flying passengers out within days.

Photo: stringer/Shutterstock

“I don’t think there is any correlation between what is happening in Afghanistan and how the U.S. is looking at the region,” Sheikh Mohammed said, adding that Qatar would continue “working together hand in hand with the U.S.”

Mr. Austin said the U.S. was grateful that Qatar continued to host U.S. troops, adding that winding down conflicts is a key goal in the region.

There are currently 4,000 Afghan evacuees in Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed said Tuesday. Another 41,000 have arrived in the U.S., defense officials said.

Some Americans and thousands of Afghans who worked for U.S. forces and diplomats during the nearly 20-year war remained in Afghanistan after the last U.S. forces left Aug. 31.

It was Mr. Austin’s first trip to the region as defense chief, though he made several trips here when he led U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East.

The U.S. also said it hoped to increase cooperation with the Gulf over rising terrorism threats. U.S. officials have described the Gulf visit as a “thank-you” tour.

The Taliban claimed Monday to have overcome the last pocket of resistance in Afghanistan, releasing images they said showed the conquest of the provincial capital of Panjshir, a region that has held out against the group’s takeover of the country.

The U.S. facilitated the evacuation of four American citizens from Afghanistan on Monday via an undisclosed overland route, a State Department official said, in what is believed to be the first such confirmed exit since the U.S. finished evacuating troops and civilians last month via the Kabul airport.

The Taliban were aware and didn’t impede the departure of the American citizens, who were in good condition and received by State Department personnel in an undisclosed country bordering Afghanistan, the official said.

The U.S. hasn’t specified how it would evacuate the remaining Americans and Afghans from the country.

Write to William Mauldin at william.mauldin@wsj.com and Nancy A. Youssef at nancy.youssef@wsj.com

WSJ · by William Mauldin and Nancy A. Youssef

18. Taliban poised to unveil new government after claiming Panjshir

Will the Taliban hold Americans and at-risk Afghans "hostage" in return for US recognition of their new government?

Excerpts:

The Taliban may be forming a government, but the U.S. for one is not in a hurry to establish official ties.

Asked whether the U.S. would recognize the Taliban, President Joe Biden told reporters at the White House late Monday, "That’s a long way off."

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday there were still around 100 U.S. citizens left in Afghanistan who wanted to leave after the last U.S. plane departed last week ending America's 20-year presence in the country. Blinked added that the State Department was working with the Taliban to facilitate charter flights to get people out.

U.S. rivals Russia, China and Iran, among others, have established relations with the Taliban leaders, and are expected to forge ties with the new government of Afghanistan.

Before completing its withdrawal, the U.S. said it had evacuated about 124,000 U.S. citizens and at-risk Afghans, but thousands were left behind.

Speaking at a news conference in Qatar — where many of the evacuees went — Blinken said that the Taliban had reasserted that U.S. and Afghan citizens with valid papers would be allowed to freely leave.

"They have said they will let people with travel documents depart." he said. "We will hold them to that."

Taliban poised to unveil new government after claiming Panjshir

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said Tuesday they were in the final stage of forming the new government and were ready to announce it any time.

NBC News · by Yuliya Talmazan, Mushtaq Yusufzai and Patrick Smith · September 7, 2021

Nearly 20 years after being toppled by American forces, the Taliban on Tuesday said they were poised to unveil the new government of Afghanistan.

On Monday, the militant group declared they were in control of Panjshir province, the last holdout of anti-Taliban forces in the country after their sweep of Afghanistan last month. Their claims were refuted by the resistance forces that said they were still fighting the militants in the area.

Ahmad Massoud, the son of an iconic anti-Taliban fighter, posted a defiant audio message to social media, calling for a national “uprising" against the Taliban.

NBC News was not able to confirm any of the claims.

Men believed to be Taliban fighters stand outside the gate of the provincial Governor's office in Panjshir, Afghanistan on Monday. Reuters

Meanwhile in the Afghan capital of Kabul, Taliban gunmen fired in the air to scatter protesters, witnesses told Reuters, as video showed scores of people scurrying to escape volleys of gunfire. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

Hundreds of men and women shouting slogans such as "Long live the resistance" demonstrated against the Taliban, the news agency reported. Video posted on social media also appeared to show men and women taking to the streets of Kabul.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said Tuesday they were in the final stages of forming a new government and were ready to announce it at any time. The timing of the move was striking, coming almost 20 years to the day after 9/11, which precipitated the American invasion after the Taliban government refused to hand over the attacks' architect, Al Qaeda's Osama bin Laden.

In recent days, there has been a lot of speculation about the composition of the government. While the group has not formally unveiled a cabinet or its new leaders, several high-profile Taliban figures are expected to remain prominent.

Download the NBC News app for breaking news and politics

One of them is Hibatullah Akhundzada, chosen as the leader of the Taliban in 2016. A hard-liner, he used his religious credentials to justify the Taliban’s insurgent campaign against America and the U.S.-backed Afghan forces as a “holy war.”

Another pivotal figure is expected to be Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of the Taliban’s founding members and its political leader.

Baradar was arrested more than a decade ago in a joint U.S.-Pakistani operation before being released in 2018. He served as chief negotiator for the group during peace talks with the U.S. in Qatar and recently held a secret meeting with CIA chief William Burns.

Other prominent figures include Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Mullah Omar, the one-eyed cleric who founded the Taliban and died in 2013, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the powerful Haqqani network, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization and whose forces took control of Kabul after Washington-backed President Ashraf Ghani fled.

The Taliban may be forming a government, but the U.S. for one is not in a hurry to establish official ties.

Asked whether the U.S. would recognize the Taliban, President Joe Biden told reporters at the White House late Monday, "That’s a long way off."

U.S. rivals Russia, China and Iran, among others, have established relations with the Taliban leaders, and are expected to forge ties with the new government of Afghanistan.

Before completing its withdrawal, the U.S. said it had evacuated about 124,000 U.S. citizens and at-risk Afghans, but thousands were left behind.

"They have said they will let people with travel documents depart." he said. "We will hold them to that."

NBC News · by Yuliya Talmazan, Mushtaq Yusufzai and Patrick Smith · September 7, 2021

19. From Kabul to Kyiv: Strengthening Deterrence Amid Questions About American Resolve

Excerpt:

“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been,” goes the hockey advice the United States must mind as it looks to Kyiv. At Ukraine’s Independence Day, the US contingent included the energy secretary, an Air Force band, and American-provided Javelin antitank missiles. The US troops marching drew some of the Ukrainian crowd’s loudest applause. The T-84 tanks, the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, and the giant Antonov An-225 flying overhead all play a role in signaling resolve to Ukraine’s Russian adversary. But US support may be the only deterrent sound that gets through to Russian ears.

From Kabul to Kyiv: Strengthening Deterrence Amid Questions About American Resolve - Modern War Institute

mwi.usma.edu · by ML Cavanaugh · September 7, 2021

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Deterrence smells like tank exhaust and feels like an earthquake. Hundreds of armored vehicles rumbled over streets, thousands of troops marched in formation, and dozens of planes flew overhead as Ukrainians cheered during their Independence Day parade on August 24. Kyiv’s main boulevard—Khreshchatyk—filled to the Maidan as the city bathed in blue and yellow. Ukrainians celebrated thirty years since their overwhelming vote to leave the Soviet Union to form a separate country.

While the world watched Kabul, another consequential geopolitical story was unfolding in Kyiv. The Afghanistan War’s tragic end is being judged in capitals around the world, as well as the Oval Office. The September 1 meeting between US president Joseph R. Biden and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was high stakes for both countries’ security.

In Ukraine, even Independence Day came with casualties—one killed and two wounded in attacks in the country’s east. A half day’s train ride away, the 250-mile-long front line is frozen in trench warfare on what Ukrainian troops call the “zero line” (or “zero” for short).

In February 2014, after months of protests in Kyiv, pro-Russian former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled the country. Within months, Russia annexed Crimea. Russia then encouraged and supported separatists to seize a significant part of eastern Ukraine (known as the Donbas). At one point Ukraine lost as much as one-fifth of its total population and one-seventh its territory. In June 2014, Ukrainian conventional troops alongside volunteer militias fought back and overran Russian-backed separatists. Then the Russian regular military stepped in to stop the counterattack.

Russia’s proxies have held onto all Crimea and much of the Donbas since then, about 7 percent of Ukraine. Like Afghanistan, where a much larger eastern neighbor (Pakistan) has used proxies to destabilize the country and exert its influence, Russian support to these separatists will continue for some time. It is the first forceful change of a European border since World War II. The war has killed over thirteen thousand people and displaced over a million and a half Ukrainians.

Moscow is using Kabul’s fall as pretext to pump doubt into Kyiv. In a recent interview, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said Ukraine “is headed toward collapse, and the White House at a certain moment won’t even remember about its supporters in Kyiv.” Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, said on CNN in late August, “I think politicians in Kyiv should be concerned about the credibility of the US security assistance to this country, because if the United States decided to let down one of its strategic allies in one part of the world, why wouldn’t they do the same in another part of the world?”

Any doubt in Kyiv as the evacuation from Afghanistan was unfolding wasn’t about American resolve. I was part of a small team of researchers in Ukraine at the time from the Homeland Defense Institute—a new organization at the US Air Force Academy, sponsored by NORAD/USNORTHCOM—and the Modern War Institute at West Point. Our conversations instead elicited frank expressions of Ukraine’s will to stand and fight. “We’re not Afghanistan,” one Ukrainian general told us last week. “We’ll fight the Russians to the death, until the last Ukrainian.” His son, a junior military officer, was recently wounded. Mine shrapnel struck his head—shrapnel, the general pointed out, that was stopped by an American-made helmet.

Ukrainian defenders often wear unit patches that read, “Ukraine or Death.” Courage is expected in uniformed combat forces. Nataliia Kalmykova is deputy operations director of Come Back Alive, a nonprofit that helped fund the Ukrainian resistance. We talked about what Afghanistan means to Ukraine. She told us directly that a similar breakdown couldn’t happen here. “A lot of people are caring about Ukraine, and keeping Russia out.”

The war in Ukraine shows Russia’s weakness and how poor a strategist Vladimir Putin is. The Russian economy is ten times the size of Ukraine’s. As columnist Walter Russell Mead notes, Russia’s become stuck in Ukraine. Russia lacks the ability or willingness to gain ground. Mead recently wrote, “Russian public opinion wouldn’t countenance the accompanying sacrifices and the staggering Russian economy couldn’t bear the costs.”

In one especially important way, Russian meddling has backfired. Ukrainian polling shows Putin’s actions have hardened Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. “Putin was surprised to see so many Ukrainians fighting for Ukraine,” Professor Sergii Glebov told us, especially “Russian-speaking Ukrainians.” Ashot Topchian of the Ukrainian Strategic Initiative put it succinctly: “We have to say ‘thank you’ to Putin for one thing—our solidarity.”

Setting specific support aside in the Zelensky-Biden meeting, going forward, greater engagement would benefit the United States. For at least seven years, Ukraine’s stood up to an eastern onslaught. Russia’s weaponized the church, history, corruption, and even language. Moscow is clearly aware that when a bullet won’t work, you should send a story (that disrupts society). It’s a form of public warfare that targets all society, all at once, on all fronts. A Ukrainian think tank has characterized this war as hybression (hybrid aggression), “a package of diverse actions, adjustable in terms of intensity and hybrid in nature, against the adversary,” in which “military instruments are not dominant, and their application is thoroughly disguised and vigorously denied, while the very act of aggression generates uncertainties that hinder its identification.” The United States can see war’s future from Ukraine.

Lt. Col. ML Cavanaugh (@MLCavanaugh) directs the Homeland Defense Institute at the US Air Force Academy, is a senior fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point, and was part of a Homeland Defense Institute research team in Kyiv this past week.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Staff Sgt. Mackenzie Mendez, US Air Force

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mwi.usma.edu · by ML Cavanaugh · September 7, 2021

20. There Is More War in the Classroom Than You Think

And we are not talking about culture war.

Some very interesting data and graphics. If they do not come through in the message please go to this link: https://warontherocks.com/2021/09/there-is-more-war-in-the-classroom-than-you-think/

Excerpts:

This integration of battlefield events with the social, cultural, ideological, and technological forces that often trigger and perpetuate war is just what the Society for Military History has called for. In November 2014, two of the best scholars in the business, Robert Citino and Tami Davis Biddle, authored a lucid and compelling statement about the importance of teaching the history of war — in all its various dimensions. “Perhaps the best way for military historians to make their case to the broader profession,” they wrote, “is to highlight the range, diversity, and breadth of the recent scholarship in military history, as well as the dramatic evolution of the field in recent decades.” A broadly based and scholarly approach to the teaching of war, they added, “puts big strategic decisions about war and peace into context; it draws linkages and contrasts between a nation’s socio-political culture and its military culture; it helps illuminate ways in which a polity’s public and national narrative is shaped over time. All this gives the field relevance, and, indeed, urgency, inside the classroom.”

The good news is that America’s top history departments are regularly rising to this challenge. Criticism from outside the academy that overlooks these on-going efforts to sustain and deepen our study of war is unfair to the efforts of historians inside college classrooms who are putting in the hard work of linking the history of war to larger social, political, and economic forces. Naturally, scholars will follow varying paths as they grapple with the problem of war in history. There will always be college teachers who emphasize, say, slavery and abolitionism more than battlefield innovations like the hollow-end bullet called the Minié ball in classes on the U.S. Civil War. Likewise, there are going to be teachers of World War II who devote more time to Nazi racial theory than to the Norden bombsight. But the field is large enough for variation in method. The real challenge for those of us who teach courses on war is to find an appropriate balance between war as it is fought and war as it is lived — between war as a practice undertaken by soldiers and war as a ghastly human experience that upends entire societies and takes millions of lives. The evidence suggests that many historians in U.S. universities understand that war is a constant feature of human history and they are working diligently to introduce this phenomenon to their students.

There Is More War in the Classroom Than You Think - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by William Hitchcock · September 7, 2021

History is dying on college campuses. At least, that’s the assessment of some leading historians. Majors are plummeting and students are leaving college without a firm grasp of the foundations of the modern world. The cause of this decline is hard to pin down. Some scholars believe the fall-off can be ascribed to an aversion toward political history, while in a January 2021 opinion piece, the distinguished author Max Hastings declared that the very study of war has been killed off on college campuses.

In his provocative essay titled “American Universities Declare War on Military History,” Hastings argues that the study of war in U.S. universities is in “spectacular eclipse.” Historians today, averse to military affairs, are concerned principally with, in his words, “culture, race and ethnicity.” So great is this “revulsion from war history,” Hastings believes, that scholars refuse to teach, “or even allow their universities to host,” courses on war. Hastings rues the alleged decline of war studies because he believes in the old adage that the best way to avoid conflict is to study it.

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Hastings is a great military historian, but the portrait he paints in his article is inaccurate. Whatever the cause of the decline in history majors, it is not due to a lack of classes on war-related themes. Indeed, the evidence we have collected shows the enduring presence of courses on war in leading American history departments. Based on a detailed examination of course offerings over a six-year period, we conclude that the teaching of war and conflict is doing quite well in history departments across the United States. Furthermore, courses in the field are taught mostly by tenure-track faculty; they are taught at both the survey and advanced level; and even using a fairly narrow definition of what constitutes “war studies,” the subject matter covered is wide-ranging across the modern era. The American Revolutionary War, the U.S. Civil War, the two world wars, regional conflicts like the Vietnam War, and even the “Global War on Terror” all appear consistently in history department offerings across the country, as do courses in the general category of “military history.” Surely, those of us who work in the field would welcome even more course-offerings. But in no way have historians “declared war” on this field.

A Look at the Data

To test the hypothesis about the death of war studies, we started with U.S. News and World Report’s list of the top 75 universities in the United States. Limiting ourselves to these schools unfortunately omitted some excellent institutions known for their strengths in military history such as the University of Kansas (ranked number 124 by U.S. News and World Report), Kansas State University (170), and North Carolina State University (80). We also did not include the service academies in our study. Furthermore, Ohio State University, which has long boasted depth in the field, does not make available its course catalogue by semester, making it hard to know when courses have been taught. So the picture nationally is surely a good bit better than our findings reveal. Of our top 75 schools, 50 publish their course offerings by semester going back to fall 2018, and 39 publish that data going back to fall 2015. Our single most important conclusion, which decisively contradicts the Hastings thesis, is this: Every single one of the 50 schools we were able to examine offers history courses on some aspect of war.

What is more, the average number of war-related courses offered in these 39 history departments each year is 6.4. That may not sound like very many, but it constitutes on average 7 percent of the total annual offerings — surely a higher share than, say, courses on the histories of India, China, Africa, or the Middle East, to say nothing of classics, economic and business history, and the history of science, among other subjects. The most commonly taught courses that deal with war are on general military history and World War II, closely followed by those on the U.S. Civil War and courses on America in the world or U.S. foreign relations. Next in line are those on the Cold War. One might argue that courses on the Cold War should not count as “military history.” But any survey of the Cold War will normally include extensive study of military institutions, intelligence, strategy, and leadership as well as active wars from Korea to Vietnam to the Gulf War. Given this data, it is hard to claim that U.S. universities have declared war on military history. In fact, courses on war are everywhere.

Figure 1: Undergraduate students at select universities have had access to over 200 courses related to the study of war per academic year since fall 2015.

Source: Chart generated by authors using course catalogues from 39 of U.S. News and World Report’s top 75 universities.

Figure 2: Discounting courses on U.S. foreign relations and the Cold War, American universities have offered numerous courses over the last six years on modern wars.

Source: Chart generated by authors using course catalogues from 39 of U.S. News and World Report’s top 75 universities.

In his essay, Hastings relates woeful accounts from faculty at Harvard and Yale to suggest that American higher education has turned its back on military history. But the allegation of decline is not even true in the Ivy League. Over the last three years, among the six Ivy League schools that publish their course offerings, each offered an average of six courses on the study of war each year, in line with the national average.

War studies have not vanished from America’s elite universities. There is, however, significant variation among the Ivies. Yale and the University of Pennsylvania offer an average of nine and 10 courses per year, respectively. Columbia University is not far behind, with an average of eight. Princeton, however, is below average, with only five courses, and Harvard and Brown each offer only an average of four courses related to war each year. (Cornell and Dartmouth do not publish comparable course data.) In Hastings’ essay, Paul Kennedy, a leading historian of military and strategic history, lends his voice to the thesis of decline and fall of military history. Yet the Yale course catalogue tells a less woeful story. Going back to 2015, we found that the Yale history department offered 21 war-themed courses, with some offered more than once, at both the survey level and the research seminar level. These include classes on the Vietnam Wars, the American Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, general military history, religion and war, grand strategy, the Cold War, the Crusades, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and even one titled “The War at Sea in the Age of Sail.” This array hardly supports the thesis of “spectacular eclipse.”

Figure 3: Ivy League schools have offered a diverse array of courses on some aspect of war over the last three academic years.

Source: Chart generated by authors using course catalogues of six Ivy League schools.

What about the faculty who teach in this field? One sign that universities do not value a given field might be an increase in courses taught by adjunct faculty or temporary lecturers. Again, the data tells a contrary story. Over the last six years, the percentage of classes in the field of war studies taught by tenure-track faculty has remained consistently high. Full-time tenure-track faculty taught 75 percent of the courses that deal with war. And that proportion has stayed fairly stable. In fact, a slightly higher percentage of these courses were taught by ladder faculty in the 2020–2021 academic year than in the 2015–2016 academic year.

Figure 4: The percentage of classes on some aspect of war taught by tenure-track faculty has remained consistently high.

Source: Chart generated by authors using data from course catalogues and department websites.

Figure 5: On average over six years, 75 percent of war-related courses have been taught by tenure-track faculty.

Source: Charted generated by authors using data from course catalogues and department websites.

To be sure, the data reveals a slight falling-off in the overall number of courses on military themes over the last six years. The largest decline (measured by the number of courses taught in the 2015–2016 academic year versus the number taught in the 2020–2021 academic year) is in courses on “America in the world” (or “U.S. foreign relations”). The next largest decline is in courses on general military history, followed by courses on America and war and on war and society. If we focus only on courses that fit our narrowest definition of “war studies” and omit the classes on diplomacy and foreign relations, we find that the largest decline is in courses on general military history followed by courses on war and society, America and war, and the Vietnam War. However, it is worth noting that in the 39 schools we were able to examine going back to fall 2015, more courses were taught on the Vietnam War in academic year 2018–2019 (15) than were taught in either 2015–2016 (11) or 2020–2021 (eight). And the 2020–2021 academic year represents a slight increase in the number of classes on “military history” (28) over the number taught in academic year 2018–2019 (25). So the slight overall decline masks a high degree of variability year by year in particular subjects. The general trajectory is a modest but perhaps insignificant decline.

Some institutions do much better than others at offering a wide array of war-related classes. Among the 39 schools for which the six-year data was available, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin tie for the highest average number of courses offered per year, at 13. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in our study we found that the tech-focused schools Caltech and Georgia Tech rank among the schools with the lowest annual average of war-themed courses — only two. But also close to the bottom are Harvard, with an average of four, and Johns Hopkins, with an average of three. Stanford is one of the clear leaders in the teaching of war, with an average of 14 courses offered per year over the last three academic years. But of those courses, an average of eight per year are taught by lecturers, versus an average of five taught by tenure-track faculty.

What Is ‘Military History’?

While the evidence decisively shows that courses on military history and war continue to be taught in America’s leading universities, there may be a larger debate worth having about just what kind of military history should be taught, and what value the subject is to undergraduates generally. It is perhaps possible to make an argument that too few university-based historians are actively teaching operational military history — courses limited chiefly to weapons, battlefield tactics, and the evolution of military doctrine within specific national militaries (though our study shows there is still plenty of general military history offered in elite schools). But typically, most college-level courses on war are characterized by a broad analytical framework that includes the social, economic, and ideological dimensions of war. Scholars adopting such an approach grapple with profound questions: What ideas motivate people to begin and to sustain a prolonged conflict? What impact does war have upon social movements, civil liberties, race and gender relations, the environment, and humanitarian attitudes? What ethical questions must the student of war confront? And should not diplomacy, war’s happier sibling, be a central component of any class that treats the origins of war or indeed the aftermath of conflict?

Certainly, such an integrated approach defined the work of Michael Howard, the great military historian and founder of the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. Hastings rightly invokes Howard as a model for all of us who wish to knit together the study of war with the study of the human societies that fight them. One of us (Hitchcock) served as Howard’s teaching assistant in the late 1980s in his Yale course called “War and Society in Modern Europe” and marveled at the way that Howard, in his lectures, linked national political structures, economies, technology, and ideology with analysis of military performance on the battlefield. He embraced military history as the study of war and society and would have considered it profoundly ahistorical to separate the two. Hastings, in his excellent scholarship, has followed in Howard’s footsteps, linking battlefield developments to broader social, cultural, and ideological forces.

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William I. Hitchcock is the William W. Corcoran Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the director of GAGE (Governing America in a Global Era). @GAGE_UVA

Meghan V. Herwig is a Ph.D. student in history and the Brian Layton Blades Jefferson Fellow at the University of Virginia and was the 2020-2021 GAGE Fellow. Her dissertation examines why and how, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world’s major economies in North America, Europe, and East Asia overcame protectionist pressures to construct an open global trade system.

Image: U.S. Army

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by William Hitchcock · September 7, 2021

21. What Afghanistan Cost the CIA (book review)

Excerpts:

Still, the valor of individuals through the haze of a war that was never conventional, with success never guaranteed, is the message of this book. Enduring lessons for counterinsurgency are there as well, told through individual engagements with Taliban fighters that still read as harrowing, regardless of whether the reader knows the outcome. The players come across as real, partly because the author’s interviews have allowed him to characterize them so compellingly, and their realness drives home the tragedy that is war. This is a book detailing a stunning American success of ingenuity, coupled with power, partnered with Afghan brutality but woven through the narrative is the story of the cost to those who fought.

Shannon Spann, Mike Spann’s widow and the mother of his third child, details her struggles during the years after he passed. Her story is not easy to read, but it is critical to understanding the lessons of First Casualty. And the lessons from the CIA officers who were first in add depth to her reflections on loss, and to the book’s underlying theme of personal sacrifice. “I lived and Mike died,” says the man who watched his death, at the end of the book, “and therefore it’s my job to make my life worth it.”

What Afghanistan Cost the CIA

thecipherbrief.com

First Casualty

BOOK REVIEW: First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11

By Toby Harnden Little Brown & Co.

Reviewed by Philip Mudd

The Author: Toby Harnden is a former foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London and the Daily Telegraph who reported from thirty-three countries and specializes in terrorism and war. He is the winner of the Orwell Prize for Books.

The Reviewer: Philip Mudd was Deputy Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and the FBI national security branch. He now comments regularly on CNN and teaches and speaks about analysis and global issues. He is the author of several books including, Black Site: The CIA in the Post 9/11 World.

REVIEW — Just months ago, Toby Harnden’s might have read as the tale of the tense first engagements with the Taliban and the lives of the men and women involved, particularly the life and death of Mike Spann, the first US casualty. No more. Frequently throughout the book, the echoes of lessons of the past jump out. There are stories of inter-tribal tensions; the critical role of air power against the Taliban; the American partnership with Afghan warlords; and the personal commitment of individuals from the CIA in the Fall of 2001, a reminder of the intrepid contributions of individual US military personnel who served during this forever war.

Harnden opens the book with an approach he returns to throughout the narrative, starting with gritty history — the days and weeks after the insertion of the first CIA team into northern Afghanistan — then adding in-depth stories of the personal lives of the officers who served and died there and the families they left behind. The book moves quickly through a survey of the decades in Afghanistan before 9/11 and the histories of some of the individuals who served then, from how they grew up to how they built careers, relationships, and families.

In the midst of the tragedy of the attacks, the randomness of history appears in the book, the kind of unique detail that Harden has gleaned through interviews that help make the twenty-year-old history in this book seem fresh. Years before 9/11, one of the first CIA operators into the country made the fateful decision to leave academia for the Agency. The factor that tipped the scales in favor of government service? Health insurance. Years later, he was fated to be the sole American who witnessed the killing in a firefight, of the first American casualty after 9/11, CIA officer Mike Spann.

Spann’s life and his family, the firefight that led to his death, and the battle that ensued, make up the lion’s share of the book. This is a history of the eye-opening risks the CIA accepted when those first men built partnerships with the warlords who made up the anti-Taliban alliance, and describes the tenuous nature of the first weeks when success was never a given. It’s not only a history of the fight, though: it’s also an examination of the psychology of the men who fought, and the mental challenges they faced afterwards.

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The book’s core revolves around the gripping, bloody, days-long fight against the group of Taliban prisoners that erupted in the prison uprising that led to Spann’s death. Spann lost his life early in that chaotic, back-and-forth battle, and Harnden details not only how that tragedy unfolded but, hour-by-hour and sometimes minute-by-minute, the unbelievable epic of how CIA officers, British counterparts, and a small contingent of US military, along with Afghan partners and US air power, eventually turned back the stunning insurrection in Qala-i Jangi prison. Key in the retaking – for days – was the commitment by Spann’s CIA team to recover his body. The hard-to-imagine drama, in the hands of another narrator, could easily turn overwrought; in this book, it is not.

First Casualty is rife with heroic moments. But it is the variety of the human reactions in those moments, and afterward, that separates this book from others. Readers unfamiliar with the world of CIA clandestine operators may skip the author’s notes on sources, but the many names revealed on that list explain why the pages of the narrative have such remarkable color: Harnden has managed to speak with a wide variety who have never spoken in such detail, some of whom still cannot reveal their full names. This access to the deeply clandestine element in the Agency is rare, and Harnden uses the words, the stories, and often the uncomfortable sentiments they felt with great effect. Fear, combat fatigue, and sadness appear often in the narrative, not because Harnden explains how they happened, but because the participants do. This book is compelling, sometimes disturbing, but in a necessary way. This is war sometimes stripped of heroism to reveal naked human emotion.

This deep dive into a CIA story that is critical to understanding America’s response to 9/11, comes with a few forgivable downsides. The details in the book — the geography, the who’s who among the US players, the ethnic divides among many Afghan factions — might be occasionally daunting for readers. And the clear CIA biases about the Pentagon during those days, including critiques of Pentagon leadership (Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, in particular) certainly reflect what CIA officers thought, but nonetheless, come across as petty interagency jealousies in Washington. More distracting, are the author’s diversions into judging how the war should have been conducted, who is at fault, and why America could have been in a better place. This is oral history; the author’s personal perspectives sometimes intrude.

“First Casualty” is awarded 3.5 Trench Coats.

First Casualty earns an impressive 3.5 out of 4 trench coats

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22. How Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban increases the global terrorism threat

Excerpts:

Moreover, Washington’s European allies, already upset by the US disregarding their interests and its haphazard, unilateral decision-making, now face a potential new refugee crisis. A Western coalition hampered by the political fallout of such a crisis and wary of US decision-making in general will be less able to effectively push back against expanding CCP influence.

Since 2011, the US has pursued its ‘pivot to Asia’ by attempting to disengage from the Middle East and Afghanistan and refocus on competition with China. Every attempt has been short-circuited by the rapid rise of a jihadist group, a pattern likely to continue with the Taliban’s victory and the resurgence of IS-K. The net result of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, including a potential hostage crisis as the US attempts to extract more than 100 American citizens stranded in the country, will leave the US less, not more, focused on confronting China’s hegemonic impulses.

Biden may think he’s succeeded where his two predecessors failed, but the consequences of the Afghanistan withdrawal will not stay contained for long. The same administration that estimated Kabul wouldn’t fall to the Taliban this year is now claiming that neither IS-K nor al-Qaeda will pose a global threat anytime soon despite the US withdrawal. They are almost certainly incorrect.

How Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban increases the global terrorism threat | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Oved Lobel · September 6, 2021

The bomb blast outside Kabul’s airport made 26 August the deadliest day for the US in Afghanistan for a decade. An Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K) suicide bomber killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 US soldiers—more American troops than were killed in action each year between 2015 and 2018.

Though IS-K has conducted several mass-casualty atrocities over the years, attacks on this scale will likely become more common with the US withdrawal, and an IS-K unchecked by a US military and intelligence presence may quickly begin to pose a global threat.

Joe Biden’s administration, like Donald Trump’s before it, has been gambling on a partnership with the Taliban for counterterrorism operations against IS-K, something that was likely raised when CIA director William Burns met with the Taliban’s putative leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Afghanistan on 23 August. For some time, the US air force has ‘deconflicted’ with the Taliban to help fight IS-K, upgrading these efforts to include direct strikes in support of the Taliban in 2019 and 2020.

The Taliban recently appointed members of their most dangerous, al-Qaeda-intertwined component, the Haqqani network, to take the lead in Kabul, making clear that transnational jihad is still a core part of their agenda. The 26 August attack and subsequent 30 August rocket attack should end the delusion that the Taliban can be an effective counterterrorism partner, a notion that never made sense given that al-Qaeda is functionally the Taliban’s foreign operations arm.

In addition to reabsorbing thousands of prisoners released by the Taliban, IS-K has had several months without counterterrorism pressure to rebuild its already extensive networks. Meanwhile, the Taliban’s capture of the entire Afghan security forces arsenal makes it the best-armed jihadist group in history, dwarfing even the rise of the Islamic State terror group in 2014.

IS-K, however, has infiltrated the ranks of the Taliban and its allies. So, regardless of where one draws the line between genuine defection and infiltration, or who comes out on top in the endlessly fracturing and reconstituting terrorist milieu in Afghanistan, the primary losers will be Afghans, the region and the rest of the world.

The US surrender to the Taliban is already inspiring every jihadist group and sympathiser across the world. Once again, from their perspective, a superpower has thrown up its hands in the face of unwavering jihad in Afghanistan. This will supercharge activity and likely provide a safe haven for decades to come for those plotting and training.

The Taliban are only one component of an integrated jihadist network controlled by figures in Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), and Afghanistan is only one front in the broader ISI-led regional jihad. Already in the 1990s, elements of this network were being trained in Afghanistan and then dispatched to Kashmir and deeper into India in an ever-escalating terrorist campaign. Because this is a single network that shifts resources to various fronts in the jihad, some of these fighters were sent back to Afghanistan to aid the initial Taliban conquest.

With Afghanistan likely to once again serve as an ISI terrorist camp, there’s little doubt that the jihadist network will be fed back into Kashmir and India, but this time armed with US weapons captured by the Taliban. Unlike with the training camps in Kashmir, India will be unable to target the terror camps in Afghanistan.

Even as it turns its eyes to India, the ISI may also use this jihadist network against the Pakistani state, which it has been trying to transform into a version of the Taliban’s ‘Islamic emirate’ since the early 2000s via its Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, component. Thousands of TTP prisoners have been released by the Taliban as potential foot soldiers in this ISI-linked effort to reignite the jihad against the Pakistani state. That could destabilise a country of over 200 million people and threaten the country’s control over its nuclear weapons. Often mischaracterised as ‘blowback’ from the ISI’s support for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the TTP jihad against Pakistan is a core component of the ISI’s regional endeavours.

Pakistan has been a virtual client regime of the Chinese Communist Party for several decades. Islamabad’s victories, including in Afghanistan, are very much those of the CCP, even if the Biden administration believes otherwise.

The CCP is reportedly harbouring, training and arming anti-India insurgent groups via Myanmar. It has also escalated direct attacks on India since 2020, forcing India to deploy at least 50,000 troops to its northern border as the CCP massively expands its military infrastructure.

Pakistan refocusing its attention on India and pouring new insurgents and upgraded weaponry across the border will lead to a surrounded, distracted India incapable of focusing on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and broader efforts to counter CCP activity in the Indo-Pacific.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Oved Lobel · September 6, 2021

23. It Is Time for Senior Military Reform

A scathing critique of our senior leadership from the President on down to the four stars. Gary Anderson pulls no punches and spares no one.

It Is Time for Senior Military Reform | The American Spectator

spectator.org · by Gary Anderson · September 7, 2021

It Is Time for Senior Military Reform

Careerism is too deeply embedded.

September 6, 2021, 10:04 PM

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III greets the commander of U.S. Forces Japan, Air Force Lt. Gen. Kevin B. Schneider, upon arrival at Yokota Air Force Base, Japan, March 15, 2021. (Department of Defense photo by Lisa Ferdinando)

Joe Biden declared the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan a success. That is somewhat akin to General Custer saying, “we have the Indians right where we want them.” Biden also said he accepts responsibility for what happened, but then he blamed Trump. As a result, none of the bumbling military incompetents who turned the evacuation into a fiasco will be disciplined. All will likely be allowed to retire at the end of their terms of service with bands, ceremonies, and medals all around. Among our leading four-star generals, there is apparently no sense of shame or honor; nor is there accountability.

The rot starts at the top. Biden has been a political hack all his life, and until his ascent to the presidency, he has never been accountable for anything. From plagiarism at Syracuse University to his incredible string of foreign policy and national defense missteps, he has slimed his way out of every bad call that he has ever made. He has declared himself to have conducted an immaculate evacuation so his subordinates are — by association — guiltless. His enablers at the Washington Post, notably E.J. Dionne and Jennifer Rubin, are trying to paper over his blunders as well as those of his national security team and his generals.

I had hoped that once the last aircraft departed Kabul, one or more of the four-star generals involved in the debacle would have had the sense of honor to accept some degree of responsibility and resign. None did. The only senior officer to call for accountability is Gen. David Berger, the Commandant of the Marine Corps. Berger was not in the chain of command for the fiasco in Kabul, but his Marines assigned to U.S. Central Command suffered most of the casualties.

Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, is a retired general officer of four-star rank. He is now a political appointee and is acting like one. He and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, recently gave a disingenuous news briefing in which they echoed Biden in claiming the withdrawal to be an unprecedented success. The commander of U.S. Central Command — unfortunately a U.S. Marine — issued a terse statement that the war was over. He thus washed his hands of the situation. Gen. Austin Scott Miller has not been heard from since July when he cut and ran from the theater of war. The utter lack of a sense of honor from these supposed leaders in taking any sort of responsibility for the greatest military humiliation in five decades is staggering.

Where do we get such men? Careerism is at the root of the problem, and it accelerated with the military reform movement in the 1980s. The Goldwater-Nichols Act and the military education initiatives of former Rep. Ike Skelton put us in exactly the wrong direction. Goldwater-Nichols dictated that every officer who aspired to flag officer rank had to serve a tour on a joint staff. This contributed to bloat on those staffs. It also created a “ticket punching” mentality that encouraged officers to be jacks of all trade, and masters of none.

The Skelton reforms of the military education system stressed pseudo-intellectualism ahead of military competence. Each military command and staff college was required to grant master’s degrees which took away from core military competence. Everyone was encouraged to get the participation trophy of a mediocre academic certificate rather than mastering the nuts and bolts of core warfighting skills. It should be no wonder that three decades later we cannot produce generals capable of planning a competent military evacuation given five months’ notice.

Both “reforms” ultimately failed. They were initially credited with military success in Panama and Operation Desert Storm, but those conflicts were fought against enemies that were hopelessly outclassed and outgunned. Since then, our strategic performance has been mediocre at best and disastrous at worst. Our senior military leaders failed to recognize that there would be an insurgency in Iraq in 2003 until it was too late to short-circuit it. In trying to create an army in their image, American senior leaders rejected a decentralized army in Afghanistan where soldiers would be fighting to defend their homes rather than a corrupt and incompetent regime in Kabul.

Thus, soldiers from Herat were tasked with defending places like Kabul and Mazar al Sharif, while soldiers from Kabul were defending Herat. Having failed to create a locally sustainable decentralized army, senior American military leaders neglected to build a competent air force capable of resupplying remote garrisons inaccessible by road. Military and civilian advisors who were operating in remote regions made such recommendations to the senior American pampered princes in Kabul, but they fell on deaf ears.

To be sure, we have produced some competent senior military leaders. Gens. Davis Petraeus, Jim Mattis, Tony Zinni, and Al Gray were all excellent strategists and thinkers; but they were mavericks who were largely self-taught.

There is nothing to be done about restoring a sense of honor among our senior military leaders in the near-term. Careerism is too deeply embedded. However, something can be done to make our future flag officers more competent at their core military responsibilities. Members of Congress who care about our military should empower a commission to fix the root causes of the rot among our senior military leaders. If culpability is found, Congress has the power to reduce four-star generals to their permanent rank and demand retirement. Then real congressionally forced military reform legislation should be initiated in the following areas:

Scrap Goldwater-Nichols

The notion that every future general officer needs to have joint service before advancing to flag rank is ridiculous. This has only led to bloated joint staffs. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that being a graves registration officer on the Central Command staff in Tampa encourages military genius.

Reduce the Size of the Joint Staffs

Irwin Rommel’s Panzer Army stormed across North Africa with a staff smaller than that of the average U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team today. The staffs of the expeditionary fleets that charged from Tarawa to Okinawa in the Pacific during World War II numbered less than 100. Goldwater-Nichols encourages a process-oriented bureaucracy that stifles initiative and critical thinking. Each Joint Staff today should be slashed at least in half.

Make Military Education Rigorous

The Skelton reforms of Joint Professional Military Education (JPME) civilianized the preparation of future senior military leaders to a point where getting a master’s degree trumped proper preparation for making grueling military decisions under tight time constraints. There is nothing wrong with getting a military master’s degree, but the process should be rigorous with the mediocre weeded out before they can go along and get along to flag rank.

Students of command, staff, and war colleges should be taxed with a set of problems and simulations of increasing rigor under tight time constraints leading up to a point where they are given an impossibly wicked problem such as the one Biden dropped on senior military leaders in April with his imposition of an arbitrary time line for the Afghan withdrawal. Those students who crack under the pressure of time constraints or who cannot come up with a coherent plan should be ruthlessly dropped from the program. The reformers who molded Goldwater-Nichols and the present JPME approach wanted to recreate the “Genius for War’ of the German General Staff system. What they got was the exact opposite.

In the science fiction world of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy has a culminating exercise which has no satisfactory solution. The Kobayashi Maru problem was designed to make the cadets face no-win situations. The future Captain Kirk is the only cadet to ever beat the system, and he does so by cheating — or at least thinking outside the box. We are not creating many Kirks these days. But, despite ourselves, we still manage to promote some competent general officers such as the commander of the 82d Airborne Division. Major Gen. Chris Donahue handled the ground portion of the Kabul evacuation with poise, even though it was a near Kobayashi Maru situation, and he was the last man on the last plane out.

Not All Competent Staff Officers Should Be Commanders

The current military promotion system requires that all future general officers be commanders at some point. Some brilliant staff officers couldn’t lead a horse out of a burning building. A friend of mine was a superb staff officer but was forced into command positions to make the next rank. After failing as a regimental and Marine expeditionary brigade commander, the Marine Corps wisely gave up trying to make a senior commander out of him; however, the commandant of the Marine Corps kept him on because he was a fiscal genius. He retired at three stars and went on as a civilian to put Iraq’s finances in order after we toppled Saddam Hussein.

Some officers prefer staff work, and are good at it; but for them, command is a burden. We should accept this and allow for a two-track system that allows for some to reach three-star rank without being forced to command. Much of the day-to-day business of the military involves logistics, communications, and intelligence work that requires managerial rigor but not tremendous leadership skill.

There is nothing wrong with our soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Air Force personnel. They performed brilliantly under near-impossible conditions in Kabul. However, they need better senior leadership than was shown in Afghanistan.

Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who served in Lebanon and Somalia and was a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan. He served as a special advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense and lectures on Alternative Analysis at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

24. Taliban completes conquest of Afghanistan after seizing Panjshir

A lot of conflicting reporting on what is taking place in Panjshir. But Bill Roggio provides some of the best analysis.

Taliban completes conquest of Afghanistan after seizing Panjshir | FDD's Long War Journal

longwarjournal.org · by Bill Roggio & Andrew Tobin · September 6, 2021

The Taliban took control of Bazarak and Panjshir province is under its control. Video of the Taliban raising its banner over the Bazarak district center. pic.twitter.com/AimalwgtnF

— Bill Roggio (@billroggio) September 6, 2021

The Taliban completed its military conquest of Afghanistan and took control of the mountainous province of Panjshir after seven days of heavy fighting. The fall of Panjshir puts the Taliban in full control of the country and eliminates the final vestige of organized resistance to its rule.

The Taliban began its assault on Panjshir on Aug. 30, the day the U.S. military withdrew its last forces from Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. The Taliban seized control of the Afghan capital of Kabul and 32 of the country’s 34 provinces on Aug. 16 after a three and a half month long offensive that began on May 1.

After the fall of Kabul, the National Resistance Front, led by former Vice President and National Directorate of Security chief Amrullah Saleh, and Panjshiri warlord Ahmad Massoud, organized inside Panjshir and several neighboring districts in Parwan and Baghlan province. Saleh and Massoud announced their opposition to the Taliban. Saleh organized thousands of members of the now-defunct Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, including Commandos, Special Forces and other units, and attempted to expand control beyond the Panjshir Valley. However, Saleh’s forays outside of Panjshir may have overextended his forces that would have been better used to defend the province and establish a secure base.

The Taliban attacked Panjshir, a mountainous fortress with few entrances and narrow passes, from multiple directions, and was initially repelled by the resistance forces. But the Taliban pressed its assault and was able to punch through the resistance’s defenses at the main pass in the south near the town of Gulbahar, and the pass at Khawak in the east.

The Taliban quickly advanced up the narrow road and took control of Bazarak, the provincial capital on Sept. 5. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, announced on Sept. 6 that Panjshir province “was completely conquered.”

Ahmad Massoud, whose father led the Northern Alliance against the Taliban in the 1990s and was assassinated by Al Qaeda just two days prior to 9/11, vowed to continue the fight against the Taliban and called on all Afghans to continue its resistance. Without his base in Panjshir, Massoud’s promise to effectively continue the fight against the Taliban is a difficult proposition. Massoud’s forces may be able to launch guerrilla attacks from the mountains, but its ability to challenge Taliban rule will be limited.

English translation of HE @AhmadMassoud01, leader of the National Resistance Front, message: pic.twitter.com/kUgGaxbTcD

— National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (@nrfafg) September 6, 2021

From the beginning, the resistance’s odds of successfully holding out against the Taliban were always long [See FDD’s Long war Journal report, After fall of Kabul, resistance to Taliban emerges in Panjshir.]

The Taliban had nearly all of the advantages in its favor, including numbers, equipment, and the quality of its fighting force. The Taliban’s military has been forged in 20 years of war against the U.S. military, NATO, and Afghan forces, while Massoud’s forces were safe in Panjshir and Saleh’s remnants were demoralized during the final Taliban offensive. The Taliban was able to mobilize its forces from across Afghanistan, while the resistance’s numbers were limited. Additionally, the Taliban was flush with weapons, munitions and gear that it seized from the Afghan military.

The National Resistance Front’s only advantage was terrain, but it was no match for the Taliban’s military might and the will to take the province and end the final challenge to dominating the country and establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

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longwarjournal.org · by Bill Roggio & Andrew Tobin · September 6, 2021

25. Afghanistan: The Warlords Who Will Decide Whether a Civil War Is Likely

This must be part of the assessment of the resistance potential.

Afghanistan: The Warlords Who Will Decide Whether a Civil War Is Likely

thequint.com · by Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham · September 7, 2021

Unsurprisingly, the Taliban’s rapid takeover of power across Afghanistan has prompted headlines about a renewed “civil war”. This is misleading, however.

“Civil war” implies a situation where an insurgent movement is taking on a ruling government. But in 2001, it was not just the United States (US)-backed Northern Alliance that removed the Taliban from Kabul – other local commanders and political leaders were challenging their authority too.

And in 2021, the Taliban swept to power by offering local groups incentives to cooperate or persuading them to stand aside. Now that the Taliban tries to establish a government and ruling institutions, it is possible that these groups may resist being co-opted. They may bristle at the lack of autonomy, or see political and economic benefit in opposition to the new system in Kabul.

Yet none of these groups has the national reach of the Taliban. And unlike 2001, none has outside support to do more than to hold on to their patch of Afghanistan.

So for the foreseeable future, Afghanistan continues in its limbo. The Taliban will be on uncertain ground as they declare legitimacy, but no pretender to Afghanistan’s troubled throne is likely to offer a national alternative.

Islamic State Khorasan

Paradoxically, as Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) has garnered attention for its mass killings outside Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 26, it has only exposed that, while it is a deadly irritant, it is not yet a threat to the Taliban’s power.

With an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 members, ISIS-K is still a local faction in eastern Afghanistan, mainly in Nangahar and Kunar provinces on the Pakistan border. It may hope to build capacity through recruitment, exploiting the publicity of its high-profile attacks.

But in contrast to the much larger Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, its capacity is for attacks on specific civilian sites rather than directly confronting national security forces or the political system as a whole. There is as yet no evidence that it has the institutional presence in villages that sustained the Taliban between 2001 and 2021. Nor are Pakistani services likely to risk their links with the Taliban by offering sustenance to a rival.

Panjshir Valley and the North

Reports are still emerging that the Taliban has “taken” the Panjshir Valley in north-eastern Afghanistan. Images of the Taliban flag being raised in Panjshir’s provincial capital, Bazarak, would appear to give them weight.

The mainly Tajik resistance has been led by Ahmad Massoud, son of renowned warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Amrullah Saleh, vice president in the ousted government. In the absence of any significant foreign support, Massoud’s resistance has been concentrating on maintaining the region’s autonomy and holding out against any Taliban attacks. He has offered negotiations with a view to a live-and-let-live arrangement, but already the tactic may be obsolete and the movement, for now, defeated.

Meanwhile, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, of Uzbek descent, has manoeuvred his way to influence in northern Afghanistan through shifting positions since the 1980s, when he was an army commander in the communist government during the Soviet intervention.

A founder of the Northern Alliance, he has fought the Taliban pretty much ever since and was a key link with the US in the alliance operations that forced the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001. He has played several political roles in US-backed governments and has survived at least two assassination attempts, but withdrew to Uzbekistan in August as the Taliban advanced.

Atta Mohammad Noor, an ethnic Tajik, has allied with Dostum. A mujahideen commander in the 1980s, he was a commander in the Northern Alliance against the Taliban. Dostum and Noor have pledged allegiance with Massoud’s resistance, but could row back from a challenge if Panjshir has fallen to the Taliban. Even before the clashes, in an interview with Reuters, Noor was putting a priority on politics over military action.

Ismail Khan and Iran

Since 2001, the leading force in western Afghanistan, including the country’s third largest city Herat, has been Ismail Khan, a Tajik backed by Iran. Khan led a large mujahideen force in the 1980s and used that to become governor of Herat in 1992.

Since then his fortunes have fluctuated. He has held – and lost – a variety of political roles and has survived Taliban assassination attempts. His force in Herat melted away in August, whether because of the Taliban threat or a secret deal with the group. Khan was reported captured on 13 August, but showed up in Iran’s second city Mashhad three days later. There is a speculation that he may receive backing from Tehran, but Iran’s strategy remains unclear.

Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami

Perhaps the most intriguing dynamic is the potential of a former Taliban foe, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, joining a Taliban government. Hekmatyar founded the Hezb-e Islami (“Party of Islam”) in the 1980s, becoming the leading recipient of CIA support, via the Pakistanis, in the fight against the Soviets. Considered one of the most brutal militia leaders in the 1990s, he was briefly prime minister before the Taliban took power in 1996.

After the Taliban fell in 2001, Hekmatyar fled to Pakistan, directing his forces against the Karzai government and the international coalition, and earning a place on a US “kill list”. He survived to reach a deal with the Afghan government in 2016, returning from exile.

Now Hekmatayr, his erstwhile foe Karzai, and veteran politician and former chief executive of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah are negotiating with the Taliban as it tries to form a government. Hekmatyar has said he will work with the Taliban even if he is not a minister: “We do not have any conditions to participate in the government other than the assignment of competent persons.”

Waiting for Economic Collapse?

In a country saturated with conflict for almost 50 years, it will be foolhardy to wave off the prospect of a battle for power. But for now the Taliban has space because its foes, actual or potential, are scattered, battered, divided or ready to make deals.

Still, that space is tenuous. If the Taliban cannot establish its ability to deliver services and security on a daily basis, then legitimacy will be foregone and discontent stoked. Opponents may be able to regroup and recruit, and temporary allies may break away.

That points to the economy rather than force of arms as the Taliban’s immediate concern. With international aid suspended and assets frozen abroad, deprivation ranges from those who can’t get cash from ATMs to those living in darkness to the 14 million who are in severe food poverty. If the Taliban’s grip over the daily lives of the people wobbles for these reasons, Massoud, Dostum, Khan and Hekmatyar may well rethink their plans.

(The author, Scott Lucas, is a professor of International Politics at the University of Birmingham. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)

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Edited By :Tejas Harad

thequint.com · by Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham · September 7, 2021

26. America's Return to Realism

Excerpts:

In any case, idealism is not actually so idealistic when a country has enough power, and the only thing that is clear now is that America doesn’t. Resistance to its post-Cold War nation-building goals took the form of international terrorism. China and Russia did not obediently embrace democracy. And much of the rest of the world has reverted to various forms of nationalism and authoritarianism.

With the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, the limits of American power have finally become obvious. Many people, and not just the leaders of hostile powers, will celebrate America’s comeuppance. But it is doubtful that the moral superstructure of human rights will survive without any country willing to use military force to support it.

America's Return to Realism | by Eric Posner - Project Syndicate

project-syndicate.org · by Eric Posner · September 3, 2021

It was already clear that former President Donald Trump repudiated the humanitarian or quasi-humanitarian motives that underpinned US military interventions after the Cold War. But Joe Biden’s forceful renunciation of foreign-policy idealism is somewhat surprising.

CHICAGO – US President Joe Biden’s speech defending the withdrawal from Afghanistan announced a decisive break with a tradition of foreign-policy idealism that began with Woodrow Wilson and reached its apex in the 1990s. While that tradition has often been called “liberal internationalism,” it also was the dominant view on the right by the end of the Cold War. The United States, according to liberal internationalists, should use military force as well as its economic power to compel other countries to embrace liberal democracy and uphold human rights.

Both in conception and in practice, American idealism rejected the Westphalian international system, in which states are forbidden to intervene in others’ internal affairs, and peace results from maintaining a balance of power. Wilson sought to replace this system with universal principles of justice, administered by international institutions. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt revived these ideals in the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which declared self-determination, democracy, and human rights to be war goals.

But during the Cold War, the US pursued a resolutely “realist” foreign policy that focused on national interest and propped up or tolerated dictatorships as long as they opposed the Soviet Union. The two rivals had little use for international institutions or universal ideals except for propaganda purposes, instead using regional arrangements to knit together their allies. It was Europe that, in the 1970s, tried to advance human rights and assume a position of moral leadership to distinguish itself from the goliaths to its east and west.

America’s commitment to human rights began at a moment of weakness. In the wake of the military and moral disaster of Vietnam, President Jimmy Carter and the US Congress sought to infuse American foreign policy with a moral center and reached for the language of human rights. President Ronald Reagan saw human rights as a convenient rhetorical cudgel for clobbering the Soviet Union. But both presidents continued to support dictatorships that served US security interests, and neither used military force to advance humanitarian ideals. The era of US-led humanitarian intervention would have to await the end of the Cold War.

The rhetoric outstripped the reality, but reality did change. As the sole global hegemon, the US embarked on a large number of wars, big and small, involving a confusing mélange of hard-nosed security interests and idealistic rhetoric. In Panama, Somalia, Yugoslavia (twice), Iraq (twice), Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the US launched military interventions on both national-security and humanitarian grounds.

The nonintervention in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 may have been the most consequential (non)event of this period, because it was reinterpreted with the benefit of hindsight as a missed opportunity to use military force to save hundreds of thousands of lives. The debacle was used to justify the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to urge US military intervention in Sudan in the early 2000s, which President George W. Bush’s administration wisely resisted, despite mass killings that amounted to another genocide.

All of this led to an extraordinary burst of interest in international law and legal institutions. Multiple international tribunals were created, leading to the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court. Human rights treaties and institutions were revived and strengthened. Principles of humanitarian intervention were advanced, including the now-forgotten “responsibility to protect.” Every Western university nowadays has a human rights center of some sort that is a testament to the idealism of that era.

It was already clear that President Donald Trump repudiated this tradition of humanitarian or quasi-humanitarian military intervention, but Biden’s forceful renunciation of it is somewhat surprising. In his speech, he repeatedly emphasized the importance of identifying and defending America’s “vital national interest.” The word “national” is key, and Biden wasn’t subtle:

“If we had been attacked on September 11, 2001, from Yemen instead of Afghanistan, would we have ever gone to war in Afghanistan? Even though the Taliban controlled Afghanistan in the year 2001? I believe the honest answer is no. That’s because we had no vital interest in Afghanistan other than to prevent an attack on America’s homeland and our friends. And that’s true today.”

America had no vital interest in introducing democracy to Afghanistan, in helping women escape a medieval theological regime, in educating children, or in helping to prevent another civil war. His decision to withdraw from Afghanistan was

“about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries. We saw a mission of counterterrorism in Afghanistan, getting the terrorists to stop the attacks, morph into a counterinsurgency, nation-building, trying to create a democratic, cohesive, and united Afghanistan. Something that has never been done over many centuries of Afghan’s [sic] history. Moving on from that mindset and those kind of large-scale troop deployments will make us stronger and more effective and safer at home.”

Biden also did say that human rights will remain “the center of our foreign policy,” and that economic tools and moral suasion can be used to advance them. This claim is in tension with his declaration that “vital national interests” should determine military intervention. Why wouldn’t vital national interests determine nonmilitary forms of intervention as well? Clearly, the role of human rights and other moral ideals in US foreign policy has been downgraded. The only question is whether the rhetoric will be toned town to match the new reality.

Of course, it was never very clear that US governments were actually motivated by humanitarian considerations. Critics often found more nefarious motives. Future historians may well argue that US foreign policy in the 1990s and 2000s was simply advancing a very ambitious vision of the national interest: America required all countries to adopt American ideals and institutions so that none would want to act against America. Or they might say that, like any empire, the US lacked the patience and wisdom to maintain a consistent stance in its treatment of its peripheries.

project-syndicate.org · by Eric Posner · September 3, 2021

27. 'Keep your head on a swivel': FBI analyst circulated a prescient warning of Jan. 6 violence

There are no intelligence failures. There is only the failure to heed the intelligence.

'Keep your head on a swivel': FBI analyst circulated a prescient warning of Jan. 6 violence

Politico

The analyst's email circulated through the Bureau and to some of its state and local partners on Nov. 9, 2020.

Insurrections loyal to President Donald Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. | (Jose Luis Magana, File/AP Photo)

09/07/2021 04:30 AM EDT

An FBI intelligence analyst warned days after the 2020 election that Stop the Steal rallies — one of which metastasized into the ransacking of the Capitol — could turn violent.

The emailed warning from an analyst at the FBI’s school for bomb technicians circulated through the Bureau and to some of its state and local partners on Nov. 9, 2020, just days after the major TV networks called the election for now-President Joe Biden. Its subject line was simple: “Far-Right Chatter re Election Results.”

“As Joe Biden is declared the victor in the 2020 Presidential Campaign, chatter from the far-right indicates the belief the election was stolen from President Trump,” the FBI analyst wrote, then urging recipients to “keep your head on a swivel.”

The FBI analyst's message, which has not been previously published and was obtained by the watchdog group Property of the People, indicates that federal law enforcement officials saw ample signs before Jan. 6 that right-wing efforts to overturn the election results could result in violence. FBI Director Christopher Wray has testified before Congress that the Bureau tracked the threat from domestic extremists in the months before the attack on the Capitol, and the email gives new detail on what the FBI was watching. When the email went out, prominent officials and leaders in the conservative movement were promoting the #StopTheSteal hashtag.

Citing the findings of SITE Intelligence Group, which describes itself as “the world’s leading non-governmental counterterrorism organization” focused on online extremist activity, the analyst wrote: “Militia groups are espousing increasingly violent rhetoric, expressing a new level of escalation by declaring, ‘The fight is now’.”

“On a popular militia forum, users called to execute Biden, Democrats, tech company employees, journalists, and other ‘rats’,” the FBI analyst went on. “QAnon and Neo-Nazi groups are using the election results to issue additional calls for action aligned with their specific ideologies.”

Then came a line that proved prescient.

“Nationwide rallies: Waves of ‘#StopTheSteal’ and similar hash-tag events are being organized across the country as various voter fraud theories gain momentum among Trump supporters,” the analyst’s email continued. “As these materialize, counter-protests and violence will likely ensue.”

The email also raised concerns about conspiracy theories and misinformation regarding the election’s outcome, sounding an alarm that “evidence of voter fraud — preliminary, unverified, or already proven false — is being widely disseminated within far-right channels, aggravating already heightened tensions across the country, with the directive to share aggressively with ‘family and friends.’”

The FBI analyst ended soberly.

“As the nation remains in flux and strongly divided, please stay focused and safe,” the email concluded.

A few weeks after the email went out, SITE published a report with a title that also sounded prescient: “Far-Right Forum Urges Proud Boys to ‘Overpower and Rush’ Police During D.C. Protests.” The text of the report is not publicly available online.

#StoptheSteal efforts turned catastrophic on Jan. 6, when Trump supporters and movement adherents gathered for a rally — promoted on Twitter by the then-president — then marched to the Capitol and overran the building. Four participants in the riot died at the Capitol, two police officers who responded died in the aftermath and more than 150 officers were injured.

In the months since then, lawmakers and law enforcement officials have scrambled to figure out how this happened and why the Capitol Police were so unprepared. The FBI has also faced scrutiny from lawmakers as they press top officials on whether counterterrorism experts were aware of the potential risk that the Jan. 6 rally posed.

The analyst’s email indicates that people throughout the Bureau saw the violence coming. Property of the People, a national security-focused transparency nonprofit that has litigated Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against Republican and Democratic administrations alike, obtained the email through an open records request.

“The evidence increasingly makes plain that the intelligence was there,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People. “Despite ample warning, U.S. Capitol police leadership failed to defend democracy. The question is why.”

The analyst who wrote the email worked at the FBI’s Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Alabama. That school trains first responders and bomb technicians on how to handle bomb threats, according to the FBI’s website.

That training would have been relevant on Jan. 6. The night before the attack, a still-unidentified person placed two bombs near the Capitol — one by headquarters for the Republican National Committee, and another by the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.

“We were dealing with two pipe bombs that were specifically set right off the edge of our perimeter to, what I suspect, draw resources away,” said Steven Sund, the former Capitol Police chief, later testified to lawmakers about Jan. 6. “I think there was a significant coordination with this attack.”

Politico

28. Planes Chartered To Evacuate Americans And Others From Afghanistan Remain Grounded

These are troubling reports if accurate.

Excerpts:

NPR could not independently confirm details of the situation in Mazar-e-Sharif.

McCaul said the Taliban was not letting the planes depart until its "demands" were met, possibly in the form of "cash or legitimacy as the government of Afghanistan."

A spokesperson with the State Department told NPR's Michele Kelemen that the U.S. is prepared to help all remaining U.S. citizens, green card holders and at risk Afghans who want to leave.

On Monday, a State Department official said the U.S. had "facilitated the safe departure of four Americans via overland route" that day. The official did not identify the Americans or specify the country to which they were taken.

Planes Chartered To Evacuate Americans And Others From Afghanistan Remain Grounded

NPR · by Jackie Northam · September 6, 2021

A plane flies over temporary camp for refugees from Afghanistan at the U.S. Army's Rhine Ordnance Barracks (ROB), where they are being temporarily housed, on August 30, 2021 in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Sascha Schuermann/Getty Images

Multiple planes meant to ferry hundreds of people who say they are fearful of life under the Taliban's rule, including American citizens and green card holders, spent another day parked on an airstrip in northern Afghanistan Monday.

Marina LeGree, executive director of Ascend, a non-profit that teaches young Afghan women leadership through mountaineering and other athletics, told NPR's Jackie Northam that several Afghans affiliated with her group remained stuck. LeGree said that was in addition to more than 600 others, including at least 19 American citizens and two U.S. green card holders.

Among the hundreds of stranded travelers were members of nongovernmental organizations, journalists and women at risk, according to LeGree.

LeGree, from her home in Italy, said these travelers had now spent seven days in anticipation of clearance to take off, taking up residence near the airport in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

On Sunday, Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Fox News that the Taliban were holding people "hostage" and that there were "six airplanes with American citizens on them as I speak."

STUCK ON PLANES: @RepMcCaul says Americans and Afghan interpreters have been held hostage by the Taliban for days at the Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport in Afghanistan. #FoxNewsSunday pic.twitter.com/2gJfxNTIfJ

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) September 5, 2021

While LeGree confirmed she'd been told there were six planes in total, she did clarify that the travelers were not waiting "physically on board" aircraft.

NPR could not independently confirm details of the situation in Mazar-e-Sharif.

McCaul said the Taliban was not letting the planes depart until its "demands" were met, possibly in the form of "cash or legitimacy as the government of Afghanistan."

A spokesperson with the State Department told NPR's Michele Kelemen that the U.S. is prepared to help all remaining U.S. citizens, green card holders and at risk Afghans who want to leave.

But the department also said that it discourages chartered airplanes because – with no more of its personnel left on the ground in Afghanistan – it could not properly confirm the planes' passenger manifests.

An Afghan official at Mazar-e-Sharif airport told the Associated Press that many of the Afghan travelers did not have passports or visas.

The U.S. government says there has to be screening for everyone arriving into U.S. military bases due to security concerns.

LeGree said her understanding from speaking with sources on the ground is that the primary issue now is a negotiation between the Taliban and Kam Air, which is operating the flights, over the cost of using the airport.

NPR · by Jackie Northam · September 6, 2021

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

V/R

David Maxwell

Senior Fellow

Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Phone: 202-573-8647

Personal Email: d avid.maxwell161@gmail.com

Web Site: www.fdd.org

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Subscribe to FDD’s new podcast, Foreign Podicy

FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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