Quotes of the Day:
"Reason has built the modern world. It is a precious but also a fragile thing, which can be corroded by apparently harmless irrationality."
- Richard Dawkins
"It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to seem good to the foolish reasoner."
- George Eliot
"Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal."
- Robert A. Heinlein
1. Hope for the Lost Souls of Liberalism
2. Southeast Asian Nations Cautious Over New AUKUS Defense Pact
3. CIA warned children were possibly present seconds before US missile killed 10
4. Afghan family ravaged by U.S. drone strike mistake wants headstones for the dead — and possible new life in America
5. How anti-terror Washington turns itself into terrorist
6. ‘Horrible Mistake’: Pentagon Admits Drone Strike Killed Children, Not Terrorists
7. Islamic State trying to spread in India through constant propaganda online: NIA
8. Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization — And What Can Be Done About It
9. Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.
10. As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader
11. Trade Versus Subs: The Risky U.S. Tradeoff in the Asia-Pacific
1. Hope for the Lost Souls of Liberalism
A good (and important) Sunday read for anyone interested in political philosophy, especially ours. I ordered the book based on this review essay by Barton Swain(Hard cover is out of stock on Amazon but Kindle is available so I ordered that while I wait for the hard cover as I think this may be a book worth keeping and marking up). I also pulled Bloom's translation of the Republic off my bookshelf for further study. I agree we need to return to the big questions. And we could probably use some respect for de Tocqueville's forms (a review of Democracy in America is also probably in order too).
Excerpts:
The task for today, in their view, isn’t to dynamite liberalism, on the one hand, or to encourage its pathologies, on the other. It is, as Mrs. Storey says, “to recover the preconditions of liberalism’s success.” To do that “is going to require returning to preliberal sources—the resources of classical thought, Christian thought and Jewish thought, and the communal practices that turn those traditions into ways of life. These ways of thinking aim to cultivate order in the soul in a way that liberal thought does not.”
All this talk of order and souls puts me in mind of Plato’s “Republic.” I haven’t read it in 30 years but I remember that Plato wanted to draw a connection between order in the soul and order in the city, or polis. On a shelf in Mrs. Storey’s office I spy a copy of the University of Chicago intellectual Allan Bloom’s famous translation of the “Republic,” so perhaps I’m on to something. Perhaps the Storeys’ point can be put as simply as this: You can’t fix the city as long as the souls are a mess.
Hope for the Lost Souls of Liberalism
The Western model of individual liberty and religious neutrality is in trouble. A return to the big questions is in order.
Twenty-five years ago, that understanding of liberalism was almost unquestionable. Not anymore. On the left, markets generate inequality, democracy works only when it achieves the right outcomes, individual freedom is uninteresting unless it involves sexual innovation or abortion, the state is everything, and religion doesn’t deserve neutrality. On the right—or anyway the intellectual/populist right—markets destroy traditional moral conventions, democracy is mostly a sham, individual freedom encourages behavioral deviancies, state power is a force for good, and the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion was likely a bad idea.
Partisans will dispute these characterizations, but the liberal order in America (and Europe) is under attack—and not without reason. Political debates in Washington are bereft of good faith, the education system idealizes self-hatred and sexual confusion, and even corporate leaders—who until yesterday could be counted on to champion patriotism and hard work—eagerly recite the maxims of idiots.
I have read many critiques of liberalism, but none so original as “Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment” by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say the book doesn’t so much criticize liberalism as explain why it’s neither the cause of our problems nor their solution.
Mr. and Mrs. Storey, 46 and 45 respectively, teach political philosophy and run the Tocqueville Program at Furman University; for the present academic year they’re also visiting scholars at the American Enterprise Institute. On a recent visit to Furman’s campus, I met them in Mrs. Storey’s book-laden but very tidy office. (Disclosure: My daughter is a student at Furman, although she avoids the subject of political philosophy on the not unreasonable grounds that “politics stresses me out.”)
At the core of their book is the reflection that educated people in modern liberal democracies are very comfortable with proximate arguments and not at all with ultimate ones—in other words, that moderns can debate means but not ends.
What do they mean by “ends”? “I teach Plato’s ‘Gorgias,’ ” Mr. Storey says. “ Socrates is arguing with Callicles about what the best way of life is. And so I will ask my students: What’s the best way of life? Just like that. The standard response is: What are you talking about? They look at me as if to say: You can’t ask that question!”
So it is, he thinks, in liberal societies generally: We’re allowed to debate all questions but ultimate ones. “We’re assuming we can’t have an answer to these questions, without even asking them.” In the classroom, he says, both he and his wife “try to shift students from a stance of dogmatic skepticism, in which they assume before the inquiry begins that you can’t ask ultimate questions, to a place of zetetic or seeking skepticism, in which you recognize that, despite all your doubts and apprehensions, you have to at least ask questions about God and the good and the nature of the universe.”
Liberalism began in the 16th and 17th centuries as a response to the violent political struggles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation—the so-called wars of religion. European philosophers and political leaders sought a political worldview in which a man was able to hold his own views and practice his own religion without reference to the mythology of the dominant culture around him. To oversimplify the ideal: In public he would behave as a loyal citizen; in private he could affirm or deny transubstantiation or decide he cared little either way.
The beginnings of liberalism are most clearly evident in the philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704). But Locke’s writings aren’t famously readable, and the Storeys begin their book with Michel de Montaigne (1533-92). Montaigne was no philosopher, and that is the point: He was a wonderful essayist but didn’t strive for universal truth. The Storeys call the Montaignian ideal “immanent contentment”: an outlook that values satisfaction in the moment and has little interest in the grand principles along which society might be reordered. Montaigne, in this view, is the prototypical liberal.
As attractive as the liberal worldview is, the Storeys think, it has ceased to satisfy. “Liberalism isn’t popular among a lot of younger people,” Mrs. Storey says, “because it was designed to solve a different anthropological problem from the ones we’re facing. We were different people when we came up with our liberal institutions to solve the strife of war and persecution.” The political institutions of liberalism, she says, were designed for people who “were already strongly committed to churches, localities, professions and families. But when private lives have broken down—families dissolved, localities less important, religious life absent—liberalism’s framework institutions no longer make sense.” Young people in particular, she says, aren’t interested in the “prosaic” Montaignian life: “It just isn’t enough for them. It has no transcendence. They’re going to go beyond it.”
Many critiques of liberalism and modernity quickly become critiques of the free market. It’s a tempting solution because the market is something you can change or rearrange by force of law. The Storeys don’t take that view. “The problems we’re facing right now are not fundamentally economic problems,” he says. “They’re fundamentally educational and philosophical problems. The way forward is a multigenerational project, and it’s going to begin in schools.”
Another way to explain the plight of 21st-century liberalism, the Storeys argue, is that it has become bereft of “forms.” Tocqueville used that term in “Democracy in America” but didn’t define it. He meant traditions, social conventions, taboos. Aristocratic societies rely heavily on forms; each person, high or low, understands the expectations his role places on him and responds accordingly. Democratic societies tend to spurn forms. Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, preferred democracy but worried that democratic citizens might forget forms altogether.
Mr. and Mrs. Storey want to resist the march toward formlessness. “In the classroom,” he says, “I always wear a tie when I teach. I call my students Mister this and Miss that. The reason we do that isn’t to make people feel uncomfortable; it’s to create proper distance between teacher and student. I’m saying to them: I’m putting my tie on because I respect you and respect the subject we’re studying. I’m going to speak to you in a very formal way, like an adult, and I’m going to ask you to rise up and be an adult.”
The loss of forms in modern democratic societies, the Storeys contend, cultivates a kind of chronic restlessness and anxiety. Without forms—without conventions and attendant expectations, without institutional connections defining our relationships—“every decision becomes an existential crisis,” Mrs. Storey says. “You’re a free-floating atom. You have to guess what the proper response is to any circumstance.”
If these free-floating atoms aren’t bound to institutions and conventions, many are governed by our nationalized political mayhem. Are young people terrorized by the protean demands of influencers and Twitter mobs? “There’s a nervousness in the classroom when we talk about political topics that I didn’t notice four or five years ago,” Mr. Storey says. “Students now come of age in a fully different world in which saying the wrong thing—or even not saying the right thing—can destroy you. One of our students was chased off a certain social media platform, I forget which one, because there was a rally around some cause célèbre and he just didn’t say anything. He was denounced for saying nothing.”
Mr. Storey adds that “Tocqueville described 200 years ago the tyranny of the majority over thought, in which people are constantly taking their intellectual bearings from what they think they’re expected to believe.”
The Storeys met at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, where they studied under the conservative intellectuals Leon and Amy Kass. Like their teachers, who were also married (Mrs. Kass died in 2015), the Storeys have an almost parental affection for their students. Although they are broadly sympathetic with French and American conservatism—you could guess that much by Mr. Storey’s tie-wearing and use of honorifics—students of wildly divergent political allegiances consider them favorites.
The couple’s conservatism consists above all in the belief that “old, wise books,” as he puts it, have something to teach us. “Old, wise books.” That, in essence, is their answer to the newspaperman’s inevitable question: So what are we going to do about this mess? Or, to put it differently: If liberalism was designed for people ensconced in a labyrinth of institutions, and the citizens of 21st-century democracies are no longer such people, what do we do with liberalism?
Other rightward-leaning critiques of liberalism—I think especially of Patrick Deneen’s “Why Liberalism Failed” (2018)—fault the liberal order itself for the hedonistic perversities, economic inequalities and cultural oppressiveness they see in modern American culture. Mr. and Mrs. Storey steer a different course. In their book they credit the liberal order with a “profound awareness of the manifold and conflicting dimensions of human life and of the consequent challenges of self-government.” Their hope, Mr. Storey says, “is that the liberal institutions that have done so much good for our country can weather the current wave of disorder.”
The task for today, in their view, isn’t to dynamite liberalism, on the one hand, or to encourage its pathologies, on the other. It is, as Mrs. Storey says, “to recover the preconditions of liberalism’s success.” To do that “is going to require returning to preliberal sources—the resources of classical thought, Christian thought and Jewish thought, and the communal practices that turn those traditions into ways of life. These ways of thinking aim to cultivate order in the soul in a way that liberal thought does not.”
All this talk of order and souls puts me in mind of Plato’s “Republic.” I haven’t read it in 30 years but I remember that Plato wanted to draw a connection between order in the soul and order in the city, or polis. On a shelf in Mrs. Storey’s office I spy a copy of the University of Chicago intellectual Allan Bloom’s famous translation of the “Republic,” so perhaps I’m on to something. Perhaps the Storeys’ point can be put as simply as this: You can’t fix the city as long as the souls are a mess.
Mr. Swaim is a Journal editorial page writer.
2. Southeast Asian Nations Cautious Over New AUKUS Defense Pact
An initial survey of key Southeast Asian countries and their concerns.
Southeast Asian Nations Cautious Over New AUKUS Defense Pact
Countries bordering the South China Sea who are wary of great power rivalries are reacting slowly and cautiously to the announcement of a trilateral defense pact between the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.
The AUKUS pact, hailed by leaders from the three powers as “historic,” is thought to be designed to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific, especially in the South China Sea where China holds sweeping claims that are disputed by its neighbors.
The pact will also see the US and UK give Australia the technology to build nuclear-powered submarines.
The pact has been denounced by China, which claims it will stoke an arms race, and other critics speculate it may provoke a new Cold War. Tensions have been building up in the region over territorial disputes, as China develops its military might.
Southeast Asian countries have responded cautiously to AUKUS – an abbreviation of the three participating nations – amid concerns of a new, intense strategic rivalry in the Indo-Pacific.
“Many regional countries do not want to be drawn into U.S.-China rivalry," Rizal Sukma, a senior researcher at the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and former Indonesia ambassador to Britain, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
AUKUS was announced early Asia time on Thursday. China wasted no time in registering its disapproval. Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian called the pact “extremely irresponsible” and said it would backfire on the three powers involved.
He said they had "seriously undermined regional peace and stability, intensified the arms race, and undermined international non-proliferation efforts."
Among the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Singapore reacted positively, but other governments were more guarded.
Philippines Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana speaks during a meeting with US Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, April 1, 2019. Credit: AFP
Arms race concernsThe Indonesian Foreign Ministry said Friday it “is watching with caution” the Australian government's decision to acquire nuclear-powered submarines. Indonesia is one of Australia’s closest neighbors and even though the country is not a territorial claimant in the South China Sea, its exclusive economic zone overlaps China’s claims.
Indonesia is “very concerned about the continued arms race and projection of military power in the region”, a ministry statement said.
Jakarta “encourages Australia and other related parties to continue promoting dialogue in resolving differences peacefully” and urges other parties in the region to adhere to international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Indonesia was among the first nations in the Indo-Pacific to be informed of the new AUKUS deal and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison reportedly said he’d seek to speak to President Joko Widodo “soon.”
Philippines Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana has also held a phone conversation with his Australian counterpart Peter Dutton on Friday, in which Dutton “underscored that Australia wants to be seen as a neighbor that promotes regional peace”, according to the Philippine Department of Defense.
Lorenzana told Dutton that his country “would like to maintain good bilateral defense relations with all other countries in the region”, suggesting that officially Manila doesn’t want to be seen as taking sides.
A lack of a solid regional security structure means that Southeast Asian countries risk being sidelined on their own strategic chessboard. ASEAN, established 54 years ago, has become lacklustre and “more irrelevant,” according to Sukma who said he doubted that the grouping “has the capacity to be a place where great powers' interests can be managed.”
Most Southeast Asian governments including Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have yet to comment on AUKUS – hinting at the prevailing strategic uncertainty in the region.
Singapore, however, was upbeat.
Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs quoted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong who said in a phone call with Australian premier Morrison that he hoped the new deal would “contribute constructively to the peace and stability of the region and complement the regional architecture.”
'China reaps what it sows'
Lee’s statement suggests that there may be much more support in the region for having a deterrent, military presence than openly claimed.
“No one country in the region wants to be under the domination of China and the U.S. presence is thus a necessity,” said Kasit Piromya, Thailand’s former minister of foreign affairs.
In the last 40 years, China has become the second-largest economy in the world and makes gains in technological advancement. However, “the current Chinese leadership has become revisionist with assertive and aggressive ambition,” argued Kasit.
In his opinion, “the ball is more in the Chinese court whether China wants to keep on continuing to dominate the region or to take stock of the limitation of power and the resources to back up the power.”
“The United States has more allies while China only has a marriage of convenience with Russia,” he said.
Apart from the new tripartite alliance, the U.S is also part of an Indo-Pacific security grouping known as the Quad, together with Australia, India and Japan. President Joe Biden will be hosting a summit of the Quad leaders in Washington, D.C., next week.
“The U.S.-led alliances are playing an important role in countering and containing China’s assertiveness”, said Nguyen Ngoc Truong, a former Vietnamese ambassador and well-known political affairs analyst.
Vietnam has been making effort to balance the relationships with both China and the U.S. with the country’s leaders always insisting that they would not side with any country against China.
Yet Vietnam and China are embroiled for years in a tense territorial dispute in the South China Sea and AUKUS should bring “a new confidence to countries contesting China’s excessive claims,” according to the former Vietnamese diplomat.
“Beijing may become even more aggressive. But China reaps what it sows.”
Ahmad Syamsuddin and Tria Dianti in Jakarta and Jason Gutierrez in Manila contributed to this report by BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.
3. CIA warned children were possibly present seconds before US missile killed 10
I am sure we are reviewing the TTPs that led to this in excruciating detail. This post-mortem will be necessarily brutal. This is necessary if we are going to have any kind of "over the horizon" counterterrorism capability.
As an aside I am reminded of this briefing at a press conference (which I recently saw reposted on social media) from then Brig Gen Daniel Leaf about hitting a civilian target in Kosovo in 1999. We should learn from this.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Brigadier General Dan Leaf, Commander of the 315th Air Expeditionary Wing at Aviano Air Base, Italy. I'm an experienced pilot with over 3500 flying hours, and I've flown frequently over Kosovo since 24 March.
Next slide.
My purpose today is to clarify the events of 14 April 1999 in Kosovo today I will tell you what I know, what we have enough information to believe, in other words, what we think, and I will address some unconfirmed information that has made it very difficult to determine, in detail the events on 14 April 1999.
I am going to brief you on a series of attacks from 1110Z to 1300Z on that date. During this period, at two separate locations, NATO aircraft dropped 9 GBU-12 500-pound laser guided bombs. The two separate target areas included one small group of vehicles north west of Dakovica, and the other, a very large convoy on a major road east south east of Dakovica going towards Prizren. To put the bottom line up front, NATO aircraft struck the first target area with two bombs, and may have hit a civilian-type vehicle, a vehicle associated with the burning of houses. In the second target area they struck the lead elements of the convoy. Vehicles that appeared to be military. Some of them may have been civilian type vehicles, and it is possible there were civilian casualties at both locations. Now, let me tell you what I have learned about these events.
My involvement in this review began very early in the process. I was scheduled to fly that night, and while in quarters heard the first news reports of potential collateral damage. I called my headquarters and asked them to ensure we reviewed our operations for any possible involvement. I received a return call almost immediately from my Operations Group Commander - my subordinate who directly supervises our flying operations. He told me that the review had already begun as part of our normal combat mission debriefing effort.
We review the tape from every sortie not just to assess damage to enemy forces, but to validate our tactics and techniques and ensure we make every effort to strike the right target the right way. I've drawn my conclusions from exhaustive reviews of mission tapes, from interviewing the pilots, examining intelligence data, counsel with other senior leaders, and indeed, from review of the reports you and your colleagues have prepared on this matter. This is a very complicated scenario and we will never be able to determine all of the exact details.
Next slide.
(Continued at the link above.)
CIA warned children were possibly present seconds before US missile killed 10
CNN · by Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen and Natasha Bertrand, CNN
(CNN)Just after the US military launched a Hellfire missile to stop a white Toyota Corolla it believed to be an imminent threat to US troops leading the evacuation at the Kabul airport, the CIA issued an urgent warning: Civilians were likely in the area, including possibly children inside the vehicle, according to three sources familiar with the situation.
It was too late. The warning on August 29 came seconds before the missile hit the car, killing 10 civilians, including seven children.
In the weeks following, the military insisted that it had been a justified strike on a confirmed terrorist target, acknowledging that some civilians might have been killed. But on Friday, after weeks of media coverage casting doubt on the legitimacy of the strike, the military acknowledged no one in the car was affiliated with ISIS-K as originally believed. "It was a mistake," Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top general of US Central Command, said bluntly at the Pentagon.
It's not clear whether the military informed the intelligence community that it had decided to pull the trigger -- if for no other reason than that the situation was rapidly evolving. The military calls such strikes, which commanders in the field were authorized to take without consulting up the chain of command, "dynamic."
In some cases, the military might ask the intelligence community to "task" its surveillance drones and other assets to watch a particular car or a particular location. The intelligence community would share data on the targets with the Defense Department in real time, but it is ultimately the military ground force commander's decision to take the strike.
Some sources say the miscommunication highlights a now-pressing decision for the Biden administration as it weighs how to conduct future strikes in Afghanistan without US troops on the ground there: Will the Defense Department or CIA own the mission?
The CIA declined to comment for this story. A spokesman for US Central Command did not respond to CNN's request for comment.
Two institutions
Counterterrorism, intelligence and military officials unanimously agree: Without US troops on the ground, identifying the correct target and launching successful strikes on legitimate ISIS-K or al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan has become infinitely harder. Trying to split the mission between two organizations, some current and former officials say, runs the risk that the grave tragedy in Kabul will happen much more frequently.
"If they tasked the agency with looking at the target for indications of 'go' or 'no go' criteria, they should have had the ability to get that information and affect whether they launched a strike. If there was no way to know that they were about to launch, there's something really wrong there," said Mick Mulroy, a former CIA officer and Pentagon official and an ABC News analyst. Mulroy cautioned he had no first-hand knowledge.
But while lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pledged to get to the bottom of what mistakes were made in the lead up to this specific strike, current and former officials also point out that civilian casualties were a consistent reality of the US mission in Afghanistan.
"It is a pretty good encapsulation of the entire 20-year war," one US official said, referring to the August 29 strike.
The intelligence community and the Defense Department have for years worked together to execute counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan -- part of a longstanding push to put the authority for drone strikes under military command under the theory that there would be more accountability and transparency surrounding civilian deaths. But the flow of information and decision-making between the two organizations sometimes hits the air gap between institutions, and in any event, the CIA and the Defense Department operate under different standards for executing strikes of this nature.
Some former intelligence officials take it a step further, claiming that CIA drone strikes kill far fewer civilians that the military's -- but the agency's figures aren't public, and outside groups that track drone strike casualties say the US military routinely undercounts its collateral deaths, making an accurate comparison difficult to draw.
The Biden administration insists that it has the tools to carry out successful "over the horizon" missions. McKenzie on Friday argued that the failure of the Aug. 29 strike was not predictive of the challenges of "over the horizon."
"This was a self-defense strike based on an imminent threat to attack us," McKenzie said. "That is not the way we would strike in an (over the horizon) mission" -- because the standards would be higher for conducting such a strike, he said, and "we'll have a lot more opportunity probably than we had under this extreme time pressure to take a look at the target."
But sources tell CNN the Biden administration is still grappling with the mechanics of how it will structure the counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan going forward. Some intelligence officials privately belittle "over the horizon" in Afghanistan as "over the rainbow."
Building a strike
For eight hours on August 29, intelligence officials tracked the movements of Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a US aid group, based on a tenuous connection to ISIS-K: Ahmadi had a short interaction with people in what the military believed was an ISIS safe house.
That flimsy clue led military commanders to misinterpret Ahmadi's movements over the course of a relatively normal day. They watched him load water jugs into the back of the car to bring home and believed they were explosives. What military commanders insisted was a large secondary explosion after the Hellfire hit the Corolla -- indicating, senior leaders believed, explosives in the trunk -- was actually more likely a propane tank located behind the parked car.
Military commanders did not know Ahmadi's identity when they began tracking his movements.
"We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
For weeks after the strike, senior military leaders have publicly and privately defended the strike and the intelligence it was based on. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley told reporters the strike was "righteous." The Pentagon insisted that there was a large, secondary explosion that could only have been caused by explosives in the trunk of the car, and that secondary explosion was the cause of the high civilian casualty rate.
In the end, almost everything they asserted turned out to be false.
McKenzie on Friday rejected the notion that the mission was a "complete and utter failure."
"This particular strike was certainly a terrible mistake and we certainly regret that, and I've been very clear that we take full responsibility for it. At the same time, we were carrying out a number of complex operations designed to defend ourselves," McKenzie said. "So while I agree... this strike certainly did not come up to our standards... I would not qualify the entire operation in those terms."
CNN · by Katie Bo Lillis, Zachary Cohen and Natasha Bertrand, CNN
4. Afghan family ravaged by U.S. drone strike mistake wants headstones for the dead — and possible new life in America
Can we get this family out? They most certainly must be at risk for their work with the US.
Excerpts:
Family members in interviews on Saturday expressed no visible animosity toward the U.S. government for killing their loved ones. But forgiveness may be too strong a word.
Rather, the Ahmadis grasp onto a sense of pragmatism. They want compensation from the U.S. government and help in leaving Afghanistan and getting resettled in the United States or another safe country, family members said.
“You can see the situation in Afghanistan is not good,” said Samim Ahmadi, 24, the step son of Zamarai. “Whether in America or another country, we want peace and comfort for our remaining years. Everyone makes mistakes. The Americans cannot bring back our loved ones, but they can take us out of here.”
On Saturday came further worrisome signs from Afghanistan. A series of blasts rocked the eastern city of Jalalabad, potentially targeting Taliban vehicles, killing at least three people and wounding 20. There was no initial claims of responsibility, but the province is a bastion of the Islamic State.
Before last month’s drone strike, both Emal and Zamarai had applications in process to acquire special visas to enter the United States because of their work with American companies, said family members.
Afghan family ravaged by U.S. drone strike mistake wants headstones for the dead — and possible new life in America
KABUL — By the time the American apology arrived, the lives of the Ahmadi family were already upended. And being falsely accused by the U.S. military of ties to the Islamic State was not the worst part of the ordeal.
There was their shattered family house. There were the nightmares, the bouts of crying and the screams triggered by the memory of a U.S. drone strike on Aug. 29 that killed 10 of their relatives, including seven children.
There were the fresh fears of persecution by the Taliban after the media spotlight on the family noted that some members, including survivors, worked for U.S.-based firms.
The Hellfire missile — the weapon used in the Pentagon’s capstone attack at the end of two-decade war — also killed the family’s only breadwinner, Zamarai Ahmadi.
“We didn’t have money to bury our relatives,” said his 32-year-old brother Emal on Saturday, steps away from the mangled carcass of a white Toyota sedan. “We had to borrow the funds.”
Without doubt, the Pentagon’s mea culpa Friday — that a series of miscalculations led to the wrongful targeting of Zamarai Ahmadi, an aid worker with a U.S.-based group — has lifted a heavy weight off the family.
“The Americans kept emphasizing they killed an ISIS-K terrorist,” said Emal, referring to the Islamic State’s Afghanistan branch. “Now we are happy they have acknowledged their mistake and confirmed that they killed innocent people.”
What the family seeks now is to exit their American-made hell.
Family members in interviews on Saturday expressed no visible animosity toward the U.S. government for killing their loved ones. But forgiveness may be too strong a word.
Rather, the Ahmadis grasp onto a sense of pragmatism. They want compensation from the U.S. government and help in leaving Afghanistan and getting resettled in the United States or another safe country, family members said.
“You can see the situation in Afghanistan is not good,” said Samim Ahmadi, 24, the step son of Zamarai. “Whether in America or another country, we want peace and comfort for our remaining years. Everyone makes mistakes. The Americans cannot bring back our loved ones, but they can take us out of here.”
On Saturday came further worrisome signs from Afghanistan. A series of blasts rocked the eastern city of Jalalabad, potentially targeting Taliban vehicles, killing at least three people and wounding 20. There was no initial claims of responsibility, but the province is a bastion of the Islamic State.
Before last month’s drone strike, both Emal and Zamarai had applications in process to acquire special visas to enter the United States because of their work with American companies, said family members.
The drone strike has heightened the urgency to leave, they added.
“We are worried,” said Ajmal Ahmadi, another brother. “We feel under threat because we are so exposed to the public by the media. Everyone got to know that we have worked for foreigners, served in the Afghan army as well as the Afghan intelligence agency.”
They also want justice. Those responsible for their tragedy, such as the commander who oversaw the strike, the drone operator or anyone else who had visuals on the ground, need to be held accountable in a U.S. court, family members said.
“The U.S. government must punish those who launched the drone strike,” said Emal Ahmadi, slim and bearded, his firm voice at times softening with emotion. “They knew and saw there were children on the ground. Can anyone bring them back?”
Yet so far, family members said, they have had no contact with U.S. officials from any branch of the government, not even to offer their apology personally.
“They should have contacted us and at least asked us about our situation,” said Emal, shaking his head.
Until Friday, the Pentagon had defended last month’s operation as a “righteous strike.” Defense officials said they had tracked a white Toyota sedan for hours after it left a suspected Islamic State safe house and destroyed it to prevent an imminent suicide attack.
In reality, the car’s driver, Zamarai Ahmadi, was a longtime employee of Nutrition and Education International, a charity based in California. He was carrying large water canisters that were apparently mistaken for bombs, officials acknowledged, echoing earlier investigations by The Washington Post and other media outlets that raised questions about the attack.
Just before the drone strike, Ahmadi had pulled into his gated family compound, where he and his three brothers grew up in a working-class enclave west of Kabul’s airport. Now, they were all living there with their own families. Their kids played with each other every day in the courtyard.
On this evening, several jumped into Ahmadi’s car. That’s when the missile struck, a pinpoint attack that eviscerated the sedan and sprayed shrapnel into doors and walls, shattering windows.
Zamarai and three of his sons — Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 11 — were killed. The three children of another brother — Arween, 7, Binyamin, 6 and Ayat, 2 — also died, along with Emal’s 3-year-old daughter, Malika, and his nephew Nasser, 30. A cousin’s infant daughter, Sumaiya, was also among those killed.
The entire family depended on Zamarai’s $500 monthly salary, said Emal. With their house destroyed, the remaining 15 family members moved to his sister’s small, four-room home, an hour’s drive away.
“Every night we sleep on the roof because there is not enough space in the house,” said Ajmal Ahmadi. “For the first 15 days, I could not sleep. I kept having flashbacks of my brother, my nieces and nephews.”
The wives of Emal and another relative, Romal, are more traumatized, said family members. Both women witnessed the deaths of their children. “They have constant nightmares, often waking up screaming at night,” said Emal.
His 7-year-old daughter, Ada, still asks when her sister, Malika, will return home.
“I can’t bear to tell her that her sister is dead,” said Emal. “I’ve told her Malika is at the hospital and one day she will come back.”
Imran, 8, Ajmal’s son, recalled how he would ride bikes and play soccer with his cousins. They would pluck fresh grapes from vines for snacks.
“Now,” he said, “they are in the next world.”
The family tries to avoid their destroyed house as much as possible.
“Whenever our relatives come here, they remember everything about the explosion,” said Ajmal. “It is just too hard. We can no longer live in this house.”
Meanwhile, the family’s financial woes are growing. The brothers have lived off the savings of her sister for the past three weeks. Those savings are gone, and the family is forced to borrow money again, said Emal. They owe nearly $2,000, a princely sum in Afghanistan.
And they still have unfinished family business.
At a cemetery, a half-hour drive away, 10 graves are scattered on a rocky hill side. Each has a stone painted in red to mark its location and a white cloth with the name of the family member. The family cannot afford to buy the gravestones.
But they say that one day they will.
Ezzatullah Mehrdad in Doha, Qatar, contributed to this report.
5. How anti-terror Washington turns itself into terrorist
We must read the Chinese propaganda about our mistakes. Unfortunately our actions feed right into two of their three "warfares:" psychological warfare and media/public opinion warfare. My question for State's Global Engagement Center (GEC) is: what are we doing about this? Do we have a process in place to address the Chinese three warfares and more specifically to deal with our mistakes that can (and will always) be exploited. I hate to appear to minimize the tragic loss of the innocent lives of 10 people, including 7 children, but there is an influence opportunity to not only counter the Chinese (and other's) propaganda but also to reinforce our values by admitting our mistakes and taking corrective action.
How anti-terror Washington turns itself into terrorist
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Cartoon: Drone tragedy (Xinhua/Yu Aicen)
U.S. atrocities against humanity in Afghanistan confessed: some soldiers have killed civilians "for the thrill of killing", killed children like "it's just a dog", blew up and shot Afghans at random, and cut and collected their fingers as trophies.
BEIJING, Sept. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Pentagon on Friday admitted the 10 victims including seven children in the Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan were all innocent civilians, not what it claimed at first the Islamic State (IS) terrorists. It added fresh evidence that Washington itself is a terrible threat to regional security despite the slogan of "anti-terrorism."
Likewise, Brandon Bryant, a former U.S. drone operator-turned-whistleblower, has spoken out against the atrocities he was forced to do when serving the U.S. army. Bryant told media that after he mistakenly killed a child in Afghanistan, his superiors told him "it's just a dog."
Such cold-blooded killings of the innocent can be seen everywhere and every moment in the whole process of U.S. "counter-terrorism war" in Afghanistan, and the campaign has switched to an anti-human direction.
Afghan children are seen at a displaced person camp in Mazar-i-Sharif, capital of Balkh province, Afghanistan, Sept. 16, 2021. (Photo by Kawa Basharat/Xinhua)
The two-decade-long war in Afghanistan has seen horrible bloodshed and civilian casualties. Incomplete statistics show that since entering the battlefield in October 2001, the U.S. troops have caused more than 30,000 civilian deaths.
What is more grieving is the deaths of children. Between 2016 and 2020, about 1,600 children were killed in the U.S.-led airstrikes in Afghanistan, according to the Action on Armed Violence, a London-based charity.
Some American troops in Afghanistan have killed civilians "for the thrill of killing." In 2010, 12 U.S. soldiers were charged over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghans at random, and cut and collected their fingers as trophies.
According to other soldiers' testimony, Calvin Gibbs, a former U.S. staff sergeant, even said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them" when he was serving in Iraq.
Photo taken on Aug. 31, 2021 shows a military plane at Kabul airport in Kabul, capital of Afghanistan. (Photo by Saifurahman Safi/Xinhua)
Sarcastically, the just-ended U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which cost more than 2,000 U.S. soldiers and over 2 trillion U.S. dollars, was finally proved a fiasco, as the number of terrorist groups on Afghan soil jumped from a single digit to more than 20 in the past 20 years.
The war, which was launched in the name of combating terrorism in Afghanistan, has only made the country poorer, weaker and more chaotic.
As of 2020, 47.3 percent of the Afghan population was living below the national poverty line, showed data from the Asian Development Bank. In 2019, 34.3 percent of the country's employed people earned less than 1.9 dollars per day.
An injured man receives medical treatment at a local hospital in Kandahar city, southern Afghanistan, April 16, 2021. (Photo by Sanaullah Seiam/Xinhua)
When meeting terrorism with terror, Washington's "war on terror" was bound to fail. Days before the U.S. troops finally retreated from Afghanistan, terrorist attacks near the Kabul airport killed and injured hundreds of Afghan civilians. However, some of the injured revealed that U.S. forces opened fire on civilians after blasts, and that led to more casualties.
It is most regrettable that some Western media have been using every means to whitewash U.S. atrocities against humanity in all victim-countries. Lives of the Afghan and Iraqi people matter as those of any nations. Washington must seriously reflect upon and take responsibilities for what it has done across the world, and ensure bloody tragedies will not happen again. ■
6. ‘Horrible Mistake’: Pentagon Admits Drone Strike Killed Children, Not Terrorists
8 hours of surveillance.
This does not even compare but I recall an incident on the DMZ in Korea in the 1980's when a thermal imagery operator in a guard post was providing overwitch of a patrol in an ambush position (I think along what we called infiltration alley or maybe the dolphin's head). He observed heat sources in front of the ambush position but the patrol could not observe them with either theirnaked eyes of the 1980s era night vision equipment. But rather than wait for verification from the patrol the imagery operation got excited and without authorization told the patrol if they did not open fire immediately they heat sources would be out of the kill zone. So the patrol engaged. And when the tapes were examined we could see as soon as the first shots were fired the heat sources "bounded" out of the kill zone looking just like deer. The worst thing was the patrol fired 67 rounds and did not hit anything and they failed to detonate their claymores as well.
But the point is in the heat of the moment people make mistakes, some small and some tragically big. That said we have been conducting drone strikes like this for 20 years and we have to have better procedures. But again that being said we have to remember the mindset at the time - we just lost 13 military personnel and more than a hundred civilians to a suidice bomber and we had intelligence that another attack was likely imminent so it is not hard to put yourself in the shoes of the analysts, targeteers, drone operators, and chain of command who all wanted to do whatever they could to protect the lives of their comrades from the next attack. .
‘Horrible Mistake’: Pentagon Admits Drone Strike Killed Children, Not Terrorists
After just eight hours of surveillance and a tip about a “white Toyota Corolla,” the U.S. fired a Hellfire missile on Aug. 29 at the wrong target.
The decision to fire a Hellfire missile that accidentally killed 10 Afghan civilians last month was based not on the solid identification of ISIS-K fighters, but a series of coincidences and assumptions, the head of U.S. Central Command told reporters Friday.
The mistakes in the Aug. 29 strike in Kabul raises questions about how the U.S. will prevent more civilian deaths in future planned “over-the-horizon” strikes aimed at terror groups in Afghanistan.
McKenzie said part of the cause for the Aug. 29 tragic mistake was the limitation of time. In future over-the-horizon strikes, “we will have an opportunity to further develop the target in time,” he said.
“To look at pattern of life. That time was not available to us, because this was an imminent threat to our forces. It's important that I emphasize that we did not have the luxury of time to develop pattern of life and do a number of other things. We struck under the theory of reasonable certainty. Probably our strikes in Afghanistan going forward will be under a higher standard.”
McKenzie outlined the series of events that led up to the deaths of the civilians.
Just 36 hours before firing the Hellfire, the “over-the-horizon” strike cell commander had been notified that “ISIS-K would utilize a white Toyota Corolla as a key element in the next attack,” Marine Corps Gen. Frank McKenzie told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday.
In response, the U.S. tasked as many as nine MQ-9 Reapers to watch an “area of interest” associated with ISIS, and spotted a white Corolla. After it left that initial area, the drones tracked it to six other locations, including a humanitarian site that U.S. forces identified as an aid location after the attack, McKenzie said.
In a horrible coincidence, as the civilians in the Corolla were unloading jugs and supplies at Nutrition and Education International, where one of the drone strike victims, Zemari Ahmadi, was employed, U.S. forces were receiving additional intelligence that an ISIS cell leader was receiving supplies at the same time, McKenzie said.
The New York Times first identified aid worker Zemari Ahmadi and nine family members. Including seven children, as the victims of the Aug. 29 attack.
At the final stop, the Ahmadi home, which was close to Hamid Karzai International Airport, “the vehicle was observed being approached by a single adult male assessed at the time to be a co-conspirator,” McKenzie said.
He did not further discuss how the man was identified as a co-conspirator, and at no time did McKenzie say that any additional identifying intelligence, such as facial recognition or identifying known associates, was engaged to back up the decision to fire.
“When the vehicle came up to the final point, that point seven on your map, which is actually, as I've noted, as close to the closest to the airfield it had been all day. We were very concerned about a white Corolla being involved in an attack, so the cumulative force of all those, all those, the intelligence that we gathered throughout the day, the position of the vehicle, it’s newness to the airport, the imminence of the threat and the other [signals intelligence] that we're getting throughout the day, all led us to the moment of deciding to take the strike.”
“Clearly, our intelligence was wrong on this particular whiteToyota Corolla,” McKenzie said.
Just three days before, an ISIS-K suicide bomber killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans at the airport’s Abbey Gate, and there was an urgency to prevent what they thought was another imminent attack, McKenzie said.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement.
“We apologize, and we will endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake,” Austin said.
7. Islamic State trying to spread in India through constant propaganda online: NIA
IS is a global threat.
Islamic State trying to spread in India through constant propaganda online: NIA
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday said that it has probed as many as 37 cases of terror attacks associated with the Islamic State (IS) so far, with the most recent being registered by the agency in June 2021.
The NIA further stated that a “total of 168 accused have been arrested” in these 37 cases. “Charge sheets have been filed in 31 cases, and 27 accused have been convicted after trial,” a statement released by the NIA read.
The agency noted that its investigation has revealed that the Islamic terrorist group is attempting to “spread its tentacles in India through continuous propaganda online.” “Gullible youth are targeted on open social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,” the statement added.
The NIA said that once a person shows interest in the ideologies of the IS, he or she is then “enticed to communicate with online handlers” based overseas using encrypted social media platforms.
The statement said that on the basis of the person’s gullibility, the handlers use the him or her for uploading digital content, translation of the terrorist group’s texts to the regional language, preparation of module, preparation of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), terror funding and even attacks, among others.
The agency also made an appeal to the Indian citizens to immediately contact the NIA authorities at 011-24368800, if they notice any such activity on the internet.
With Afghanistan falling into the hands of Islamist extremist group Taliban after 20 years and the US and its allied forces pulled out from the country, there is a constant fear of land being used for terror attacks in the coming future.
Notably, on August 26, the Islamic State’s Afghanistan unit carried out suicide attack at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport while the evacuation of foreign nationals of various countries and Afghans were underway. The incident claimed the lives of 13 US troops and injured over 100 people, including several Afghan citizens.
8. Fueling the Fire: How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization — And What Can Be Done About It
We have met the enemy and he is us. - Pogo
Polarization Report — NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights
September 2021 Report Release
Fueling the Fire:
How Social Media Intensifies U.S. Political Polarization
— And What Can Be Done About It
Paul M. Barrett, Justin Hendrix, J. Grant Sims
Do major tech sites stoke political polarization?
Some critics of the social media industry contend that widespread use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has contributed to increased political polarization in the United States. But Facebook, the largest social media platform, has disputed this contention, saying that it is unsupported by social science research. Determining whether social media plays a role in worsening partisan animosity is important because political polarization has pernicious consequences. We conclude that social media platforms are not the main cause of rising partisan hatred, but use of these platforms intensifies divisiveness and thus contributes to its corrosive effects.——————————————————————-
The consequences of extreme partisan animosity
In the U.S., where divisiveness has reached new extremes, the consequences of polarization include declining trust in fellow citizens and major institutions; erosion of democratic norms like respect for elections; loss of faith in the existence of commonly held facts; and political violence such as the January 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill.
The way forward
Our report offers a series of recommendations for how the government and the social media industry can reduce political polarization. These include President Biden prioritizing the problem and Congress empowering the Federal Trade Commission to draft and enforce new standards for industry conduct, especially requirements that social media companies disclose far more about how their algorithms rank, recommend, and remove content. The companies, meanwhile, need to adjust their automated systems to depolarize platforms more systematically -- a step they now take only on an ad hoc basis to reduce antagonism during emergencies.
9. Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.
Also better images and formatting at the link.
I wonder what might have happened if the NY Times visual forensics team had not reported on this tragedy?
I do commend General MacKenzie for making a strong statement of responsibility and regret.
But as I mentioned previously there is a lot we can do with this to reinforce our values by admitting our mistakes. The GEC should be working this. Few countries, if any, are as transparent as the US. Few countries, if any, admit their mistakes so definitively. And few countries respond to the press conducting investigations to challenge and hold the government and military accountable. Freedom of the press is a frustrating thing but I would not give it up for the world.
Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.
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How a U.S. Drone Strike Killed the Wrong Person
A week after a New York Times visual investigation, the U.S. military admitted to a “tragic mistake” in a drone strike in Kabul last month that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.
[explosion] In one of the final acts of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the United States fired a missile from a drone at a car in Kabul. It was parked in the courtyard of a home, and the explosion killed 10 people, including 43-year-old Zemari Ahmadi and seven children, according to his family. The Pentagon claimed that Ahmadi was a facilitator for the Islamic State, and that his car was packed with explosives, posing an imminent threat to U.S. troops guarding the evacuation at the Kabul airport. “The procedures were correctly followed, and it was a righteous strike.” What the military apparently didn’t know was that Ahmadi was a longtime aid worker, who colleagues and family members said spent the hours before he died running office errands, and ended his day by pulling up to his house. Soon after, his Toyota was hit with a 20-pound Hellfire missile. What was interpreted as the suspicious moves of a terrorist may have just been an average day in his life. And it’s possible that what the military saw Ahmadi loading into his car were water canisters he was bringing home to his family — not explosives. Using never-before seen security camera footage of Ahmadi, interviews with his family, co-workers and witnesses, we will piece together for the first time his movements in the hours before he was killed. Zemari Ahmadi was an electrical engineer by training. For 14 years, he had worked for the Kabul office of Nutrition and Education International. “NEI established a total of 11 soybean processing plants in Afghanistan.” It’s a California based NGO that fights malnutrition. On most days, he drove one of the company’s white Toyota corollas, taking his colleagues to and from work and distributing the NGO’s food to Afghans displaced by the war. Only three days before Ahmadi was killed, 13 U.S. troops and more than 170 Afghan civilians died in an Islamic State suicide attack at the airport. The military had given lower-level commanders the authority to order airstrikes earlier in the evacuation, and they were bracing for what they feared was another imminent attack. To reconstruct Ahmadi’s movements on Aug. 29, in the hours before he was killed, The Times pieced together the security camera footage from his office, with interviews with more than a dozen of Ahmadi’s colleagues and family members. Ahmadi appears to have left his home around 9 a.m. He then picked up a colleague and his boss’s laptop near his house. It’s around this time that the U.S. military claimed it observed a white sedan leaving an alleged Islamic State safehouse, around five kilometers northwest of the airport. That’s why the U.S. military said they tracked Ahmadi’s Corolla that day. They also said they intercepted communications from the safehouse, instructing the car to make several stops. But every colleague who rode with Ahmadi that day said what the military interpreted as a series of suspicious moves was just a typical day in his life. After Ahmadi picked up another colleague, the three stopped to get breakfast, and at 9:35 a.m., they arrived at the N.G.O.’s office. Later that morning, Ahmadi drove some of his co-workers to a Taliban-occupied police station to get permission for future food distribution at a new displacement camp. At around 2 p.m., Ahmadi and his colleagues returned to the office. The security camera footage we obtained from the office is crucial to understanding what happens next. The camera’s timestamp is off, but we went to the office and verified the time. We also matched an exact scene from the footage with a timestamp satellite image to confirm it was accurate. A 2:35 p.m., Ahmadi pulls out a hose, and then he and a co-worker fill empty containers with water. Earlier that morning, we saw Ahmadi bring these same empty plastic containers to the office. There was a water shortage in his neighborhood, his family said, so he regularly brought water home from the office. At around 3:38 p.m., a colleague moves Ahmadi’s car further into the driveway. A senior U.S. official told us that at roughly the same time, the military saw Ahmadi’s car pull into an unknown compound 8 to 12 kilometers southwest of the airport. That overlaps with the location of the NGO’s office, which we believe is what the military called an unknown compound. With the workday ending, an employee switched off the office generator and the feed from the camera ends. We don’t have footage of the moments that followed. But it’s at this time, the military said that its drone feed showed four men gingerly loading wrapped packages into the car. Officials said they couldn’t tell what was inside them. This footage from earlier in the day shows what the men said they were carrying — their laptops one in a plastic shopping bag. And the only things in the trunk, Ahmadi’s co-workers said, were the water containers. Ahmadi dropped each one of them off, then drove to his home in a dense neighborhood near the airport. He backed into the home’s small courtyard. Children surrounded the car, according to his brother. A U.S. official said the military feared the car would leave again, and go into an even more crowded street or to the airport itself. The drone operators, who hadn’t been watching Ahmadi’s home at all that day, quickly scanned the courtyard and said they saw only one adult male talking to the driver and no children. They decided this was the moment to strike. A U.S. official told us that the strike on Ahmadi’s car was conducted by an MQ-9 Reaper drone that fired a single Hellfire missile with a 20-pound warhead. We found remnants of the missile, which experts said matched a Hellfire at the scene of the attack. In the days after the attack, the Pentagon repeatedly claimed that the missile strike set off other explosions, and that these likely killed the civilians in the courtyard. “Significant secondary explosions from the targeted vehicle indicated the presence of a substantial amount of explosive material.” “Because there were secondary explosions, there’s a reasonable conclusion to be made that there was explosives in that vehicle.” But a senior military official later told us that it was only possible to probable that explosives in the car caused another blast. We gathered photos and videos of the scene taken by journalists and visited the courtyard multiple times. We shared the evidence with three weapons experts who said the damage was consistent with the impact of a Hellfire missile. They pointed to the small crater beneath Ahmadi’s car and the damage from the metal fragments of the warhead. This plastic melted as a result of a car fire triggered by the missile strike. All three experts also pointed out what was missing: any evidence of the large secondary explosions described by the Pentagon. No collapsed or blown-out walls, including next to the trunk with the alleged explosives. No sign that a second car parked in the courtyard was overturned by a large blast. No destroyed vegetation. All of this matches what eyewitnesses told us, that a single missile exploded and triggered a large fire. There is one final detail visible in the wreckage: containers identical to the ones that Ahmadi and his colleague filled with water and loaded into his trunk before heading home. Even though the military said the drone team watched the car for eight hours that day, a senior official also said they weren’t aware of any water containers. The Pentagon has not provided The Times with evidence of explosives in Ahmadi’s vehicle or shared what they say is the intelligence that linked him to the Islamic State. But the morning after the U.S. killed Ahmadi, the Islamic State did launch rockets at the airport from a residential area Ahmadi had driven through the previous day. And the vehicle they used … … was a white Toyota. The U.S. military has so far acknowledged only three civilian deaths from its strike, and says there is an investigation underway. They have also admitted to knowing nothing about Ahmadi before killing him, leading them to interpret the work of an engineer at a U.S. NGO as that of an Islamic State terrorist. Four days before Ahmadi was killed, his employer had applied for his family to receive refugee resettlement in the United States. At the time of the strike, they were still awaiting approval. Looking to the U.S. for protection, they instead became some of the last victims in America’s longest war. “Hi, I’m Evan, one of the producers on this story. Our latest visual investigation began with word on social media of an explosion near Kabul airport. It turned out that this was a U.S. drone strike, one of the final acts in the 20-year war in Afghanistan. Our goal was to fill in the gaps in the Pentagon’s version of events. We analyzed exclusive security camera footage, and combined it with eyewitness accounts and expert analysis of the strike aftermath. You can see more of our investigations by signing up for our newsletter.”
A week after a New York Times visual investigation, the U.S. military admitted to a “tragic mistake” in a drone strike in Kabul last month that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.Credit...By The New York Times. Video frame: Nutrition & Education International.
WASHINGTON — The Pentagon acknowledged on Friday that the last U.S. drone strike before American troops withdrew from Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians, including seven children, after initially saying it had been necessary to prevent an attack on troops.
The extraordinary admission provided a horrific punctuation to the chaotic ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan and will put President Biden and the Pentagon at the center of a growing number of investigations into how the administration and the military carried out Mr. Biden’s order to withdraw from the country.
Almost everything senior defense officials asserted in the hours, and then days, and then weeks after the Aug. 29 drone strike turned out to be false. The explosives the military claimed were loaded in the trunk of a white Toyota sedan struck by the drone’s Hellfire missile were probably water bottles, and a secondary explosion in the courtyard in a densely populated Kabul neighborhood where the attack took place was probably a propane or gas tank, officials said.
In short, the car posed no threat at all, investigators concluded.
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Pentagon Admits It Made a ‘Tragic Mistake’ in Kabul Drone Strike
Following a New York Times investigation, the Pentagon acknowledged that a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on Aug. 29 was a “tragic mistake” that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.
A comprehensive review of all the available footage and reporting on the matter led us to a final conclusion that as many as 10 civilians were killed in the strike, including up to seven children. At the time of the strike, based upon all the intelligence and what was being reported, I was confident that the strike had averted an imminent threat to our forces at the airport. Based upon that assessment, I and other leaders in the department repeatedly asserted the validity of this strike. I’m here today to set the record straight, and acknowledge our mistakes. I will end my remarks with the same note of sincere and profound condolences to the family and friends of those who died in this tragic strike. We are exploring the possibility of ex-gratia payments. And I’ll finish by saying that while the team conducted the strike did so in the honest belief that they were preventing an imminent attack on our forces and civilian evacuees, we now understand that to be incorrect.
Following a New York Times investigation, the Pentagon acknowledged that a U.S. drone strike in Kabul on Aug. 29 was a “tragic mistake” that killed 10 civilians, including an aid worker and seven children.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III ordered a review of the military’s inquiry into the drone strike to determine, among other issues, who should be held accountable and “the degree to which strike authorities, procedures and processes need to be altered in the future.”
Congressional lawmakers, meanwhile, said they wanted their own accounting from the Pentagon.
Senior Defense Department leaders conceded that the driver of the car, Zemari Ahmadi, a longtime worker for a U.S. aid group, had nothing to do with the Islamic State, contrary to what military officials had previously asserted. Mr. Ahmadi’s only connection to the terrorist group appeared to be a fleeting and innocuous interaction with people in what the military believed was an ISIS safe house in Kabul, an initial link that led military analysts to make one mistaken judgment after another while tracking Mr. Ahmadi’s movements in the sedan for the next eight hours.
“I offer my profound condolences to the family and friends of those who were killed,” Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr., the head of U.S. Central Command, told reporters at a Pentagon news conference on Friday.
The general said the strike was carried out “in the profound belief” that ISIS was about to attack Kabul’s airport, as the organization had done three days earlier, killing more than 140 people, including 13 American service members.
Seven children, including this boy’s sister, were killed in the drone attack.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times
The general said the Times investigation helped investigators determine that they had struck a wrong target. “As we in fact worked on our investigation, we used all available information,” General McKenzie told reporters. “Certainly that included some of the stuff The New York Times did.”
The findings of the inquiry by the military’s Central Command mirrored the Times investigation, which also included interviews with more than a dozen of the driver’s co-workers and family members in Kabul. The Times inquiry raised doubts about the U.S. version of events, including whether explosives were present in the vehicle. It also identified the driver and obtained security camera footage from Mr. Ahmadi’s employers that documented crucial moments during his day that challenged the military’s account.
Mr. Austin and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said the missile was launched because the military had intelligence suggesting a credible, imminent threat to the airport, where U.S. and allied troops were frantically trying to evacuate people. General Milley later called the strike “righteous.”
On Friday, General Milley suggested that he spoke too soon.
“In a dynamic high-threat environment, the commanders on the ground had appropriate authority and had reasonable certainty that the target was valid, but after deeper post-strike analysis, our conclusion is that innocent civilians were killed,” General Milley said in a statement. “This is a horrible tragedy of war and it’s heart-wrenching and we are committed to being fully transparent about this incident.”
General McKenzie said the conditions on the ground before the strike contributed to the errant strike. “We did not have the luxury to develop pattern of life,” he said.
The Pentagon will work with the families and other government officials on reparation payments, General McKenzie said. Without any American troops in Afghanistan, he said that the task may be difficult, but that “we recognize the obligation.”
Military officials said they did not know the identity of the car’s driver when the drone fired, but they had deemed him suspicious because of his activities that day: He had visited a suspected Islamic State safe house in a white Toyota Corolla, the same model that other intelligence that day indicated was involved in an imminent plot, and at one point he loaded the vehicle with what they thought could be explosives.
Military officials on Friday defended their assessment that the safe house was a hub of ISIS planning, based on a combination of intercepted communications, information from informants and aerial imagery. Rockets were fired at the airport 24 hours after the U.S. drone strike, General McKenzie said.
But after reviewing additional aerial video and photographs, military investigators concluded that their initial judgment about the driver and his car were wrong, an error that prejudiced their views of every subsequent stop he made that day while driving around Kabul.
Times reporting had identified the driver as Mr. Ahmadi. The evidence suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.
“We now know that there was no connection between Mr. Ahmadi and ISIS-Khorasan, that his activities on that day were completely harmless and not at all related to the imminent threat we believed we faced, and that Mr. Ahmadi was just as innocent a victim as were the others tragically killed,” Mr. Austin said in a statement, referring to an affiliate of the Islamic State.
Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan
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Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.
Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be. One spokesman told The Times that the group wanted to forget its past, but that there would be some restrictions.
The officials said on Friday that a subsequent review concluded, as did the Times investigation, that the suspicious packages were nothing more than water, and possibly a package the size of a laptop computer.
Senior Pentagon leaders, who were already preparing to brief lawmakers on the chaotic end to the war in Afghanistan, will probably face tough questioning on the last drone strike of that engagement.
“I’m devastated by the acknowledgment from the Department of Defense that the strike conducted on Aug. 29 was an utter failure that resulted in the deaths of at least 10 civilians,” Representative Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, said in a statement. “I expect the department to brief us immediately on the operation, focusing on a full accounting of the targeting processes and procedures which led to the determination to carry out such a strike.”
Civilian deaths from drone strikes have been a recurring problem in more than two decades of fighting in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and are unlikely to go away as the Biden administration moves toward what officials call “over the horizon” operations in Afghanistan — strikes launched against terrorist targets in the country from great distances away.
Since the Aug. 29 strike, U.S. military officials justified their actions by citing an even larger blast that took place afterward in the courtyard where Mr. Ahmadi, who worked as an electrical engineer for Nutrition and Education International, a California-based aid group, made his final stop.
But an examination of the scene of the strike, conducted by the Times visual investigations team and a Times reporter the morning afterward, and followed up with a second visit four days later, found no evidence of a second, more powerful explosion.
Experts who examined photos and videos pointed out that, although there was clear evidence of a missile strike and a subsequent vehicle fire, there were no collapsed or blown-out walls, no destroyed vegetation, and only one dent in the entrance gate, indicating a single shock wave.
Military officials said investigators now believed the second explosion was a flare-up from a propane tank in the courtyard, or possibly the gas tank of a second vehicle in the courtyard.
While the U.S. military initially said the drone strike might have killed three civilians, officials now say that 10 people, including seven children, were killed. The military reached that conclusion after watching aerial imagery that shows three children coming out to greet the sedan, one of them taking the wheel of the car after Mr. Ahmadi got out.
When Mr. Ahmadi pulled into the courtyard of his home, the tactical commander made the decision to strike his vehicle, launching a single Hellfire missile at 4:53 p.m.
Military officials defended the procedures the drone strike commander made in deciding to carry out the strike, with “reasonable certainty” there would be no civilian casualties, even as they described the badly flawed chain of events that led to that decision.
The commander overseeing the drone strike, an experienced operator whom the Pentagon did not identify, faced a difficult decision in his mind: Take the shot while the sedan was parked in a relatively isolated courtyard, or wait until the sedan drove even closer to the airport — and denser crowds — increasing the risk to civilians.
In the end, however, officials said on Friday, tragically, it was the wrong call.
10. As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader
STEM education is a national security issue.
As US Schools Prioritize Diversity Over Merit, China Is Becoming the World’s STEM Leader
All three of us are mathematicians who came to the United States as young immigrants, having been attracted by the unmatched quality and openness of American universities. We came, as many others before and after, with nothing more than a good education and a strong desire to succeed. As David Hilbert famously said, “Mathematics knows no races or geographic boundaries; for mathematics, the cultural world is one country.” Having built our careers in US academia, we are proud to call ourselves American mathematicians.
The United States has been dominant in the mathematical sciences since the mass exodus of European scientists in the 1930s. Because mathematics is the basis of science—as well as virtually all major technological advances, including scientific computing, climate modelling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics—US leadership in math has supplied our country with an enormous strategic advantage. But for various reasons, three of which we set out below, the United States is now at risk of losing that dominant position.
First, and most obvious, is the deplorable state of our K-12 math education system. Far too few American public-school children are prepared for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This leaves us increasingly dependent on a constant inflow of foreign talent, especially from mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and India. In a 2015 survey conducted by the Council of Graduate Schools and the Graduate Record Examinations Board, about 55 percent of all participating graduate students in mathematics, computer sciences, and engineering at US schools were found to be foreign nationals. In 2017, the National Foundation for American Policy estimated that international students accounted for 81 percent of full-time graduate students in electrical engineering at U.S. universities; and 79 percent of full-time graduate students in computer science.
That report also concluded that many programs in these fields couldn’t even be maintained without international students. In our field, mathematics, we find that at most top departments in the United States, at least two-thirds of the faculty are foreign born. (And even among those faculty born in the United States, a large portion are first-generation Americans.) Similar patterns may be observed in other STEM disciplines.
The second reason for concern is that the nationwide effort to reduce racial disparities, however well-intentioned, has had the unfortunate effect of weakening the connection between merit and scholastic admission. It also has served (sometimes indirectly) to discriminate against certain groups—mainly Asian Americans. The social-justice rhetoric used to justify these diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs is often completely at odds with the reality one observes on campuses. The concept of fighting “white supremacy,” in particular, doesn’t apply to the math field, since American-born scholars of all races now collectively represent a small (and diminishing) minority of the country’s academic STEM specialists.
Third, other countries are now competing aggressively with the United States to recruit top talent, using the same policies that worked well for us in the past. Most notably, China, America’s main economic and strategic competitor, is in the midst of an extraordinary, mostly successful, effort to improve its universities and research institutions. As a result, it is now able to retain some of the best Chinese scientists and engineers, as well as attract elite recruits from the United States, Europe, and beyond.
In a 2018 report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), China ranked first in mathematical proficiency among 15-year-olds, while the United States was in 25th place. And a recent large-scale study of adults’ cognitive abilities, conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, found that many Americans lack the basic skills in math and reading required for successful participation in the economy. This poor performance can’t be explained by budgetary factors: When it comes to education spending per pupil, the United States ranks fifth among 37 developed OECD nations.
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There are numerous underlying factors that help explain these failures—including some that, as mathematicians, we feel competent to address. One obvious problem lies in the way teachers are trained. The vast majority of K-12 math teachers in the United States are graduates of programs that teach little in the way of substantive mathematics beyond so-called math methods courses (which focus on such topics as “understanding the complexities of diverse, multiple-ability classrooms”). This has been true for some time. But the trend has become more noticeable in recent years, as curricula increasingly shift from actual mathematics knowledge to courses about social justice and identity politics.
At the same time, math majors—who can arrive in the classroom pre-equipped with substantive mathematics knowledge—must go through the process of teacher certification before they can teach math in most public schools, a costly and time-consuming prerequisite. The policy justification for this is that all teachers need pedagogical training to perform effectively. But to our knowledge, this claim isn’t supported by the experience of other advanced countries. Moreover, in those US schools where certification isn’t required, such as in many charter and private schools, math majors and PhDs are in great demand, and the quality of math instruction they provide is often superior.
Even if some pedagogical training is desirable, particularly for elementary-school teachers, it is easier for a math specialist to pick up teaching skills on the job than it is for a trained teacher to acquire fundamental math knowledge. Based on our own experience, the best high school teachers are typically those who have solid mathematics backgrounds and enjoy teaching math.
An even bigger problem, in our view, is that the educational establishment has an almost complete lock on the content taught in our schools, with little input from the university math community. This unusual feature of American policymaking has led to a constant stream of ill-advised and dumbed-down “reforms,” which have served to degrade the teaching of mathematics to such an extent that it has become difficult to distinguish a student who is capable from one who is not.
Those who find that last assertion difficult to accept should peruse the revised Mathematics Framework proposed by California’s Department of Education. If implemented, the California framework would do away with any tracking or differentiation of students up to the 11th grade. In order to achieve what the authors call “equity” in math education, the framework would effectively close the main pathway to calculus in high school to all students except those who take extra math outside school—which, in practice, means students from families that can afford enrichment programs (or those going to charter and private schools). California is just one state, of course. But as has been widely noted, when it comes to policymaking, what happens in California today often will come to other states tomorrow.
The framework proposed for California’s 10,588 public schools and their six-million-plus students promotes “data science” as a preferred pathway, touting it as the mathematics of the 21st century. While this might sound like a promising idea, the actual “data-science” pathway described in the framework minimizes algebraic training to such an extent that it leaves students completely unprepared for most STEM undergraduate degrees. Algebra is essential to modern mathematics; and there is hardly any application of mathematics (including real data science) that is not based to a large extent on either algebra or calculus (with the latter being impossible to explain or implement without the former).
The authors write that “a fundamental aim of this framework is to respond to issues of inequity in mathematics learning”; that “we reject ideas of natural gifts and talents [and the] cult of the genius”; and that “active efforts in mathematics teaching are required in order to counter the cultural forces that have led to and continue to perpetuate current inequities.” And yet the research they cite to justify these claims has been demonstrated to be shallow, misleadingly applied, vigorously disputed, or just plainly wrong. Even the specific model lessons offered in the proposed framework fail to withstand basic mathematical scrutiny, as they muddle basic logic, present problems that can’t be solved by techniques described as being available to students, or list solutions without discussing the need for a proof (thus developing a false understanding of what it means to “solve” a problem—a misconception that university educators such as ourselves must struggle to undo).
The low quality of public K-12 math education in the United States has affected all demographic groups. But it has had a particularly strong negative effect on non-immigrant blacks and Hispanics, as well as young women of all races. This has led to a disappointing level of representation for these groups in STEM disciplines, which in turn has provoked understandable concern. We applaud efforts to address this problem, insofar as they help remove remaining obstacles and prejudices, and encourage more women and underrepresented minorities to choose careers in mathematics and other STEM disciplines. Indeed, partly as a result of such steps, the representation of women in our profession has increased dramatically over the last 50 years.
But what started as a well-meaning and sometimes beneficial effort has, over time, transformed into a bureaucratic machine whose goal has gone well beyond fighting discrimination. The new goal is to eliminate disparities in representation by any means possible. This is why education officials in some school boards and cities—and even entire states, such as California and Virginia—are moving to scrap academic tracking and various K-12 gifted programs, which they deem “inequitable.” Operating on the same motivations, many universities are abandoning the use of standardized tests such as the SAT and GRE in admissions.
This trend, which reaches across many fields, is especially self-defeating in mathematics, because declining standards in K-12 math education are now feeding into a vicious cycle that threatens to affect all STEM disciplines. As already noted, low-quality K-12 public-school education produces students who exhibit sub-par math skills, with underprivileged minorities suffering the most. This in turn leads to large disparities in admissions at universities, graduate programs, faculty, and STEM industry positions. Those disparities are then, in turn, condemned as manifestations of systemic racism—which results in administrative measures aimed at lowering evaluation criteria. This lowering of standards leads to even worse outcomes and larger disparities, thus pushing the vicious cycle through another loop.
The short-term fix is a quota system. But when applied to any supposedly merit-based selection process, quotas are usually counterproductive. Various studies, which accord with our own experience in academia, show that placing talented students from underrepresented groups in math programs that are too advanced for their level of preparedness can lead to discouragement, and often even abandonment of the field. Typically, these students would be better served by slightly less competitive, more nurturing programs that accord with their objectively exhibited levels of performance.
Unfortunately, the trend is pointing in the opposite direction. In fact, at many of our leading academic and research institutions, including the National Academies of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, scientific excellence is being supplanted by diversity as the determining factor for eligibility in regard to prizes and other distinctions. And some universities, following the example of the University of California, are now implementing measures to evaluate candidates for faculty positions and promotions based not only on the quality of their research, teaching, and service, but also on their specifically articulated commitment to diversity metrics. Various institutions have even introduced pathways to tenure based on diversity activities alone. The potential damage such measures can bring to academic standards in STEM is immense. And the history of science is full of examples that show how performative adherence to a politically favored ideology, easily faked by opportunistic and mediocre scientists, can lead to the devaluation of entire academic fields.
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Needless to say, China pursues none of the equity programs that are sweeping the United States. Quite the contrary: It is building on the kind of accelerated, explicitly merit-based programs, centered on gifted students, that are being repudiated by American educators. Having learned its lesson from the Cultural Revolution, when science and merit-based education were all but obliterated in favor of ideological indoctrination, China is pursuing a far-sighted, long-term strategy to create a world-leading corps of elite STEM experts. In some strategically important fields, such as quantum computing, the country is arguably already ahead of the United States.
As part of this effort, China is identifying and nurturing talented math students as early as middle school. At the university entrance level, China relies on a hierarchical, layered system based on a highly competitive, fairly administered, national exam. STEM disciplines are encouraged: According to the World Economic Forum, China has the highest number of STEM grads in the world—at least 4.7 million in 2016. (By comparison, the United States came in third at 569,000. And as noted previously, a large portion of these graduates are foreign nationals.) China also has vastly increased the quality of its top universities, with six now ranked among the best 100 in the world. Tsinghua and Peking (ranked 17th and 18th respectively) now narrowly outrank Columbia, Princeton, and Cornell. As visitors to these Chinese universities (including ourselves) can attest, the average math undergraduate is now performing at a much higher level than his or her counterpart at comparable US institutions.
One reason for this is the work of scientists such as Shing-Tung Yau, a prominent Harvard mathematician who has spent decades helping to build up research mathematics in China. A key feature of the selective and consequential undergraduate competitions he’s developed over the last 10 years is that students are encouraged to focus their studies precisely on the content they will need as research mathematicians. High placement in these competitions virtually guarantees a student a spot at a top graduate school, and the program thereby helps systematically attract talented people to mathematics.
More recently, another group of prominent mathematicians (including some based in the United States), acting with the help of the Alibaba technology conglomerate and the China Association for Science and Technology, have created a global undergraduate mathematics competition with similar features. High schoolers who excel in annual math olympiads also are fast-tracked into top university programs.
While China already produces almost twice as many STEM PhDs as the United States, its universities still lag their US counterparts with respect to the quality of their graduate education programs. This is why many talented Chinese scholars continue to enroll in US programs. But this talent flow will likely soon ebb, or even dry up completely, as Chinese universities are now actively attracting senior Chinese, US, and European scientists to their faculty. (And unlike their American institutional counterparts, they recruit on the merit principle, unhampered by ideologically dictated diversity mandates.) In some cases, we are seeing prominent mathematicians at good or even top US schools moving to Peking and Tsinghua Universities after long and successful US careers. Many of these scholars are Chinese, but some are not.
We do not wish to gloss over China’s status as an authoritarian country that exhibits little concern for personal freedoms. But acknowledging this fact only serves to emphasize the significance of the shift we are describing: The drawbacks of American education policies are so pronounced that US schools are now losing their ability to attract elite scholars despite the fact that the United States offers these academics a freer and more democratic environment.
Moreover, even America’s vaunted reputation as a welcoming land for immigrants has taken a hit thanks to the recent, highly-publicized wave of anti-Asian crimes—which, though small in scale, is scaring off some Chinese students and their parents. Of greater significance are the thinly disguised anti-Asian policies (masquerading as anti-racism mandates) that are implemented by top US schools as a means to exclude Asian students.
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Reversing America’s slide in STEM education will require many policy changes, not all of which fall within our expertise as mathematicians and academics. But at the very least, we recommend that American education authorities prioritize the development of comprehensive STEM curricula, at both basic and advanced levels, and allow outstanding mathematicians and other scientists to assist public servants in their design. Highly successful precedents such as the BASIS Charter School Curriculum and the Math for America teacher-development program supply examples of how such curricula might be developed. This should be coupled with a nationwide effort to identify and develop students who exhibit exceptional math talent.
American policymakers must also address the misplaced priorities of the education schools that train teachers. At the very least, math majors should be allowed to teach without following a full slate of accreditation procedures. And people who teach middle and high-school math should themselves be required to receive rigorous instruction in that subject.
Schools in urban areas and inner-city neighborhoods should be improved by following the most promising models. Such programs demonstrate that children benefit if they are challenged by high standards and a nurturing environment. Ideally, schools should operate in a manner that allows them to avoid year-to-year dependence on the vagaries of local funding and bureaucratic mandates.
More broadly, American educators must return to a process of recruitment and promotion based on merit, at all levels of education and research—a step that will require a policy U-turn at the federal, state, and local levels (not to mention at universities, and at tech corporations that have sought to reinvent themselves as social-justice organizations). Instead of implementing divisive policies based on the premise of rooting out invisible forms of racism, or seeking to deconstruct the idea of merit in spurious ways, organizations should redirect their (by now substantial) DEI budgets toward more constructive goals, such as funding outreach programs, and even starting innovative new charter schools for underprivileged K-12 students. Elite private universities, in particular, are well positioned to direct portions of their huge endowments and vast professional expertise in this regard. By doing so, they could demonstrate that it’s possible to help minority students succeed without sacrificing excellence.
The proposals we are describing here may sound highly ambitious—not to mention being at cross-currents with today’s ideological climate. But we also believe there will soon be an opportunity for change, as the rapid rise of China in strategically important STEM fields may help shock the American policymaking community into action—much like the so-called Sputnik crisis of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it was Russia’s soaring level of technical expertise that became a subject of public concern. Then, as now, the only path to global technological leadership was one based on a rigorous, merit-based approach to excellence in mathematics, science, and engineering.
Percy Deift, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, and Sergiu Klainerman are professors of mathematics at, respectively, New York University, Georgia Institute of Technology and University of California Irvine, and Princeton University.
11. Trade Versus Subs: The Risky U.S. Tradeoff in the Asia-Pacific
One paradox of this situation is that Australia needs strong trade with China to pay for the submarines. But because trade will decline as cina attempts to "punish" Australia there will be no way Australia could buy both American and French submarines.
But China made an interesting move on the Go (paduk) board seeking to join the trade pact. Could we ever try to get back into the TPP? Withdrawing from it is one of our bigest strategic mistakes.
Excerpt:
But a less noticed move on the same day could matter more: China's application to join a trade deal that the United States had brokered to counter China's rise—but then rejected due to internal political strife.
In effect, the moves are a bet: which will matter more a few decades from now, a dozen more nuclear subs on the U.S. side of the ledger or a trade pact that could draw many of the world's largest and most dynamic economies ever-closer toward China? For now, the U.S. decision has drawn the most headlines and attention—and for good reason.
Trade Versus Subs: The Risky U.S. Tradeoff in the Asia-Pacific
Which will matter more, a dozen more nuclear subs on the U.S. side of the ledger or a trade pact that could draw many of the world's largest economies ever-closer toward China?
The headline-grabbing announcement by the United States and the United Kingdom to help Australia build a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines could be a strategic masterstroke, helping Washington find an important military ally in countering China's growing naval might (it now boasts the world's largest, according to the Pentagon), while also reinvigorating U.S. alliances in the Pacific.
But a less noticed move on the same day could matter more: China's application to join a trade deal that the United States had brokered to counter China's rise—but then rejected due to internal political strife.
In effect, the moves are a bet: which will matter more a few decades from now, a dozen more nuclear subs on the U.S. side of the ledger or a trade pact that could draw many of the world's largest and most dynamic economies ever-closer toward China? For now, the U.S. decision has drawn the most headlines and attention—and for good reason.
Since developing nuclear-powered submarine technology in the 1950s, the United States has only shared it with one country, the United Kingdom. Sharing it now with Australia shows how important Washington views the need to bolster countries on the frontline of conflict with China.
The move also shows that Washington can still win over countries that at one point were unsure whether they had to choose between the United States and China.
As recently as 2018, Australian Prime Minister Scot Morrison said Australia could have it all—security via the United States and a dominant economic partner in China—declaring that "Australia doesn't have to choose."
The country's decision to buy up to a dozen nuclear-powered submarines effectively means it is now choosing, effectively gambling that Washington is in the Pacific to stay—a move that will likely improve morale among anxious U.S. allies, such as South Korea and Japan.
But the move could end up being a problem for Washington for two reasons. The move threatens to compound concerns in Europe about U.S. snubbing of allies, which has already been buffeted in recent months by the unilateral U.S. decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Now, it has blindsided France, nixing its plans to sell Australia conventionally powered submarines. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drain saying it was "brutal, unilateral, and unpredictable."
This is about more than mercantilistic concerns, calling into question efforts to forge a common trans-Atlantic strategy to counter China's rise. Until now, both sides have been trying to find a common policy, for example in how to handle human rights violations in Xinjiang, Chinese expansion in the South China Sea, and threats to the self-governing island of Taiwan.
On Thursday, the European Union issued a Indo-Pacific strategy paper that underscored the group's desire to take that part of the world more seriously—something the United States has urged it to do for years. Many of the paper's concerns overlap those of the United States, part of a slow alignment of interests to strengthen democracy in Asia.
Now, such cooperation will be harder to achieve, with Washington signaling that cooperation is only a tactic that can be discarded when the chips are down.
But those risks to relations may pale in comparison to a potentially bigger issue—that the benefits of the submarines may matter less than the damage the United States has inflicted on itself in the realm of trade.
For most of the 2010s, the United States pushed a new trade deal called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to bind together like-minded countries around the Pacific Rim in what would have been the world's largest free-trade deal covering 40 percent of the global economy. One goal was to reduce the countries' dependency on trade with China and boost U.S. leadership in the region.
The TPP was signed by a dozen countries, including the United States, in 2016. But it came under attack in that year's presidential election by Donald Trump as a jobkiller. When he won the presidency, the United States withdrew in 2017. The next year, the remaining signatories formed the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). President Joe Biden has said he would only support the United States entering the deal if it were renegotiated.
On Thursday, however, China formally applied to join the CPTPP—seeking to turn the tables on the United States by joining the very trade pact that was designed to counter its rise. Over the past few months, it has held talks with Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and other nations about joining the group.
China's membership is far from assured. But it underscores the reality that China is the region's dominant economic power and that the United States is beset by so many internal battles that it cannot muster the will to join a group that its elites argued for a decade was vital to its strategic interests.
If China were to join and the United States remain on the sidelines, the sub deal could look anachronistic: an effort by Anglo-American countries to play their one, fading advantage—advanced military technology—while allowing China to use its economic power to draw countries inexorably into its orbit.
This piece, first published by the Council on Foreign Relations, is used with permission.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
