WAR 02-15-2020-to-02-21-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

(404) 01-25-2020-to-01-31-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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(405) 02-01-2020-to-02-07-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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(406) 02-08-2020-to-02-14-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

WAR - 02-08-2020-to-02-14-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(403) 01-18-2020-to-01-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** http://xf.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/01-18-2020-to-01-24-2020___-the-winds-of-war.566911/ (404) 01-25-2020-to-01-31-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****...

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Esper tells Europe to ‘wake up’ to a China that seeks to dominate

Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Saturday issued a stark warning that China threatens "long-standing international rules-based order."

www.stripes.com

Esper tells Europe to ‘wake up’ to a China that seeks to dominate

By JOHN VANDIVER | STARS AND STRIPES Published: February 15, 2020

Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Saturday issued a stark warning that allies in Europe must “wake up” to the threat posed by China’s rapid military advances, which will eventually make Beijing “the preeminent global military power.”
"It is essential that we, as an international community, wake up to the challenges presented by China's manipulation of the long-standing international rules-based order,” Esper told an audience of global leaders at the annual Munich Security Conference.
Esper railed against China for intellectual property theft and using its economic heft as leverage against countries large and small. Esper also emphasized that when it comes to U.S. military strategy, countering China comes before all else.
“By 2035, the PRC intends to complete its military modernization, and by 2049, it seeks to dominate Asia as the preeminent global military power,” Esper said.
Dealing with China’s rise has been a focal point for the Pentagon. Washington has urged allies to take a tougher stance against Beijing and resist its attempts to extend influence in Europe with 5G technology that Washington says poses a security threat.

• 

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks on the second day of the Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, Saturday, Feb. 15, 2020.
JENS MEYER/AP

In Munich, Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo faced an audience with many skeptics who are worried about a weakening connection between the U.S. and Europe.
The angst was underscored by the theme of this year’s conference — “westlessness” — a word coined by organizers to describe a general sense of confusion among countries about how to deal with issues like the rise of China.

“Western societies and governments appear to have lost a common understanding of what it even means to be part of the West. … it appears uncertain whether the West can come up with a joint strategy for a new era of great-power competition,” said the Munich Security Report, released as talks began.

Pompeo pushed back against the idea of “westlessness,” or a decline in American commitment to Europe. Pompeo rattled off a series of quotes in recent years made by European leaders claiming a crisis in the trans-Atlantic relationship.

He said the claims “don’t reflect reality.” “The death of the trans-Atlantic alliance is grossly exaggerated,” Pompeo said. “The west is winning.”

Pompeo cited the U.S.’s upcoming Defender Europe exercise, one of the largest military drills on the continent since the Cold War, as an example of American backing of NATO.

Regarding Iran and China, “there is a common understanding about the threat,” Pompeo said, but he acknowledged there are tactical differences in how to deal with those threats.

What isn’t clear, however, is if the U.S. can bring key European countries over to its side in challenging China. The German economy relies heavily on exports to China and could be wary about taking a hard line on issues such as banning 5G Chinese technology for fear of economic repercussions.

French President Emmanual Macron also has expressed skepticism about treating Beijing as an adversary.

In Munich, Macron said Europe should be more independent from the U.S. or at least find its own way to deal with emerging challenges like China. “My vision is a more sovereign and united Europe,” Macron said. “We are at a moment of truth for Europe.”

Unlike Pompeo, Macron also was more worried about the cohesion of the West itself, which he said is under threat from within.

“We can see that there is a certain weakness of the West,” Macron said. "The values have changed, and new powers have risen."

For Esper, the Munich Security Conference wrapped up a week in Europe that began earlier with a meeting of defense ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels. While Russia has traditionally been the focal pint for allies in Europe, China’s global ambitions demand attention, Esper said.

“The Chinese Communist Party is heading even faster and further in the wrong direction — more internal repression, more predatory economic practices, more heavy-handedness, and most concerning for me, a more aggressive military posture," Esper said.

vandiver.john@stripes.com
Twitter: @john_vandiver

 

[Housecarl]

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Russia’s Proposed New Pipeline Threatens U.S. National Security Interests

Russia wants to build another natural gas pipeline that bypasses Ukraine for Europe. How does the proposed project threaten Ukrainian and U.S. interests? What has

www.lawfareblog.com

Russia’s Proposed New Pipeline Threatens U.S. National Security Interests

By Todd Carney
Friday, February 14, 2020, 9:00 AM

Since 2014, Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a conflict in Donbas that has killed thousands. Despite the fighting, the two countries have been able to maintain an economic relationship centered around one industry: energy. A new Russian energy project threatens to undermine that relationship and impact U.S. energy interests in Europe.
The new project, Nord Stream 2, will enable Russia to provide natural gas to Germany directly instead of going through Ukraine. This has stark consequences for Ukraine: What little leverage Ukraine holds over Russia comes largely from the fact that Russia has to export most of its natural gas through Ukraine in order to reach Europe. If Russia can bypass Ukraine, the pipeline would make that leverage obsolete.
But this project impacts not only Ukraine but also the United States. Some observers in the U.S. see the pipeline as a way for Russia to subtly spread its influence in Europe by deepening European dependence on Russia for natural gas. Analysts fear this will make it more difficult for the U.S. to recruit European support in holding Russia accountable for its transgressions. In response, the U.S. has enacted sanctions to try to slow down the Nord Stream 2. Despite the sanctions, Russia is nonetheless aiming to continue the pipeline project.

Russia-Ukraine Energy Relationship​

European, Russian and Ukrainian natural gas interests are deeply interconnected. About half of Russia’s European natural gas exports pass through Ukraine, and 30 percent of the natural gas in Europe comes from Russia. On Russia’s end, 90 percent of its natural gas exports go to Europe. At the same time, Ukraine is largely dependent on Russia for its natural gas—60 percent of which comes from Russia.
As Ukraine was struggling to achieve financial independence in the 1990s, Russia supplied it with large amounts of natural gas. The gesture was not merely altruistic: The relationship benefited Russia because it needed a natural gas pipeline to go through Ukraine to access Europe. This relationship remained largely stable until 2006 when Russia and Ukraine had a dispute over the price of natural gas, which led Russia to reduce its flow of gas through Ukraine. However, the two countries ultimately reached a resolution just after the spat began.
In 2009, Russia and Ukraine again began having conflicts over gas prices. As a result, Russia shut off its gas flow to Ukraine, and this time the conflict lasted for three weeks. Though Russia and Ukraine resolved the dispute, it prompted both nations to look for ways to lessen their dependence on each other. Russia established gas deals with Germany in 2006 and Turkey in 2007. These deals allowed gas to go to Europe without going through Ukraine. The construction of the pipeline with Germany was completed in 2011, and the pipeline with Turkey was finished in January of this year. Over the next decade, Ukraine began getting more natural gas from Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.
Throughout 2019, Russia and Ukraine had been trying to renegotiate their energy contract but were unable to reach an agreement. Russia wanted to extend the relationship for only one year, but Ukraine wanted to extend the deal for as much as 10 years. Ultimately, Russia and Ukraine agreed in December 2019 on a five-year extension to their natural gas deal.

Nord Stream 2​

The past tension between Russia and Ukraine led Russia to develop a natural gas relationship with Germany, which formally began in 2005 when the two countries signed an agreement to create two pipelines that went through the Baltic Sea. This arrangement cut out Ukraine completely. The project was initially known as the Northern European Gas Pipeline but later became known as Nord Stream AG. The two pipelines were finished in 2011 and 2012.
By 2015, Nord Stream AG had proved successful and was providing Germany with 10 billion tons of natural gas, which was also exported to the rest of Europe. As a result, Germany and Russia signed an agreement in June 2015 to construct two additional pipelines that would provide 55 billion tons of natural gas to Germany by the end of 2019. The project became known as Nord Stream 2. The Nord Stream 2 pipelines would supply more than one-tenth of Europe’s natural gas demand and would be 760 miles long, with the two pipelines running parallel to each other. The project would begin at the Russian port of Ust-Luga near St. Petersburg and then go through the Baltic Sea⁠—through waters near Finland, Sweden and Denmark⁠—and end in Greifswald, Germany.
By 2017, many EU members, such as Sweden and Lithuania, were concerned that Russia might use Nord Stream 2 to exert influence over Europe by increasing European reliance on Russia for natural gas. Nord Stream 2 skeptics also feared it could take away Ukraine’s economic leverage that the country had used to push back against past instances of Russian aggression. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had in the past advocated for EU sanctions against Russia over its transgressions, pushed back on these concerns and rejected the need for universal support from the EU for Nord Stream 2, arguing that Nord Stream 2 “is an economic project and I don’t think we need an extra mandate for it.”
In 2017, Poland and about a dozen other countries tried to get the European Commission to block Nord Stream 2. Despite the countries’ protestations, the European Commission said it had no legal basis to block Nord Stream 2 because the pipeline is offshore and thus not under EU jurisdiction. Interestingly, the European Commission did not issue a formal declaration on the matter but instead merely sent a statement directly to the Danish government because the proposed route would go through Denmark’s continental shelf, which is an area under Danish sovereignty 350 nautical miles off the country’s coast. If the pipeline was within the territorial waters of Denmark, which extend to 12 nautical miles off the coast, then the European Commission would have had authority over the pipeline.
Denmark had its energy regulating arm, the Danish Energy Agency, look into whether Denmark had the legal authority to stop the pipeline. In October 2019, two years after the inquiry began, the Danish Energy Agency finally issued a ruling over the portion of the pipeline that went through Denmark’s waters. The agency found that under Denmark’s Continental Shelf Act and the UN Law of the Sea Treaty, Denmark could stop Nord Stream 2 only if the pipeline would cause environmental harm. The Danish Energy Agency ruled there was no environmental threat to the waters from the pipeline, so it held that Denmark had no legal authority to stop the project.

Where the U.S. Comes In​

The U.S. has remained concerned about Russia’s Nord Stream 2 project because the project would deepen European reliance on Russia for energy to a level that the U.S. fears would make European countries most hesitant to participate in sanctions against Russia.
The Obama administration opposed the development of Nord Stream 2, a stance that frustrated Germany’s government. “Some things the Europeans need to decide for themselves,” Germany’s then-ambassador to the United States said regarding Nord Stream 2. The Obama administration nonetheless maintained its opposition to the pipeline; later in 2016, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden declared the pipeline a “bad deal” for Europe.
Despite concerns over Trump’s soft tone on Russia, after the Trump administration came to power it maintained the Obama administration’s policy of opposing the Nord Stream 2. In 2017, Congress passed a new round of sanctions that Trump signed into law. The sanctions largely targeted individuals and businesses that helped Russia launch cyberattacks against U.S. entities, but among “policy statements” listed as justification for the sanctions was the following policy goal: “to continue to oppose the NordStream 2 pipeline given its detrimental impacts on the European Union's energy security, gas market development in Central and Eastern Europe, and energy reforms in Ukraine.” The legislation listed 12 types of sanctions that the Trump administration could enact and mandated that the Trump administration use at least five. One of the options was enacting penalties on Americans who engaged in gas and oil development in Russia. Some feared that the Trump administration might enact sanctions against Americans working on Nord Stream 2. By 2018, however, the U.S. assured Germany that the Trump administration would not use the latest round of sanctions to target Nord Stream 2.
Nevertheless, a month after the U.S. assurance to Germany, Trump erupted in anger over the Nord Stream 2 at 2018’s NATO Summit and called the proposed project “inappropriate.” State Department officials followed up on these remarks and said the U.S. government could further target the Nord Stream 2 using the 2017 sanctions. The State Department’s follow-up comments ended up being nothing more than a threat; the U.S. never enacted sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 using the 2017 sanctions bill.
But, in summer of 2019, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress that directs the U.S. government to enact sanctions against any companies involved in the development of Nord Stream 2. One of the bill’s co-sponsors, Sen. Ted Cruz, stated that Nord Stream 2 “poses a grave threat to the national security of the United States and our European allies,” because it creates a situation in which Russia could strategically withhold energy from European countries and because Russia could spend the money gained from Nord Stream 2 on operations against the U.S. and Europe. The sanctions bill’s other co-sponsor, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, felt the sanctions were important in order to show that the U.S. would act to counter Russia’s underhanded attempts to influence Europe. In December 2019, after Congress overwhelmingly passed the sanctions as part of an end-of-the-year funding bill, the Trump administration signed the legislation into law. The legislation gave the Trump administration 60 days to report on the progress of the sanctions, so an update on the enactment of the sanctions will be due mid-February. These sanctions are unique from past sanctions, because they specifically target Nord Stream 2 by mandating that the U.S. government freeze assets and revoke U.S. visas of contractors who worked on Nord Stream 2. Ukraine had long lobbied the U.S. for sanctions that directly targeted Nord Stream 2, and these are the first sanctions to pass that do so. 2.
Germany and Russia reacted angrily to the recently passed sanctions. Both governments protested that the sanctions violated their sovereignty, with Russia claiming that the sanctions would only delay the project, not end it. Ultimately, some experts believe that the U.S. ultimately acted too late to stop the pipeline because so much of Nord Stream 2 is already completed.

What Comes Next?​

The sanctions seemed to play some role in getting Russia and Ukraine to agree to a natural gas deal. Shortly after the U.S. sanctions legislation was signed into law, Russia and Ukraine agreed on a five-year extension of their current deal. So, although Russia and Ukraine’s deal does not mention Nord Stream 2, the threat of sanctions dooming Nord Stream 2 likely caused Russia to agree to a deal with Ukraine. With the new deal, Russia can continue to have Ukraine as an export partner of gas even if it does not have Nord Stream 2 to increase its gas exports to Germany. If Nord Stream 2 is not completed, Ukraine will retain some economic leverage over Russia because it will remain Russia’s largest connection to Europe. If Russia does manage to complete Nord Stream 2, many observers fear the completion of the pipeline would water down the strength of the new Ukraine-Russia deal.With Nord Stream 2, Russia would no longer need to cooperate with Ukraine to make money off its natural gas resources. Though Russia does have a five-year deal with Ukraine, there is nothing to stop the Kremlin from going back on the deal if it does not need Ukraine as an export partner. In the end, the fate of the project and the weight of its potential impact remain uncertain.

Todd Carney is a first-year student at Harvard Law School. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Political Science and Public Communications. He has also worked in digital media in New York City and Washington D.C.

 

[Housecarl]

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Mali violence: At least 40 killed in spate of violence

The west African country has been blighted by ethnic and Islamist violence in recent years.

www.bbc.com

Mali violence: At least 40 killed in spate of violence

• 1 hour ago

At least 40 people, including nine soldiers, have been killed in three separate incidents in Mali.
Thirty-one were killed when gunmen attacked a village in central Mali, burning houses, crops and livestock.
A group of eight soldiers also died in an ambush, while another was killed during an attack on a military camp in the Gao region.
Mali has been blighted by instability since 2012 when an Islamist rebellion broke out in the north.
The village of Ogossagou, where one of Friday's attacks took place, is mostly home to Fulanis, a largely-Muslim ethnic group who traditionally work as herders.

• The war in the desert
• In charts: West Africa's battle against Islamist militants

Other ethnic groups in Mali - including the Dogon community - accuse the Fulani of being linked to jihadi groups operating across the Sahel region.
These accusations have fuelled inter-ethnic violence in recent years.
Last March, 160 people were killed in another attack at Ogossagou, which authorities blamed on a Dogon militia.
That attack led to several protests over perceived inaction by the government, and Mali's prime minster at the time, Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga, later resigned.

No one has claimed responsibility for the latest incident, but village chief Aly Ousmane Barry told local media that the gunmen struck several hours after government troops had withdrawn from the area.
In a separate incident, Malian security forces said on Twitter that they had sustained "material damage" during an ambush in the village of Bintia, which killed eight soldiers and injured four others.
A ninth soldier was killed in another attack at a camp in Mondoro, which is regularly targeted by militants.

Media captionWhat is behind Mali's massacres?
Since 2012, Malian forces have managed to regain control of large swathes of territory taken by militants with help from France, which has 4,500 troops deployed in the region. The UN has 13,000 peacekeeping troops in Mali.
But thousands of lives have been lost as Mali struggles to contain the violence, which has spread to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.
Combating militants in the Sahel region is seen as important for maintaining security further afield, including Europe.
France's Foreign Minister Florence Parly travelled to Washington last month in the hope of persuading the US to continue its logistical backing - drones, intelligence and transport - which she said was crucial to the French operation.

Related Topics

• Mali
• Sahel Islamist insurgency

More on this story

• 
  Mali: Militants on motorbikes kill 20 troops, officials say
  
  26 January 2020
  
• 
  France summit: Macron and Sahel partners step up jihadist fight
  
  13 January 2020
  

 

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‘We want to finish this conflict’: Mali is ready to talk peace with jihadis

Violence has surged as militant groups wreak havoc across the west African country

www.ft.com

‘We want to finish this conflict’: Mali is ready to talk peace with jihadis
Violence has surged as militant groups wreak havoc across the west African country



Neil Munshi in Bamako 13 hours ago

Sara fled Sobane Da, her village in central Mali, eight months ago when jihadis arrived on motorbikes carrying torches and Kalashnikovs. They set alight the traditional mud-and-thatch justice hall of the Dogon people before killing 35 villagers, including Sara’s sister and uncle. The 18-year-old, now living in an informal displacement camp on the outskirts of the capital, Bamako, is desperate for the violence that has engulfed Mali to end. Since the defeat of Isis in the Middle East, there has been an influx of foreign fighters into the west African Sahel, a vast region that shelters homegrown rebels, criminal gangs and weapons pouring out of Libya, raising fears that it could become a stronghold for militants. With more than 1,200 people killed last year in central Mali alone, Sara wants the government to begin talks with the jihadi groups that have wreaked havoc across the country. “If we sit with these people, and say we pardon each other, it can finish,” she said. “We are able to pardon, we want to finish this conflict and settle this.” This month, Mali’s president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita said that his government was ready to hold discussions with two of Mali’s most notorious extremist leaders. “Why not try to contact those who we know are pulling the strings,” he said in an interview with Radio France Internationale on the sidelines of the African Union summit in Ethiopia. “The number of dead in the Sahel is becoming exponential. It’s time for certain avenues to be explored.” Mali's incumbent president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita addresses his supporters during his last political rally in Bamako on August 10, 2018, ahead of the runoff vote in Mali's presidential election on August 12, 2018. (Photo by Michele CATTANI / AFP) (Photo credit should read MICHELE CATTANI/AFP via Getty Images) © AFP via Getty Images His comments are likely to raise concerns among the international community, particularly France, the former colonial power, which still has troops stationed in Mali after its 2013 military intervention against the Islamist insurgency that sprang up in the north of the country. “We want to discuss with all the sons of Mali who [have taken] up arms, but France doesn’t want it,” said Ali Nouhoum Diallo, former president of the National Assembly and a leader of the country’s Fulani community. The French foreign ministry said President Emmanuel Macron and leaders from across the Sahel had reconfirmed their “common determination to fight together against terrorist groups” at their summit in France last month. “We are fighting armed terrorist groups in the Sahel at the requests of the states in the region, including Mali,” a ministry spokesperson said. A graphic with no description Others in Mali argue that the government in Bamako lacks a plan for peace talks and will end up legitimising the extremists’ demands for sharia law. “If you accept to negotiate with them from a weak position, it means you accept their position [as valid],” said Mohamed Ould Mahmoud, spokesman for the CMA, one of the rebel groups that signed a controversial peace accord with the government in 2015 to end tensions in the north. “The government doesn’t even have a road map to see what you will discuss, what results you want to see . . . you need to prepare your negotiation before you go into them.” A senior western official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said any talks “would be uncomfortable for the international community”. But another western diplomat, echoing sentiments among Malians advocating talks, said: “The Americans are talking to the Taliban now.” A Fulani woman poses while she prepares a meal for her children in an Internally Displaced People's (IDP) camp set up on the outskirts of Bamako on May 4, 2019. - Following a massacre on March 23, 2019 in the central Malian town of Ogassogou, home to the Fulani herding community, and in which some 160 people died according to officials, more than 600 displaced people from the centre of the country have found refuge in this camp. (Photo by MICHELE CATTANI / AFP) (Photo credit should read MICHELE CATTANI/AFP via Getty Images) Minusma, the UN’s 14,000-troop peacekeeping force in Mali, and the 4,500 French troops who remain in the region have so far been unable to quell violence that has spread into neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso, where the government has lost control of swaths of the country. Last month France said it would send 600 additional troops to the region, but few in Mali expect the meagre extra force to do much to secure the country or region. The effects of climate change, explosive population growth, widespread unemployment and an absent Malian government have created fertile ground for jihadis to stoke grievances. “You have a situation where everyone is on the edge and any little incident can provoke violence from some other part of the conflict,” said Dougoukolo Alpha Oumar Ba-Konaré, a lecturer at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris and founder of the Fulani organisation Kisal. Recommended David Pilling Sahel governments are failing in fight against jihadis “It’s very complicated. It’s ethnic, it’s tribal . . . it’s so much more than terrorism,” said Lieutenant General Dennis Gyllensporre, the Swedish soldier in charge of Minusma’s peacekeeping mission. “The social contract between the government and citizens is broken, and religious extremists have come into some of these places and provided these services.” Boucar Ali, 46, fled his village last year after one of his children was killed by Dogon people from a neighbouring village. “They burnt our village to the ground,” he said from his new home at a Fulani displaced persons camp outside Bamako, lifting a handful of red-brown dirt. “We knew them, we were together for a long time — our parents and grandparents know each other. We lived together for centuries. I don’t understand it. But there is no government so people do what they want.” He said there must be talks. “I don’t know who is a jihadist, I don’t know who is a hunter — anyone who sees us kills us, so what does it matter?” he said. “The government has failed in all it’s responsibilities — they should do all they can to reconcile the communities so they can go back to their homes.” Additional reporting Victor Mallet in Paris

 

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Swiss Islamic State Cell Plotted Major Terror Attack

According to a new investigation, a cell of jihadists based in Geneva plotted to bomb oil cisterns near the city's airport in a major attack.

www.breitbart.com

Switzerland Thwarts Major Islamic State Terror Attack

Chris Tomlinson15 Feb 2020440
2:11

According to a new investigation by Swiss media, a cell of jihadists based in Geneva plotted to bomb cisterns full of oil near the city’s airport in a major terror attack.

The plot, which was set to take place last year before being stopped, revolved largely around a man named Daniel D., who also went by the Islamic name Abu Ilias al-Swisri, a convert to Islam who went on to join the Islamic State terror group two years later, Le Temps reports.

Al-Swisri, now 25-years-old, had attended the Petit-Saconnex mosque where he met two other radicals named “PF” and Ramzi, who would also join his Islamic State terror cell.

In 2015, both al-Swisri and Ramzi took a trip to Syria where they met with a branch of Islamic State and received weapons training. PF, who remained in Geneva, requested to join the two men in Syria but was told by al-Swisri that the group wanted to plot an attack in Switzerland.

Al-Swisri is said to have formed relationships with several more Switzerland-based jihadists, all of whom are currently, like al-Swisri, detained in Kurdish prison camps, and plotted the bombing attack with them.

11 Suspected Jihadists Arrested in Swiss Raids, Including Several Minors 11 Suspected Jihadists Arrested in Swiss Raids, Including Several Minors
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 30, 2019

In 2018, American intelligence sent a warning to Swiss intelligence regarding the terror plot which was said to have been planned for April or May of 2019. The arrest fo two Albanian migrants heading for Geneva is also rumoured to have been a factor in the unravelling of the plot.

Details, however, have remained sketchy due to investigators not wanting to jeopardise the case, with key details being kept hidden until they were revealed this week by Le Temps.

The terror cell is not the first in Switzerland. In 2015 it was revealed that a terror cell was operating out of the An’Nur mosque in the city of Winterthur near Zurich by journalist Kurt Pelda.

As recently as October of last year, eleven suspected jihadists were arrested by Swiss authorities, including five minors.

 

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The new Russian geopolitics

Recent domestic political changes in Russia, including the process of amending the Constitution, have become the subject of close attention. Most experts believe that Putin's main goal is to formulate new political structure to preserv...

www.americanthinker.com

February 15, 2020
The new Russian geopolitics

By Areg Galstyan

Recent domestic political changes in Russia, including the process of amending the Constitution, have become the subject of close attention. Most experts believe that Putin's main goal is to formulate new political structure to preserve his rule over the county after the end of the term in 2024. However, the reasons for these transformations have deeper roots that are associated with changes in the geopolitical picture of the world.

Imperialism has always been the core of Russian political culture: its forms and formats could vary in different eras, but the essence remained the same. It lies in the fact that the main function of the Russian ruler (prince, tsar, emperor or president) is to ensure the state's territorial integrity. According to Russian strategists and thinkers, this goal is possible to achieve only when Russia has one of the central places in the system of international relations. The mission to maintain the great power status has unified all the laeaders aof the country, no matter how different they have been: even Emperor Peter the Great, who promoted the Western model of development, and Tsar Alexander III, who followed a special Russian way.

To a certain extent, having led the country in the late '90s, Vladimir Putin became a hostage to objective circumstances. Being a moderate conservative who sympathized with the philosophies of Peter the Great, he set the task of ensuring consistent political and economic integration with the West. This direction failed since the parties perceived the process differently. Russia hoped that the United States and the European Union would build dialogue as equal partners, not as winners that dictate the rules of the game. Many actions of leading Western countries (such as NATO's expansion to the East) played into the hands of the part of the Russian elite who convinced the general public and the president that Washington and Brussels did not respect the opinion of Moscow and were the source of the main threats to national security. In fact, it was the shortsightedness of Western policy, which completely ignored not only Russia's global, but also regional interests, that left no arguments for Putin to maintain the strategic orientation toward the West.

Today, few remember that before the famous Munich speech of 2007, the Russian president was harshly criticized inside the country for his indecisiveness and inability to force America and Europe to respect Russia. Russian rulers who showed weakness ceased to enjoy the trust of the population and political environment. This resulted in disastrous consequences. And the question is not only in fear of losing power: this is the lesser of potential problems. The indecisiveness of Tsar Nicholas II led to revolution, the Civil War, and the execution of the entire royal family. Gorbachev's excessively soft policy ended with the next collapse of the state. Putin knows Russian history well and feels the changing mood of society. Without this understanding and these instincts, it would be impossible to rule the country, where 190 nations of various religions, traditions, and mentality live together. The Western scientific and analytical community often overlooks this nuance. That is why there is confusion between the personality of Putin and Putinism as a concept of managing a complex and multi-layered system that has been forming for hundreds of years. From the standpoint of international politics, this concept is focused on the principle of total sovereignty.

Vladislav Surkov, the author of the modern ideology of Putinism, always emphasizes that Russia should contribute to the formation of a concert of great powers, where new architecture of international relations will be devised based on forgotten principles: non-interference in internal affairs (Westphalian system), balance of power (Vienna system), and the separation of spheres of influence and zones of responsibility (Yalta-Potsdam system). While realizing this concept, Moscow began to actively support right-wing conservative forces in Europe; returned to large Middle East policy; and strengthened its position in Africa (in particular the Maghreb — Libya and Egypt) and Latin America, which is the zone of special strategic interests of the United States, according to the Monroe Doctrine. Having firm position in key regions of the world, the Kremlin will get more advantages as part of future debates among the great powers on the formation of rules in the post-unipolar world. At the same time, it is important for Putin that Russia can participate in this process as an independent subject, not the younger brother of neighboring China, which is perceived as a strategic ally of Moscow. Is it really so?

After returning to the office in 2012, Putin began to focus more not on Peter the Great, but on Alexander III, the author of the famous phrase that Russia has only two allies: the army and navy. These are not just simple words for the Russian president, but the foundation of the long-term foreign policy strategy. Today, Moscow and Beijing are equally interested in accelerating the final collapse of the unipolar system. However, in the future process of building a new model, the Russians and Chinese will wage a fierce struggle for influence not only in Central Asia, but also in the post-Soviet space — the traditional zone of Russian interest. Even now, Beijing has a serious impact on Belarus, which, along with Ukraine, Putin considers an integral part of the Russian world core. Moscow understands the inevitability of a clash of interests with China. That is why the Kremlin seeks to expand bilateral relations with India, establish closer ties with Japan, and strengthen its influence on North Korea. At the same time, as a pragmatist, the Russian leader understands that in order to successfully solve such complicated geopolitical tasks, it is necessary to strengthen the internal rears by starting the process of changing the decaying system. There were critically weak particles that threatened national security. Putin not only reorganized the system, but also deprived those who have foreign citizenship or a residence permit of the right to occupy key positions.

Many former senior officials and politicians were connected by business and lobbying interests with other countries. So, when they made decisions, they had to consider the mood in America, Europe, and China. Now it is in the past. In other words, political elites became nationalized. Without this step, Putin would not be able to stabilize the internal situation and take up his original mission: to make Russia great again.
Areg Galstyan, Ph.D. is a regular contributor to Forbes, The National Interest, and the American Thinker.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

In the heart of Mexico’s violence, disillusion grows » Borneo Bulletin Online

URUAPAN, MEXICO (AP) — Alejandra Uvilla fled her home city of Apatzingan because of overwhelming violence, moving 105 km north to bustling, mountain-nestled Uruapan in the avocado belt of Michoacan state. Three years later, the bloodshed is even worse here. Cartels are battling for territory and...

borneobulletin.com.bn

In the heart of Mexico’s violence, disillusion grows
February 15, 2020

URUAPAN, MEXICO (AP) — Alejandra Uvilla fled her home city of Apatzingan because of overwhelming violence, moving 105 km north to bustling, mountain-nestled Uruapan in the avocado belt of Michoacan state. Three years later, the bloodshed is even worse here.

Cartels are battling for territory and reports of grisly killings are common, such as the gun massacre last week of three young boys, a teenager and five others who were playing video games at an arcade in what had been a relatively quiet neighbourhood.

“You constantly hear that there are a lot of dead here in Uruapan,” said Uvilla, a 20-year-old stay-at-home mom, adding that she doesn’t know what to do anymore other than be extra cautious with her one-year-old son. “And you don’t live at ease, because now when you go out, you do so with fear.”

The names of cartels have changed over the years in Uruapan as groups and alliances wax and wane, but the killings continue. Similar stories are playing out in many towns and cities across the country, leaving millions of Mexicans fearful, frustrated and discouraged amid record homicide levels, de facto cartel control over entire communities and no apparent end in sight to nearly a decade and a half of drug conflict.

Mexico recorded 35,588 homicides last year, the most since comparable records began to be kept in the 1990s, though the rate of increase was far lower than in previous years. Since then-President Felipe Calderón ramped up a militarised anti-drug offensive beginning in 2006, annual killings have more than tripled in the country.

State police stand guard along the road leading into Uruapan, Michoacan state, Mexico. PHOTOS: AP

Family and friends attend the funeral procession for one of the victims of a shooting at a video-game arcade in Uruapan

Current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who took office in December 2019, has in the past referred to his security strategy as “hugs not bullets” and emphasises addressing root causes of violence such as poverty, youth unemployment and corruption, in contrast to his predecessors.

Not everyone agrees.

“If we keep doing the same thing we can’t expect different results,” university professor Emiliano Maciel Ávila said while walking in Uruapan’s main square. “I don’t think this hugging and kissing thing is working. I think we have to combat them.”

Only a handful of National Guard members were seen in Uruapan on Wednesday, the rainy day when the murdered boys were buried.

By the next day, the sun shone brightly, and double the number of guardsmen and women stood at that entryway, checking cars and trucks. More police, both federal and state, were seen driving through town, circling Uruapan’s central square.

But not many believe that will make much of a difference.

“We don’t expect anything from authorities anymore. People are very disenchanted,” said Rev Sergio Arroyo, who presided over the funeral for the arcade victims.

López Obrador reformulated Mexico’s security forces into a new National Guard that deployed last year with some 70,000 troops nationwide. But as before, police and troops often find themselves outgunned by the cartels. Moreover, the Guard has also been tasked with immigration enforcement following intense pressure from Washington, raising questions about whether that would distract from its security responsibilities.

Arroyo said locals would have to take it upon themselves to turn things around in the city of some 340,000 people, whose colonial-style downtown is a few blocks from the verdant Cupatitzio National Park that abounds with springs and small waterfalls. He suggested peace marches, committees of community and faith leaders and pressure on the government to take action.

“Prayer without action won’t do anything,” Arroyo said.

The detonator of Mexico’s drug war, which has left an estimated 150,000 dead so far, is often traced to Uruapan, where in September 2006 masked gunmen burst into a bar and tossed five severed heads onto the dance floor.

Recent events made clear that Uruapan, where murders rose 61 per cent from 2018 to 2019 according to government figures, remains a hot spot of violence. The Jalisco New Generation cartel and Los Viagra gang are waging a turf war, and other groups and factions also may come into play.

The day before the arcade shooting, the bodies of 11 people were found in clandestine graves on a hill where luxury apartments are being built. A day earlier, gunmen attacked a municipal police patrol, killing an officer and wounding two.

The attack may have been in retaliation for the earlier arrest of a Los Viagras leader who’s been implicated in 19 killings.

So in a city where stores all around the city display giant Valentine’s Day teddy bears for sale, bloodshed is common.

Uruapan residents say they avoid leaving the house at night and don’t let children play outside. Two of the boys who were killed in the arcade didn’t have permission when they sneaked out to play, relatives said.

The boys, all from the same neighbourhood, were gunned down in broad daylight in the small, bright blue arcade, which was adorned with candles and remained closed after the funeral.

The motive behind the attack has not been clarified, and many residents of the neighbourhood where it happened were loath to speculate. But some around town said they suspect gangs may have been extorting the arcade’s owner — a major issue in this city, according to residents.

Over time, so many criminal bands have fought with and within each other that it’s impossible to know who’s behind what, many say.

“You don’t know who’s good, who’s bad, who’s doing what to pacify,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and George Mason University professor who has written extensively on violence and organised crime in Mexico.

Correa-Cabrera’s family had to flee Michoacan after her father was extorted and threatened by the once-dominant Zetas cartel.

“We don’t have the police to respond to the needs of the country, and the National Guard was very recently created without a very clear plan for how, where, they were going to fight violence,” she said.

 

[Housecarl]

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U.N. says Libya arms embargo a 'joke', demands accountability

An arms embargo aimed at curbing fighting in Libya has become meaningless because of violations and it is imperative that those who breach it are held to account, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday. "The arms embargo has become a joke, we all really need to step up here," U.N. Deputy Special...

www.yahoo.com

U.N. says Libya arms embargo a 'joke', demands accountability
By John Irish and Sabine Siebold
Reuters•February 16, 2020

MUNICH (Reuters) - An arms embargo aimed at curbing fighting in Libya has become meaningless because of violations and it is imperative that those who breach it are held to account, a senior U.N. official said on Sunday.

"The arms embargo has become a joke, we all really need to step up here," U.N. Deputy Special Representative to Libya Stephanie Williams said after a meeting of foreign ministers to follow up on a Berlin summit last month that agreed to uphold the embargo. Fighting has continued despite a call for a truce.

"It's complicated because there are violations by land, sea and air, but it needs to be monitored and there needs to be accountability," Williams told a news conference, adding that Libya was now awash with advanced weapons.

Several countries backing rival factions in Libya have repeatedly violated an arms embargo, according to the United Nations, which has previously named the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Turkey for breaching the embargo. After the Berlin conference the violations increased and the U.N. denounced them without naming countries.

The Libyan National Army led by eastern-based commander Khalifa Haftar and forces aligned with the internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli have been fighting since April last year for control of the capital.

The UAE and Egypt support Haftar while the GNA is backed by Turkey.

A joint statement issued on Sunday by 13 countries involved in Libya, included Egypt, UAE and Turkey, said there had been a discussion on the "deplorable" arms embargo violations and "renewed determination to contribute to its thorough implementation."

However, there was no mention of how the embargo would be monitored, enforced or whether there would be any consequences for violating it.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said he wanted EU foreign ministers to make a decision on Monday on their role in monitoring the embargo.

"Everyone needs to know that - if they violate the embargo in future - then they violate a U.N. resolution and that this can't remain without consequences," Maas said, without elaborating.

The head of the GNA, Fayez al-Serraj, said on Saturday that the country faces a financial crisis because of a blockade of oil terminals and oil fields by Haftar.

"The situation on the ground remains deeply troubling. The truce is holding only by a thread... the economic situation continues to deteriorate," the U.N.'s Williams said.

(Reporting by John Irish and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Paul Carrel and Frances Kerry)

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

https://www.thelocal.de/20200216/france-impatient-over-lack-of-german-drive-to-reform-eu-macron

France 'impatient' over lack of German drive to reform EU: Macron
The Local

news@thelocal.fr
@thelocalfrance
16 February 2020
09:26 CET+01:00

President Emmanuel Macron said Saturday France was growing "impatient" with the lack of German response to its push to strengthen the European Union after Brexit.

Asked at the Munich Security Conference if he was frustrated by Chancellor Angela Merkel's silence on his proposed reforms, Macron said: "I'm not frustrated, I'm impatient."

"We have a history of waiting for answers" from each other, he said.

"What's key in the coming years is to move much faster on issues of sovereignty on the European level."

Macron has long pushed for an ambitious overhaul of the European Union in response to Britain's departure from the bloc, including deeper integration in financial and defence matters.

Although Paris and Berlin are traditionally spoken of as the twin "motors" of the European project, Macron's hopes that the two neighbours could spearhead the reforms together have been dashed by German foot-dragging.

Resistance from Germany and others saw Macron's flagship proposal of a common eurozone budget watered down to a tiny budget for selected projects.

His recent offer to put France's nuclear deterrence at the heart of Europe's defence strategy has also met with a cool response from Berlin, wary of straying from the US nuclear shield within NATO.

"I maintain that the protection of many countries here in Europe is guaranteed by the alliance with NATO," German Defence Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer said in Munich.

Any talk of strengthening Europe should above all be about "strengthening the European pillar within NATO," she added.

But with the Merkel era drawing to close as the veteran chancellor plans to bow out in 2021, Macron may well be looking to the next German government to put his reform push back on track.

At the conference, he met with leaders of Germany's surging Greens party, as well as top figures in Merkel's CDU/CSU conservative bloc.

 

[Housecarl]

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USAF to Start Buying 'Extreme Range' JASSMs in 2021 | Air & Space Forces Magazine

The Joint Air to Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range will start low-rate initial production next year, with deliveries beginning in 2024.

www.airforcemag.com

USAF to Start Buying ‘Extreme Range’ JASSMs in 2021

Feb. 14, 2020 | By Brian W. Everstine

The newest variant of the Air Force’s advanced, stealthy Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile will start low-rate initial production next year, with deliveries beginning in 2024, according to the service’s budget request.

The Air Force’s fiscal 2021 request includes $506 million total for JASSMs, including $60 million in initial funding for 40 AGM-158D variants—previously known as the JASSM-XR, or “Extreme Range,” according to service budget justification documents.

Lockheed Martin began development on the missile in 2018 with an initial $51 million contract from the Air Force Lifecycle Management Center. In October, Lockheed said the new variants would enter the production line as part of the 19th lot of JASSMs.

The upgrade includes a missile control unit, changes to the wings, a different paint coating, an Electronic Safe and Arm Fuze, a secure GPS receiver, and program protection requirements, according to the Air Force. All of these upgrades make the unit cost of the AGM-158D approximately $1.5 million, up from the $1.04 million cost of an AGM-158B JASSM-ER. The B variant has a range of about 500 nautical miles, while the D reportedly extends up to 1,000 nautical miles.

Lockheed will deliver five per month starting in January 2024, and the service plans to integrate the missiles with the B-1B. The Extended-Range variant, which entered full-rate production in 2015, already has been integrated on the B-52, F-16, B-2, and F-15E.

As part of the overall JASSM request, the service plans to buy 336 of the B-variants at a total cost of $352 million, according to budget documents. That total is below the expected buy of 400 JASSM variants as part of the Lot 19 buy, according to an October sources-sought notice.

The Air Force’s budget also requests $19.8 million total for five Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, another variant of the JASSM developed for offensive anti-surface warfare. The Navy is the lead on this program, and it has been integrated on both the B-1 and F/A-18. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced Feb. 7 that the State Department has approved the sale of 200 LRASMs to Australia for an expected price of about $990 million.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Navy cruiser sails through Taiwan Strait days after Air Force flyover there

The USS Chancellorsville’s transit through the 110-mile-wide waterway that separates Taiwan from mainland China “demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” 7th Fleet spokesman Lt. Joe Keiley told Stars and Stripes in an email Sunday.

www.stripes.com

Navy cruiser sails through Taiwan Strait days after Air Force flyover there

By CAITLIN DOORNBOS | STARS AND STRIPES Published: February 16, 2020

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — The United States sailed a guided-missile cruiser through the Taiwan Strait on Saturday, three days after flying an Air Force tanker over the contentious area, officials said.

The USS Chancellorsville’s transit through the 110-mile-wide waterway that separates Taiwan from mainland China “demonstrates the U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” 7th Fleet spokesman Lt. Joe Keiley told Stars and Stripes in an email Sunday.

“The U.S. Navy will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows,” he added.

The transit follows an Air Force mission on Wednesday that sent an MC-130J Commando II north to south along the airspace over the Taiwan Strait, while two B-52 Stratofortress bombers flew along Taiwan’s east coast, according to Pacific Air Forces spokeswoman Maj. Victoria Hight.

The U.S. operations were held after Chinese naval and air forces operated near Taiwan twice this week. Beijing, which regards the island as its own, held a “combat-readiness patrol” with bombers, jet fighters, early warning aircraft, destroyers and frigates near Taiwan on Feb.9, according to the Chinese Defense Ministry.

The U.S. considers Taiwan’s status unsettled, but adheres to the “One China” policy, acknowledging that Beijing considers Taiwan part of China. However, the Taiwan Relations Act provides a framework for the U.S. to aid the self-governing island’s defense.

On Monday, China held naval and air drills in the waters off the southeastern coast of Taiwan, including air-to-ground assault and fire-support exercises, a Tuesday Defense Ministry statement said.

Chinese fighter jets during the Monday exercise went over the Taiwan Strait and crossed its “middle line,” flying closer to Taiwan than mainland China, according to a report Tuesday by China’s state-run Global Times newspaper.

The Navy’s Saturday sail was the second Taiwan Strait transit this year. The guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh made the trip on Jan. 16, Keiley said at the time.

doornbos.caitlin@stripes.com
Twitter: @CaitlinDoornbos

 

[jward]

The ABCs of AI-Enabled Intelligence Analysis
Iain J. Cruickshank

February 14, 2020


From July 2014 to April 2015, a period of about 10 months, experts estimate there were 23 million tweets involved in the self-proclaimed Islamic State’s online marshalling of support and influence operations. These tweets contained critical information about the group’s leadership, information narratives, and even indications of tactical activities. While the Islamic State didn’t tweet its way into Mosul, this open-source data was of significant intelligence value. But it’s impossible for any given analyst to sort and understand 23 million tweets manually. This illustrates the dilemma that recent advances in technology pose for traditional methods of intelligence analysis: The digitization of human society has made huge amounts of information available for analysis. This information comes from an ever-increasing number of sources, like online social networks, digital sensors, or ubiquitous surveillance, and has been increasingly useful for intelligence. Too much information is being produced too quickly for an intelligence analyst to even comprehend it using current analysis techniques and software, much less derive meaningful intelligence from it or verify its veracity.

Become a Member

The changing information environment will force the conduct of military intelligence analysis to change too. This change cannot simply be the acquisition of some new analysis software or implementation of a new policy, but rather must be more comprehensive changes across all military intelligence organizations. To meet the new realities of the information environment, and by corollary the new realities of intelligence analysis, the whole of military intelligence needs to modernize in three areas. First, military intelligence organizations like the Army G-2, the J-2, and Futures Command should continue modernizing the tools and infrastructure supporting intelligence analysis and make these changes more broadly available to the force. Second, the military intelligence schoolhouse ought to update how it trains and develops intelligence analysts. Third, military intelligence research organizations — like Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity and elements within U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command — need research into potential disruptive technologies to maintain the integrity of intelligence analysis.

Adopting Data-Centric Systems
The first, and arguably easiest, area for modernization of intelligence analysis is to move towards data-centric systems for analysis for the entire force. At first glance it would seem the military already has and is pursuing data-centric technologies. And it is indeed the case that some organizations in the Department of Defense are developing cutting-edge data-centric systems for some types of intelligence analysis. In particular, groups like the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Special Operations Command, and the Army G-2 have been working on implementations of machine learning systems to be used in some intelligence analysis tasks. There are also several contract opportunities posted by the Department of Defense for developing AI solutions to military problems, including problems for military intelligence.
However, much of the work remains confined to specific intelligence problems like object identification in imagery, or are only available to certain organizations such as the special operations community. Additionally, many of these AI solutions are not configurable by the users. They are “black-box” software applications and, as such, the machine learning algorithms cannot be retrained on new data by a user.

Why does this matter? Imagine having a computer program that does a great job at detecting military vehicles from satellite imagery. Then the organization’s mission changes to counter-insurgency, and it now needs a program to detect individuals carrying weapons on foot. If the computer program is closed and not configurable, you would have to contract out or otherwise build a brand-new program. Whereas if the program were configurable you could just change the machine learning algorithms, or even just retrain the algorithms on new data from the new scenario. Further, many of the intelligence analysis tools and infrastructure available to the whole force are simply not data-centric by any of the principles of data-centric technologies (e.g. none of the algorithms or computational tools can be modified for different data scenarios). It is time for all operational military intelligence units to pursue data-centric technologies for their analysis systems, and move beyond applying AI to specific intelligence problems in an ad-hoc and one-off manner.
There are two key concepts to any data-centric system: First, analysis tools and applications should change with the data, and second, data should be easily accessible. Analysts must be able to configure the tools and algorithms of the systems to meet the realities of the battlefield, and data access should be as seamless as possible.

Within a data-centric context, the use of machine learning algorithms has led to breakthroughs in nearly every analysis endeavor, from fraud detection to image identification. To take advantage of these advances, intelligence analysts need systems that allow them to use computational tools and to constantly adjust, or retrain, their algorithms to a changing battlefield. Unfortunately, nearly all analysis software products in use today — including advanced systems like Palantir or Analyst Notebook — are closed systems that do not allow analysts to code custom algorithms, use the latest machine-learning algorithms, use the latest research in “explainable AI,” or even allow analysts to provide feedback to the software’s algorithms.

The inability to adjust analysis tools to the operational environment is a prodigious problem. Every battlefield scenario is unique in some respect and will therefore produce different information. What is more, the battlefield is a dynamic place; an operation can begin with a conventional tank battle and then quickly transition to an urban infantry fight. Furthermore, military intelligence analysts are called upon to analyze and provide intelligence estimates for everything from tactical missions and operations planning to long-term strategic plans. Given these realities, there will never be a particular algorithm or set of data that will always work to produce the best battlefield intelligence. (In fact, this a direct result of the foundational “No Free Lunch theorem.”) So, intelligence analysis cannot solely rely on an analysis system that treats algorithms and data as a black box. Nor can it solely rely on contracting for all the AI solutions to intelligence problems, or rely on software that requires constant tuning from contractors, and hope to keep pace with realities on the battlefield.

There is no one right way to accomplish the goal of giving analysts data-centric systems that can keep pace with changes on the battlefield. There are ongoing efforts and proposals to address this issue. At a minimum, however, any analysis system meant for all military intelligence units ought to allow analysts to code in the common languages used for data analysis and machine learning (i.e. Python, R, etc.). The analysis system can have special contractor-specific algorithms or interfaces to solve specific intelligence analysis problems, but it should allow for coding. While the ability to write code will entail some additional risk to both the computational resources and data — through things that can occur with data programming like program bugs or data corruption — careful oversight of the environments and use of virtualization can mitigate a lot of this risk. What’s more, having analysts that can configure their tools and algorithms to the battlefield environment will decrease operational risk. Configuring an algorithm to a set of data requires you to understand how well that algorithm is performing on that data. And, if you have a good understanding of how well the algorithm is performing on a particular set of data, it will make it that much easier for you to have confidence (or uncertainty) in the predictions being output by the program. Ultimately, military intelligence analysts and organizations need computational tools that are both flexible and powerful enough and this can only come from data-centric systems that support programming in appropriate languages.

Information Storage
To support the modernization of analysis tools, the military intelligence data-storage infrastructure is also in sore need of modernization. The fuel of all machine learning algorithms, and really intelligence analysis itself, is data. Digital data is most useful when it is stored in a way that maintains some kind of consistent format (i.e., all data entries have the same fields of information: date, time, location, for example) and can be easily accessed (i.e., can be queried from the same programming environment where the analysis is taking place: the analyst doesn’t have to launch a new program or window to search the database). However, many current databases of information used by military intelligence analysts make query of data difficult and they have no standardized data formats or documentation. Often, an intelligence analyst will have to navigate to a half-dozen information sources that only allow for manual click-through menus to search for information on them.

Then they will have to download any information as a bunch of .csv files, manually fix the formatting errors between the files such as differences in date formats — just to get usable data. This severely inhibits an analyst from using advanced, computational tools as much of their time will necessarily be spent manually downloading and formatting data.
Intelligence information storage systems need to be more accessible for analysis. One way to do this is to provide policies so that certain standards are observed by all intelligence databases. For example, any given repository of information should have clear documentation on what resides within it. That way, an analyst can quickly understand how to craft queries to get the information they are after. Furthermore, databases should also endeavor to have programmatic access to information repositories.. This allows an analyst to quickly download large volumes of information right into their analysis environment rather than fumbling around with manually downloading, formatting, and then uploading the same information. It would also be worthwhile to create and maintain a directory of all of the databases of information that exist. While these steps are not a panacea, they are simple, concrete first steps to addressing current data issues within military intelligence organizations. Ultimately, without modernizing how the community stores and accesses information, many advanced tools for intelligence analysis will be hard to use.

Managing Analysts
Modernization also requires new training and management of intelligence analysts. Analysts need to know how to handle massive amounts of digital data, which requires some programming skills and basic data science skills. Some would argue that there simply isn’t enough time to train these kinds of skills in addition to everything else a military intelligence analyst needs to know. However, if one considers how much time intelligence analysts spend manually handling data, military organizations can’t afford not teach these skills to their intelligence analysts. Imagine being an intelligence analyst tasked with analyzing threats and information warfare on social media for your area of operations, which could be as large as a country or region of the world. And imagine you have no idea how to use regular expressions or how to parse data files, meaning you could only use rough keyword searches and manually scan every result. All of your time would be spent in just manually looking through search results — most of which may be completely useless — and not thinking about the adversary or developing actionable intelligence. There is, and will continue to be, too much information for analysts to parse and sort manually, and analysts must be equipped with skills in data programming to handle this information deluge.
Talent management for intelligence analysts should also include their ability to handle and leverage digital data in their analyses. As analysts improve their ability to handle digital information, they will need advanced training and schooling in data visualization and, for more experienced analysts, machine learning. This need may necessitate changes to the skills trained at advanced analysis schools. Furthermore, the varying level of digital data skills across analysts will also require some means of tracking for appropriate career management. Functional Area 49 in the U.S. Army has already implemented a “data scientist” skill identifier. The CIA has full data science career tracks for intelligence analysts. Something similar will be needed for intelligence analysts within the military. As the skills for analysis shift, so too must the development and management of intelligence analysts shift.

Research Technologies Relevant to Intelligence
Research and development arms of military intelligence and organizations like Army Futures Command ought to conduct practical research into emerging technologies and trends that will likely significantly impact intelligence analysis. Nearly all machine learning research today, while often funded by the Department of Defense, has been driven by commercial, medical, and academic problems. It’s unclear how much of this research will translate into military applications, especially since military applications have unique and critical ethical considerations. Many commercial machine learning algorithms are designed to work by training on large volumes of data without any regard for things like the nationality of the individuals producing the data. Most commercially used machine learning algorithms are not tied to life-or-death decisions, so the assumptions underpinning these algorithms may not meet standards for ethical military use. Thus, there is a need for research, within the military intelligence community, into what machine learning and other AI technologies work for specific military applications and their specific ethical employment.

Military intelligence analysis would also greatly benefit from research into new, disruptive technologies. Two disruptive technologies in particular are adversarial machine learning and the production of believable, artificial data. Adversarial machine learning, or learning how to fool machine learning algorithms into making wrong predictions, is a fast-growing field of research. If one considers the parallel growth of surveillance and machine learning for intelligence purposes in many other nations, adversarial machine learning could be hugely disruptive (and likely a great boon for things like special forces operations). Adversarial machine learning will likely be critical to all things intelligence, concealment, and deception and so should be researched by those that it will impact. Similarly, machine learning algorithms like Generative Adversarial Networks have shown great ability to generate fake data, including video and audio, which looks entirely real to a human observer. Since data is the fuel of intelligence analysis, it follows that there is a need to also research these new technologies in order to preserve the integrity of any analysis. Military intelligence research organizations should conduct their own research into how to counter these threats and understand their impact upon intelligence analysis, in order to preserve its effectiveness.

The operational environment confronting intelligence analysts is undergoing an accelerating digitalization. As such, military intelligence analysts and organizations are confronting new problems of data volume, velocity, and veracity which necessitate a comprehensive modernization of military intelligence organizations. In particular, the military needs force-wide, data-centric tools and infrastructure for intelligence units, training of intelligence analysts in digital data handling skills, and research by military intelligence research organizations on the impact and mitigation of adversarial machine learning and digital fake data generation.


Special Series, AI and National Security

• https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/power-and-pretzels-in-munich-2020/
• The ABCs of AI-Enabled Intelligence Analysis - War on the Rocks

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

No hiding strained EU-US ties – DW – 02/16/2020

Friend or foe? Ties between the two sides of the Atlantic are already complicated. At the Munich Security Conference, the differences were more apparent than ever, says Matthias von Hein.

www.dw.com

Opinion
Opinion: Munich Security Conference reveals frayed trans-Atlantic ties
Friend or foe? Ties between the two sides of the Atlantic are already complicated. At the Munich Security Conference, the differences were more apparent than ever, says Matthias von Hein.





Tensions had been simmering for a long time, and now they have come to the fore: At the Munich Security Conference, the deep cracks in the trans-Atlantic relationship have become more apparent than ever. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's reply to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier's opening speech showed that Europe — or at least Berlin, and even more so Paris — is further away from Washington than ever.

A common enemy?

The US delegation, surprisingly large for an election year, made every effort to close the gap between the two sides — but its approach was clearly at odds with President Donald Trump's administration. The US Congress and government does agree on something, though: That China is the new enemy. Hopefully in the face of this threat, the Europeans and Americans might once more find common ground.

Read more: US-Chinese confrontation hangs over MSC summit



Watch video 02:34

World leaders reveal opposing views on Western alliance

There was hardly any meeting, panel or speech in which the US did not address the upcoming 5G rollout, with repeated warnings about the involvement of Chinese communications supplier Huawei. For all their justified concerns, the constant finger pointing only served to cement resistance.

One thing is certain: There will be no return to the heyday of close trans-Atlantic ties. Rhetorically, at least, the Europeans have been shaken awake from that dream. There is much talk of Europe becoming a sovereign, strategic, political power. There are demands that Germany once again learns the language of power, which French President Emmanuel Macron has already seemed to master.

Read more: France's Macron envisions new era of European strength in MSC address



Watch video 04:36

Maas: 'We will accept Macron's invitation to dialogue'

Support for European 'independence'

With regard to future trans-Atlantic relations, three positions have emerged. Firstly, the French vision of European independence. Secondly, the prevailing position — especially in Eastern Europe — that one should be closely connected to Washington, no matter what. And thirdly, Germany's indecision between these positions. However, one can predict with some certainty that if Donald Trump wins a second term in the White House in November, the French vision will get a massive shot in the arm — including from Berlin.


DW's Matthias von Hein

Read more: NATO secretary-general defends trans-Atlantic ties at MSC

Macron energizes EU debate

The highlight of the conference was perhaps the appearance of French President Emmanuel Macron. The French president brings incredible dynamism to the European debate. He fights for European independence. He wants a common foreign and defense policy. And if that does not work for all 27 remaining EU members after Brexit, then Paris would be happy to work with those that do support the idea repeatedly advocated at the conference: to create a Europe capable of action in the face of the "rivalry of the great powers."

Macron has come to the opinion that ambitions alone are not enough in this new world. Skills are also required. Reaction to this conclusion of Macron's from the German delegation was broadly approving — but it remains to be seen whether that approval is reflected in action.



Watch video 02:17

'Westlessness' ahead of Munich Security Conference

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• Date 16.02.2020
• Author Matthias von Hein
• Related Subjects Munich Security Conference, Emmanuel Macron, White House, Europe, French presidential election 2017
• Keywords Munich Security Conference, United States, Europe, trans-Atlantic, Heiko Maas, Emmanuel Macron
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• Permalink Opinion: Munich Security Conference reveals frayed trans-Atlantic ties | DW | 16.02.2020

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[Housecarl]

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Assad pledges to continue onslaught that has displaced 900,000

As government forces make gains in northwestern Syria, UN warns of ‘horrifying’ crisis amid ‘indiscriminate’ violence.

www.aljazeera.com

• News
• /
• Bashar al-Assad

Assad pledges to continue onslaught that has displaced 900,000
As government forces make gains in northwestern Syria, UN warns of 'horrifying' crisis amid 'indiscriminate' violence.

17 Feb 2020

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has pledged to continue an onslaught on the country's last major rebel stronghold, saying the war was not yet over but a "complete victory" was in sight.
The fierce Russian-backed government offensive has displaced 900,000 people in the northwestern region since the start of December, the United Nations said on Monday, warning that the "horrifying" crisis was forcing those fleeing to sleep outside in freezing temperatures and had resulted in babies dying of cold as camps are full.
More:

• 'Breaking point': Babies dying in the freezing cold amid Idlib push

• What is happening in Idlib?

• Three scenarios for the battle for Idlib

But in a rare address carried on state television on Monday, al-Assad congratulated his forces for recent gains that led to them consolidating control over Aleppo province and pledging to press ahead with a military campaign in Idlib province.
"This liberation does not mean the end of war and it does not mean the end of the schemes nor the end of terrorism or the surrender of enemies and it doesn't mean our enemies will surrender," he said.
"But it means that we rubbed their noses in the dirt as a prelude for complete victory and ahead of their defeat sooner or later.
"We should not rest, but continue to prepare for coming battles, and therefore, the battle of liberating the Aleppo countryside and Idlib will continue."

The offensive has disrupted the fragile cooperation between Turkey and Russia, which back opposing sides in the conflict but have collaborated towards what they say is a political solution to the nearly nine-year war.
Ankara, which supports several Syrian rebel groups in the northwest, has been outraged since Syrian attacks in Idlib province killed 13 Turkish troops in two weeks. It has called on Moscow to stop the attacks, warning it would use military power to drive back Syrian forces unless they withdraw by the end of the month.

Turkey has, so far, sent thousands of troops and hundreds of convoys of military equipment to reinforce its observation posts in Idlib, established under a 2018 de-escalation agreement with Russia.
In his address, al-Assad also alluded to Ankara's warning, saying the offensive will go ahead despite "empty voices that are coming from the north".
Al Jazeera's Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from the Turkey-Syria border, said al-Assad appeared to want "to tell his own people that this [offensive] is something that might take longer than expected.
"Particularly if Turkey continues its involvement and there is no deal between Turkey and Russia about implementing a ceasefire," Ahelbarra added.
Humanitarian crisis
Rami Khouri, a professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, said it is not clear what al-Assad's defiant message means for Syria's relationship with Turkey.
Khouri said that Turkey was unlikely to engage in conventional warfare with Syria because it would threaten its own ties with Russia.
"The Turkish-Russian relationship is way more important than the Turkish-Syrian government [relationship," he said.
Separately, Mark Lowcock, the UN head of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, warned on Monday that the violence in the northwest was "indiscriminate".
"Health facilities, schools, residential areas, mosques and markets have been hit. Schools are suspended, many health facilities have closed. There is a serious risk of disease outbreaks. Basic infrastructure is falling apart," he said in a statement.
"We are now receiving reports that settlements for displaced people are being hit, resulting in deaths, injuries and further displacement."
He said a massive relief operation under way from the Turkish border has been "overwhelmed. The equipment and facilities being used by aid workers are being damaged. Humanitarian workers themselves are being displaced and killed."

NewsFeed

What is happening in Idlib?



SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

 

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Leaked Data Shows China's Uighurs Detained Due to Religion

A newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties

www.voanews.com

East Asia Pacific
Leaked Data Shows China's Uighurs Detained Due to Religion
By Associated Press

February 17, 2020 01:41 PM

BEIJING - For decades, the Uighur imam was a bedrock of his farming community in China’s far west. On Fridays, he preached Islam as a religion of peace. On Sundays, he treated the sick with free herbal medicine. In the winter, he bought coal for the poor.

But as a Chinese government mass detention campaign engulfed Memtimin Emer’s native Xinjiang region three years ago, the elderly imam was swept up and locked away, along with all three of his sons living in China.

Now, a newly revealed database exposes in extraordinary detail the main reasons for the detentions of Emer, his three sons, and hundreds of others in Karakax County: their religion and their family ties.




Uighur Persecution in China

More than one million Uighurs, members of a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority in China, are currently held in Xinjiang internment camps. Olivia Enos, Senior Policy Analyst in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation, and Sophie Richardson, China Director at Human Rights Watch, discuss with host Carol Castiel the deplorable treatment of Uighurs in China.

The database obtained by The Associated Press profiles the internment of 311 individuals with relatives abroad and lists information on more than 2,000 of their relatives, neighbors and friends. Each entry includes the detainee’s name, address, national identity number, detention date and location, along with a detailed dossier on their family, religious and neighborhood background, the reason for detention, and a decision on whether or not to release them. Issued within the past year, the documents do not indicate which government department compiled them or for whom.

Taken as a whole, the information offers the fullest and most personal view yet into how Chinese officials decided who to put into and let out of detention camps, as part of a massive crackdown that has locked away more than a million ethnic minorities, most of them Muslims.

The database emphasizes that the Chinese government focused on religion as a reason for detention — not just political extremism, as authorities claim, but ordinary activities such as praying, attending a mosque, or even growing a long beard. It also shows the role of family: People with detained relatives are far more likely to end up in a camp themselves, uprooting and criminalizing entire families like Emer’s in the process.




US Teenager Vows to Continue to Advocate for Uighurs Despite Pressure

Feroza Aziz, a 17-year-old from New Jersey, says her account on the Chinese-owned social network was suspended after she posted three videos in which she condemned China’s policy against the Uighurs

Similarly, family background and attitude is a bigger factor than detainee behavior in whether they are released.

“It’s very clear that religious practice is being targeted,” said Darren Byler, a University of Colorado researcher studying the use of surveillance technology in Xinjiang. “They want to fragment society, to pull the families apart and make them much more vulnerable to retraining and reeducation.”

The Xinjiang regional government did not respond to faxes requesting comment. Asked whether Xinjiang is targeting religious people and their families, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said “this kind of nonsense is not worth commenting on.”

Beijing has said before that the detention centers are for voluntary job training, and that it does not discriminate based on religion.




China Targets Foreign Nationals of Uighur Origin

VOA interviewed several ethnic Uighurs of different nationalities who said they or their family members faced detention upon arriving in China

China has struggled for decades to control Xinjiang, where the native Uighurs have long resented Beijing’s heavy-handed rule. With the 9/11 attacks in the United States, officials began using the specter of terrorism to justify harsher religious restrictions, saying young Uighurs were susceptible to Islamic extremism.

After militants set off bombs at a train station in Xinjiang’s capital in 2014, President Xi Jinping launched a so-called “People’s War on Terror”, transforming Xinjiang into a digital police state.




Uighur Woman Uses Social Media to Pressure China into Releasing Her Father

Samira Imin came to the US in 2014 as an international student and was admitted to the University of Massachusetts Amherst majoring in biology

The leak of the database from sources in the Uighur exile community follows the release in November of a classified blueprint on how the mass detention system really works. The blueprint obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which includes the AP, showed that the centers are in fact forced ideological and behavioral re-education camps run in secret. Another set of documents leaked to the New York Times revealed the historical lead-up to the mass detention.

The latest set of documents came from sources in the Uighur exile community, and the most recent date in them is March 2019. The detainees listed come from Karakax County, a traditional settlement of about 650,000 on the edge of Xinjiang’s Taklamakan desert where more than 97 percent of residents are Uighur. The list was corroborated through interviews with former Karakax residents, Chinese identity verification tools, and other lists and documents seen by the AP.

Detainees and their families are tracked and classified by rigid, well-defined categories. Households are designated as “trustworthy” or “not trustworthy,” and their attitudes are graded as “ordinary” or “good.” Families have “light” or “heavy” religious atmospheres, and the database keeps count of how many relatives of each detainee are locked in prison or sent to a “training center.”




US House Approves Bill Denouncing China's Crackdown of Uighur Muslims

Legislation calls for Trump administration to impose sanctions on officials deemed responsible for detention of millions of Uighurs and other ethnic Muslims; China vows Washington will "pay a price" for interfering in its internal affairs

Officials used these categories to determine how suspicious a person was — even if they hadn’t committed any crimes.

“It underscores the witch-hunt mindset of the government, and how the government criminalizes everything,” said Adrian Zenz, an expert on the detention centers and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Reasons listed for internment include “minor religious infection,” “disturbs other persons by visiting them without reasons,” “relatives abroad,” “thinking is hard to grasp” and “untrustworthy person born in a certain decade.” The last seems to refer to younger men; about 31 percent of people considered “untrustworthy” were in the age bracket of 25 to 29 years, according to an analysis of the data by Zenz.

When former student Abdullah Muhammad spotted Emer’s name on the list of the detained, he was distraught.

“He didn’t deserve this,” Muhammad said. “Everyone liked and respected him. He was the kind of person who couldn’t stay silent against injustice.”

Even in Karakax county, famed for its intellectuals and scholars, Emer stood out as one of the most renowned teachers in the region. Muhammad studied the Quran under Emer for six years as a kid, following him from house to house in an effort to dodge the authorities. Muhammad said Emer was so respected that the police would phone him with warnings ahead of time before raiding classes at his modest, single-story home of brick and mud.

Though Emer gave Party-approved sermons, he refused to preach Communist propaganda, Muhammad said, eventually running into trouble with the authorities. He was stripped of his position as an imam and barred from teaching in 1997, amid unrest roiling the region.

When Muhammad left China for Saudi Arabia and Turkey in 2009, Emer was making his living as a doctor of traditional medicine. Emer was growing old, and under heavy surveillance, he had stopped attending religious gatherings.

That didn’t stop authorities from detaining the imam, who is in his eighties, and sentencing him on various charges for up to 12 years in prison over 2017 and 2018. The database cites four charges in various entries: “stirring up terrorism,” acting as an unauthorized “wild” imam, following the strict Saudi Wahhabi sect and conducting illegal religious teachings.

Muhammad called the charges false. Emer had stopped his preaching, practiced a moderate Central Asian sect of Islam rather than Wahhabism and never dreamed of hurting others, let alone stirring up “terrorism,” Muhammad said.

“He used to always preach against violence,” Muhammad said. “Anyone who knew him can testify that he wasn’t a religious extremist.”

None of Emer’s three sons had been convicted of a crime. But the database shows that over the course of 2017, all were thrown into the detention camps for having too many children, trying to travel abroad, being “untrustworthy” or “infected with religious extremism,”or going on the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. It also shows that their relation to Emer and their religious background was enough to convince officials they were too dangerous to let out from the detention camps.

“His father taught him how to pray,” notes one entry for his eldest, Ablikim Memtimin.

“His family’s religious atmosphere is thick. We recommend he (Emer) continue training,” says another entry for his youngest son, Emer Memtimin.

Even a neighbor was tainted by living near him, with Emer’s alleged crimes and prison sentence recorded in the neighbor’s dossier.

The database indicates much of this information is collected by teams of cadres stationed at mosques, sent to visit homes and posted in communities. This information is then compiled in a dossier called the “three circles”, encompassing their relatives, community, and religious background.

It wasn’t just the religious who were detained. The database shows that Karakax officials also explicitly targeted people for activities that included going abroad, getting a passport or installing foreign software.

Pharmacist Tohti Himit was detained in a camp for having gone multiple times to one of 26 “key” countries, mostly Muslim, according to the database. Former employee Habibullah, who is now in Turkey, recalled Himit as a secular, kind and wealthy man who kept his face free of a beard.

“He wasn’t very pious, he didn’t go to the mosque,” said Habibullah, who declined to give his first name out of fear of retribution against family still in China. “I was shocked by how absurd the reasons for detention were.”

The database says cadres found Himit had attended his grandfather’s funeral at a local mosque on March 10, 2008. Later that year, the cadres found, he had gone to the same mosque again, once to worship and once to celebrate a festival. In 2014 he had gone to Anhui province, in inner China, to get a passport and go abroad.

That, the government concluded, was enough to show that Himit was “certainly dangerous.” They ordered Himit to stay in the center and “continue training.”

Emer is now under house arrest due to health issues, his former student, Muhammad, has heard. It’s unclear where Emer’s sons are.

It was the imam’s courage and stubbornness that did him in, Muhammad said. Though deprived of his mosque and his right to teach, Emer quietly defied the authorities for two decades by staying true to his faith.

“Unlike some other scholars, he never cared about money or anything else the Communist Party could give him,” Muhammad said. “He never bowed down to them — and that’s why they wanted to eliminate him.”

 

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In a small Polish village near a Russian exclave, US-led NATO battle group is ready ‘in case anything happens’

Some residents in Bemowo Piskie, Poland, say having American troops in the Polish village makes them feel safer. Others just like having them in town.

www.stripes.com

In a small Polish village near a Russian exclave, US-led NATO battle group is ready ‘in case anything happens’

By IMMANUEL JOHNSON | STARS AND STRIPES Published: February 15, 2020

BEMOWO PISKIE, Poland — When American troops first deployed to northeast Poland in 2017 to lead a NATO enhanced Forward Presence battle group, the population of the village of Bemowo Piskie grew by a third overnight.
Nearly three years later, locals have grown used to the military presence and the occasional columns of tanks that pass through the village. Some say having the Americans in the village, which lies just south of the strategic Suwalki Corridor — a border area between Poland and Lithuania that is sandwiched between Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad — makes them feel safer. Others just like having them in town.
“American soldiers in Bemowo Piskie enjoy being here and we like having them,” said Kate, a villager who didn’t want to give her last name.
The U.S.-led battle group is one of four on NATO’s eastern flank aimed at deterring Russian aggression in Europe. The other three are in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which were annexed by the Soviet Union immediately after World War II, only regaining their freedom in 1991 when the USSR crumbled.
Russia often breaches the air space of the three Baltic states, has conducted crippling cyberattacks against them, and in 2014 was accused by the Estonians of abducting a security official at the border.
A 2018 report co-authored by former U.S. Army Europe commander retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges called the Suwalki Corridor, about 60 miles northeast of Bemowo Piskie, “some of the most important territory within NATO’s borders.”

A U.S. soldier from 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, prepares to fire an M3 Carl Gustaf 84mm recoilless rifle, during an anti-tank training course in Bemowo Piskie, Poland, Jan. 31, 2020.
TIMOTHY HAMLIN/U.S. ARMY

“It is NATO’s physical link between the Baltic littoral to the north and the European plain to the south. If this Corridor is not fully secured, NATO’s credibility as a security guarantor to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia could be seriously undermined,” the report said.
Having American and other NATO troops in Bemowo Piskie is seen as a deterrent to Russian aggression because, under NATO’s founding principles, an attack on the battle group would be seen as an attack on the entire alliance. But with around 15,000 Russian troops based in Kaliningrad, just 65 miles north of Bemowo Piskie, the U.S.-led battle group, which with Polish, Croatian, Romanian and British forces totals about 1,200 troops, would be sorely outnumbered in an attack.
The troops know their job would be to hold off any attackers until NATO could strike back on a much larger scale.
“We have a training plan in case anything happens,” said Capt. Ian Staley, Lightning Troop commander for 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment. “We don’t feel that being this close [to Russia] is an issue. It is an opportunity for us to be in Bemowo Piskie in case anything happens.”
American troops cycle through Bemowo Piskie in six-month rotations, living in barracks inside the fenced-off training area of around 42,000 acres, where they regularly participate in exercises with forces from other NATO member states.
Earlier this month, the battle group took part in “kill tank,” an exercise designed to “teach soldiers about the functions and capabilities of weapons systems,” Staley said. In July last year, Bemowo Piskie was host to the first Interoperability Games, testing how well allied troops can use each other’s equipment and vehicles.

Other than the language barrier and a 10 p.m. curfew, the American troops are free to take advantage of the village’s amenities – two small grocery stores and two restaurants.

“The soldiers enjoy going out in town and out at night, even though it is a small town,” Kate, said.

Some of the Americans came to Poland with apprehensions – not because of how close they’d be to Russia but because they’d heard stories about the long, cold winters and how small and isolated Bemowo Piskie is.

“I heard a lot of horror stories, but it’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” said Spc. Kyle Bercsik, who arrived in January with the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, out of Vilseck, Germany.

“There are soccer and basketball teams,” and Bercsik attends Polish lessons with a few other soldiers, he said.

“It puts the stress away for a couple of hours.”

Johnson.Immanuel@stripes.com
Twitter: @Manny_Stripes

 

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US Navy Confirms Global Strike Hypersonic Weapon Will First Deploy on Virginia Attack Subs

The US Navy intends to deploy its conventional prompt strike hypersonic weapon on Virginia-class attack submarines, after previous discussions of putting the weapon on the larger Ohio-class guided-missile submarine (SSGN), according to budget request documents.

In its Fiscal Year 2021 budget overview, the Navy outlines a research and development portfolio with 5 percent more funding than this current year – for a total of $21.5 billion – that is aimed at “providing innovative capabilities in shipbuilding (Columbia class), aviation (F-35), weapons (Maritime Strike Tomahawk), hypersonics (Conventional Prompt Strike), unmanned, family of lasers, digital warfare, applied [artificial intelligence], and [U.S. Marine Corps] expeditionary equipment. These technologies are crucial to maintaining DON’s competitive advantage.”

On the Conventional Prompt Strike, the Navy wants to invest $1 billion for research and development.

“The CPS program develops warfighting capability to enable precise and timely strike capability in contested environments across surface and sub-surface platforms,” reads the budget documents.
“The Navy’s CPS program will design a missile comprised of a Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB) and a 34.5 inch two-stage booster. The program is pursuing an [initial operational capability] of FY 2028 in which the missile will be fielded on a Virginia class submarine with Virginia Payload Module.”

In the fall of 2017, the Navy and Defense Department tested “the first conventional prompt strike missile for the United States Navy in the form factor that would eventually, could eventually be utilized if leadership chooses to do so, in an Ohio-class tube,” now-retired Vice Adm. Terry Benedict, who then directed the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs (SSP), said, calling it “a monumental achievement.”

The conventional prompt global strike capability would allow the U.S. to hit any target on the planet with precision-guided weapons in less than an hour. Similar to nuclear weapons, part of that prompt strike capability would rely on multiple ways to launch the missiles from ships, submarines or ground launchers around the globe.

news.usni.org
Navy Confirms Global Strike Hypersonic Weapon Will First Deploy on Virginia Attack Subs - USNI News
The Navy intends to deploy its conventional prompt strike hypersonic weapon on Virginia-class attack submarines, after previous discussions of putting the weapon on the larger Ohio-class guided-missile submarine (SSGN), according to budget request documents. In its Fiscal Year 2021 budget...
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US Navy Confirms Global Strike Hypersonic Weapon Will First Deploy on Virginia Attack Subs

The US Navy intends to deploy its conventional prompt strike hypersonic weapon on Virginia-class attack submarines, after previous discussions of putting the weapon on the larger Ohio-class guided-missile submarine (SSGN), according to budget request documents. In its Fiscal Year 2021 budget...

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Will the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty survive the 2020s? | The Strategist

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The treaty has three separate but inter-related objectives: preventing the spread of nuclear weapons ...

www.aspistrategist.org.au

Will the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty survive the 2020s?

20 Feb 2020|Rod Lyon

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the entry into force of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The treaty has three separate but inter-related objectives: preventing the spread of nuclear weapons and nuclear-weapon technologies to more countries; promoting cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy; and pressing the existing nuclear-weapon states to disarm.

With 191 states parties, it enjoys almost universal membership. Today, only India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and South Sudan remain outside it. (North Korea did join, in December 1985, but never came into compliance and left in January 2003.) Of course, the first four of those countries have all built nuclear weapons, which severely constrains their options for future membership: the treaty contains no provision under which they could be admitted as nuclear-weapon states, entitled to the same status and privileges as the five officially recognised nuclear powers (the US, Russia, China, France and the UK).

Treaty members will vent about a range of issues during the upcoming five-yearly review conference, scheduled to take place in New York from 27 April to 22 May. North Korean nuclear and missile developments, the trials of the Iranian nuclear deal, the collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the continuing modernisation programs of the five recognised nuclear weapon states—instead of disarmament—provide plenty of new grist for the mill.

Still, every review conference seems to precipitate a sense of unease over the future of the treaty. This year’s no different. Yet the NPT will survive this conference, too, because most treaty members continue to believe that an uncontrolled spread of nuclear weapons would make for a more dangerous international security environment than the one we already have. Moreover, few states would want the NPT to collapse and leave the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (which still hasn’t been ratified by enough states to enter into force) in sole possession of the field.

Harder to calculate, and more worrying, is the shifting relationship between the NPT and geopolitics. Let’s see the treaty for what it is—an attempt to freeze the world in the nuclear status quo of 1968, when the treaty was first opened for signature. As such, the NPT represents an attempt to disconnect nuclear weapons from the geopolitical power shifts that have occurred since then.

True, the freeze wasn’t perfectly solid. The treaty gave some wriggle room. Once the treaty entered into force, there were only two ways that a country not previously protected by nuclear weapons could acquire such protection: it could leave the treaty under the ‘supreme national interest’ clause (or never join in the first place) and build its own nuclear arsenal in the teeth of international disapproval; or it could enter into an alliance relationship with one of the recognised nuclear-weapon states and gain the protection of extended nuclear deterrence.

India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea took the first course. The ‘new NATO’ states took the second. NATO was an alliance of 15 countries in 1968; today it’s an alliance of 29. US extended nuclear deterrence, which covered perhaps 20 countries worldwide in 1968, now covers almost double that number.

Of course, the attraction of the second course turns heavily upon a set of judgements about the credibility and resilience of extended nuclear assurances. For such assurances to be a substitute for a national indigenous program, they have to be more than superficially plausible—and the benchmark tends to climb steeply as the sense of imminent threat grows.

And here we come to the central quandary. Looked at in the broadest sense, the NPT has led something of a sheltered geopolitical existence. Born into a bipolar strategic world, where the bulk of nuclear weapons were in the hands of two risk-averse superpowers, both of which knew well the terrible costs of great-power war, the treaty added an ordering layer to a geopolitical environment in which caution, and recognised spheres of influence, already prevailed.

The treaty was originally intended to last for 25 years, which meant it expired, and was indefinitely extended, in the year 1995—probably the single best year in the last 50 ideally suited to achieving that outcome. The world of 1995, remember, was a unipolar one, where US dominance and the ‘end of history’ thesis suggested global geopolitical convergence.

No such favourable geopolitical environment now exists. Neither bipolarity nor unipolarity has prepared us for the emerging security challenges that now confront us. An NPT which held back proliferation incentives during those earlier, less strategically demanding eras might find it harder to contain such pressures in an age of multipolarity and risk-tolerant actors. And, given the weight it’s now carrying, a US less willing to run nuclear risks on behalf of its allies could throw a serious spanner into the works.

Nuclear proliferation is rare. And it’s always treated on a case-by-case basis. But the four successful non-NPT proliferators have proven that the world has no strategy—save another Desert Storm—to halt proliferation by a determined proliferator.

Nor does it have a strategy for managing proliferation pressures if US extended nuclear deterrence were to falter. The steady expansion of US nuclear commitments in the post–Cold War era suggests a world where the demand for nuclear protection could outrun the supply. Indeed, there are growing concerns that the supply itself might be contracting as US engagement declines—which may explain some of the teasing hints in French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent speech on nuclear doctrine, holding out the possibility of closer nuclear links between France and its neighbours.

Can we reinvent the NPT for the world of 2020? Frankly, I don’t see how we do that—not without reopening the whole question of nuclear identity. The NPT forced states to choose their nuclear identity in the geopolitical world of 1968, when only five countries—the Permanent Five of the UN Security Council—had conducted nuclear tests. Repeating the exercise now would open a veritable Pandora’s box. Even Australia, a country patently unenthusiastic about a more densely proliferated world, would probably find a decision now more difficult than the one it took five decades ago.

Author
Rod Lyon is a senior fellow at ASPI. Image: US Department of Defense.

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China expands influence in Africa as US plays catch-up

Beijing is combining military, economic and diplomatic efforts to boost its reach

asia.nikkei.com

Opinion China expands influence in Africa as US plays catch-up
Beijing is combining military, economic and diplomatic efforts to boost its reach

James Stavridis Guest Writer
February 20, 2020 14:00 JST

As China continues to implement its trillion-dollar Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, a principal focus will be engagement in Africa. China knows that Africa's youthful population is exploding, that the continent is rich in natural resources and that it is massive in geographical scale.
It represents a huge potential market for Chinese goods and a zone of significant political influence in countering the U.S. globally. But while China is alive to all these possibilities, and indeed is actively exploring them, the U.S. has only just started to play catch-up and faces losing out to its superpower rival.
Economically, Africa continues to expand in raw output, technological sophistication and growth, which may hit 4% in 2020. While some of the larger economies can drag down overall expansion, countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Kenya are showing strong growth.

Africa's population is already 16% of the world at 1.3 billion people, and is forecast to grow to 2.5 billion by 2050 and 4 billion by the century's end.
Specific examples point to the success of China's strategic approach. Just over a year ago, Senegal signed up to the BRI, becoming the first nation in West Africa to do so while welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping in an elaborate ceremony.
Other nations around the huge and oil-rich Gulf of Guinea are likewise in conversations with China to join the BRI, and Senegal has been working with China to bring African heads of state together with Chinese counterparts in 2021 at the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation.
Ethiopia is another example. With the second largest population in Africa and a newly minted peace agreement with neighbor Eritrea, Ethiopia is poised for significant economic growth this decade. China has been involved in a variety of high-profile construction projects in Addis Ababa, for example light rail and the African Union headquarters. The Ethiopians see themselves as crucial to Chinese economic and political inroads in East Africa.

The light rail transit in Addis Ababa constructed by china, pictured in March 2016: China has been involved in a variety of high-profile construction projects in the capital city. © Corbis/Getty Images
A final example is Angola, which has received enormous loans for government construction projects and supplies a high level of oil to China.
Depending on the trajectory of the coronavirus, there may be an impact on China’s ability to execute much of this as staffing and resources are choked off -- at least temporarily.
China's military is likewise involved with counterparts across the continent. The People's Liberation Army has significant training and exercise programs in more than a dozen countries, with an emphasis on both counterterrorism and humanitarian operations. They have modeled their Africa program of military-to-military engagement on U.S. practice in Latin America and the Caribbean, where they are also deeply engaged.
The Chinese are also willing to make arms sales much easier than the U.S. tends to do, both in terms of favorable prices and willingness to provide key technologies. Chinese warships from the rapidly expanding People's Liberation Army's Navy are paying port calls along the coast of East Africa, to South Africa and to the Gulf of Guinea.
There are certainly a variety of downsides to the Chinese approach from the perspective of African nations. They are looking warily at a series of debt trap entanglements that can end up with a Chinese takeover of infrastructure if loans are not paid off -- as happened in Sri Lanka recently.
The overhang of Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage, and suspicion about the role of Chinese vendor Huawei Technologies in the rollout of fifth-generation, or 5G, wireless networks, are subjects of debate on the continent as they are globally. And China has typically limited its use of local labor and talent at the midlevel and above in its projects. But despite these downsides, BRI is gaining speed throughout Africa.
The U.S., on the other hand, is just beginning to wake up to the enormous potential of Africa. This week Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has toured Ethiopia, Senegal and Angola. It was his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa in his two years as Secretary of State, and the short visit was sandwiched between stops in Europe and the Middle East.
Over the past decade, U.S. interest in Africa has largely been confined to security operations against terrorist organizations such as al-Shabab in East Africa and Boko Haram in West Africa.
But recent budget realignment by the Defense Department has signaled a possible reduction in troops and such partnership operations.
Unlike China, which has a finely crafted strategy for Africa and is moving swiftly to execute it, U.S. efforts are relatively small and not well aligned between military, economic and diplomatic. The U.S.'s profile in Africa is not helped by a perception that President Donald Trump does not care for the region -- recall his "shithole countries" categorization of African nations.

Mike Pompeo shakes hands with African Union Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat in Addis Ababa on Feb. 18: U.S. efforts are not well aligned between military, economic and diplomatic. © Reuters
While Secretary Pompeo's trip is at least an opening, it cannot substitute for a better constructed set of strategic initiatives.
China is not altruistic in its actions -- for example, it has been accused of spying on the very African Union headquarters it built. But it has moved well ahead of the U.S. throughout the continent, and -- despite temporary internal distractions and the impact of dealing with the coronavirus -- is likely to continue leading the way as the two powers compete.

James Stavridis, a retired four-star U.S. Navy admiral, is an operating executive of the Carlyle Group. After leading the NATO alliance as supreme allied commander from 2009 to 2013, he spent five years as dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His latest book is "Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character."

 

[Housecarl]

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How the Good War Went Bad

Winning in Afghanistan was always going to be difficult, but avoidable errors have made it impossible.

www.foreignaffairs.com

How the Good War Went Bad
America’s Slow-Motion Failure in Afghanistan
By Carter Malkasian March/April 2020

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Pakistani protesters rally against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in Karachi, Pakistan, September 2001 Reuters
The United States has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for over 18 years. More than 2,300 U.S. military personnel have lost their lives there; more than 20,000 others have been wounded. At least half a million Afghans—government forces, Taliban fighters, and civilians—have been killed or wounded. Washington has spent close to $1 trillion on the war. Although the al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead and no major attack on the U.S. homeland has been carried out by a terrorist group based in Afghanistan since 9/11, the United States has been unable to end the violence or hand off the war to the Afghan authorities, and the Afghan government cannot survive without U.S. military backing.
At the end of 2019, The Washington Post published a series titled “The Afghanistan Papers,” a collection of U.S. government documents that included notes of interviews conducted by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. In those interviews, numerous U.S. officials conceded that they had long seen the war as unwinnable. Polls have found that a majority of Americans now view the war as a failure. Every U.S. president since 2001 has sought to reach a point in Afghanistan when the violence would be sufficiently low or the Afghan government strong enough to allow U.S. military forces to withdraw without significantly increasing the risk of a resurgent terrorist threat. That day has not come. In that sense, whatever the future brings, for 18 years the United States has been unable to prevail.
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The obstacles to success in Afghanistan were daunting: widespread corruption, intense grievances, Pakistani meddling, and deep-rooted resistance to foreign occupation. Yet there were also fleeting opportunities to find peace, or at least a more sustainable, less costly, and less violent stalemate. American leaders failed to grasp those chances, thanks to unjustified overconfidence following U.S. military victories and thanks to their fear of being held responsible if terrorists based in Afghanistan once again attacked the United States. Above all, officials in Washington clung too long to their preconceived notions of how the war would play out and neglected opportunities and options that did not fit their biases. Winning in Afghanistan was always going to be difficult. Avoidable errors made it impossible.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF A LONG WAR
On October 7, 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush launched an invasion of Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks. In the months that followed, U.S. and allied forces and their partners in the Northern Alliance, an Afghan faction, chased out al Qaeda and upended the Taliban regime. Bin Laden fled to Pakistan; the leader of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, went to the mountains. Taliban commanders and fighters returned to their homes or escaped to safe havens in Pakistan. Skillful diplomatic efforts spearheaded by a U.S. special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, established a process that created a new Afghan government led by the conciliatory Hamid Karzai.
For the next four years, Afghanistan was deceptively peaceful. The U.S. military deaths during that time represent just a tenth of the total that have occurred during the war. Bush maintained a light U.S. military footprint in the country (around 8,000 troops in 2002, increasing to about 20,000 by the end of 2005) aimed at completing the defeat of al Qaeda and the Taliban and helping set up a new democracy that could prevent terrorists from coming back. The idea was to withdraw eventually, but there was no clear plan for how to make that happen, other than killing or capturing al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Still, political progress encouraged optimism. In January 2004, an Afghan loya jirga, or grand council, approved a new constitution. Presidential and then parliamentary elections followed. All the while, Karzai strove to bring the country’s many factions together.
But in Pakistan, the Taliban were rebuilding. In early 2003, Mullah Omar, still in hiding, sent a voice recording to his subordinates calling on them to reorganize the movement and prepare for a major offensive within a few years. Key Taliban figures founded a leadership council known as the Quetta Shura, after the Pakistani city where they assembled. Training and recruitment moved forward. Cadres infiltrated back into Afghanistan. In Washington, however, the narrative of success continued to hold sway, and Pakistan was still seen as a valuable partner.
In February 2006, thousands of Taliban insurgents overran entire districts and surrounded provincial capitals.
Violence increased slowly; then, in February 2006, the Taliban pounced. Thousands of insurgents overran entire districts and surrounded provincial capitals. The Quetta Shura built what amounted to a rival regime. Over the course of the next three years, the Taliban captured most of the country’s south and much of its east. U.S. forces and their NATO allies were sucked into heavy fighting. By the end of 2008, U.S. troop levels had risen to over 30,000 without stemming the tide. Yet the overall strategy did not change. Bush remained determined to defeat the Taliban and win what he deemed “a victory for the forces of liberty.”
President Barack Obama came into office in January 2009 promising to turn around what many of his advisers and supporters saw as “the good war” in Afghanistan (as opposed to “the bad war” in Iraq, which they mostly saw as a lost cause). After a protracted debate, he opted to send reinforcements to Afghanistan: 21,000 troops in March and then, more reluctantly, another 30,000 or so in December, putting the total number of U.S. troops in the country at close to 100,000. Wary of overinvesting, he limited the goals of this “surge”—modeled on the one that had turned around the U.S. war in Iraq a few years earlier—to removing the terrorist threat to the American homeland. Gone was Bush’s intent to defeat the Taliban no matter what, even though the group could not be trusted to stop terrorists from using Afghanistan as a refuge. Instead, the United States would deny al Qaeda a safe haven, reverse the Taliban’s momentum, and strengthen the Afghan government and its security forces. The plan was to begin a drawdown of the surge forces in mid-2011 and eventually hand off full responsibility for the country’s security to the Afghan government.

Over the next three years, the surge stabilized the most important cities and districts, vitalized the Afghan army and police, and rallied support for the government. The threat from al Qaeda fell after the 2011 death of bin Laden at the hands of U.S. special operations forces in Pakistan. Yet the costs of the surge outweighed the gains. Between 2009 and 2012, more than 1,500 U.S. military personnel were killed and over 15,000 were wounded—more American casualties than during the entire rest of the 18-year war. At the height of the surge, the United States was spending approximately $110 billion per year in Afghanistan, roughly 50 percent more than annual U.S. federal spending on education. Obama came to see the war effort as unsustainable. In a series of announcements between 2010 and 2014, he laid out a schedule to draw down U.S. military forces to zero (excluding a small embassy presence) by the end of 2016.

What, us worry? Karzai and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Washington, D.C., September 2006 Jim Young / Reuters

By 2013, more than 350,000 Afghan soldiers and police had been trained, armed, and deployed. Their performance was mixed, marred by corruption and by “insider attacks” carried out on American and allied advisers. Many units depended on U.S. advisers and air support to defeat the Taliban in battle.
By 2015, just 9,800 U.S. troops were left in Afghanistan. As the withdrawal continued, they focused on counterterrorism and on advising and training the Afghans. That fall, the Taliban mounted a series of well-planned offensives that became one of the most decisive events of the war. In the province of Kunduz, 500 Taliban fighters routed some 3,000 Afghan soldiers and police and captured a provincial capital for the first time. In Helmand Province, around 1,800 Taliban fighters defeated some 4,500 Afghan soldiers and police and recaptured almost all the ground the group had lost in the surge. “They ran!” cried an angry Omar Jan, the most talented Afghan frontline commander in Helmand, when I spoke to him in early 2016. “Two thousand men. They had everything they needed—numbers, arms, ammunition—and they gave up!” Only last-minute reinforcements from U.S. and Afghan special operations forces saved the provinces.
In battle after battle, numerically superior and well-supplied soldiers and police in intact defensive positions made a collective decision to throw in the towel rather than go another round against the Taliban. Those who did stay to fight often paid dearly for their courage: some 14,000 Afghan soldiers and police were killed in 2015 and 2016. By 2016, the Afghan government, now headed by Ashraf Ghani, was weaker than ever before. The Taliban held more ground than at any time since 2001. In July of that year, Obama suspended the drawdown.
When President Donald Trump took office in January 2017, the war raged on. He initially approved an increase of U.S. forces in Afghanistan to roughly 14,000. Trump disliked the war, however, and, looking for an exit, started negotiations with the Taliban in 2018. Those negotiations have yet to bear fruit, and the level of violence and Afghan casualties rates in 2019 were on par with those of recent years.
THE INSPIRATION GAP
Why did things go wrong? One crucial factor is that the Afghan government and its warlord allies were corrupt and treated Afghans poorly, fomenting grievances and inspiring an insurgency. They stole land, distributed government jobs as patronage, and often tricked U.S. special operations forces into targeting their political rivals. This mistreatment pushed certain tribes into the Taliban’s arms, providing the movement with fighters, a support network, and territory from which to attack. The experience of Raees Baghrani, a respected Alizai tribal leader, is typical. In 2005, after a Karzai-backed warlord disarmed him and stole some of his land and that of his tribesmen, Baghrani surrendered the rest of his territory in Helmand to the Taliban. Many others like him felt forced into similar choices.
Washington could have done more to address the corruption and the grievances that Afghans felt under the new regime and the U.S. occupation, such as pushing Karzai to remove the worst-offending officials from their positions, making all forms of U.S. assistance contingent on reforms, and reducing special operations raids and the mistaken targeting of innocent Afghans. That said, the complexity of addressing corruption and grievances should not be underestimated. No comprehensive solution existed that could have denied the Taliban a support base.

The ease of the initial invasion in 2001 distorted Washington’s perceptions.
Another major factor in the U.S. failure was Pakistan’s influence. Pakistan’s strategy in Afghanistan has always been shaped in large part by the Indian-Pakistani rivalry. In 2001, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf officially cut off support for the Taliban at the behest of the Bush administration. But he soon feared that India was gaining influence in Afghanistan. In 2004, he reopened assistance to the Taliban, as he later admitted to The Guardian in 2015, because Karzai, he alleged, had “helped India stab Pakistan in the back” by allowing anti-Pakistan Tajiks to play a large role in his government and by fostering good relations with India. The Pakistani military funded the Taliban, granted them a safe haven, ran training camps, and advised them on war planning. The critical mass of recruits for the 2006 offensive came from Afghan refugees in Pakistan. A long succession of U.S. leaders tried to change Pakistani policy, all to no avail: it is unlikely that there was anything Washington could have done to convince Pakistan’s leaders to take steps that would have risked their influence in Afghanistan.
Underneath these factors, something more fundamental was at play. The Taliban exemplified an idea—an idea that runs deep in Afghan culture, that inspired their fighters, that made them powerful in battle, and that, in the eyes of many Afghans, defines an individual’s worth. In simple terms, that idea is resistance to occupation. The very presence of Americans in Afghanistan was an assault on what it meant to be Afghan. It inspired Afghans to defend their honor, their religion, and their homeland. The importance of this cultural factor has been confirmed and reconfirmed by multiple surveys of Taliban fighters since 2007 conducted by a range of researchers.

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[Housecarl]

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The Afghan government, tainted by its alignment with foreign occupiers, could not inspire the same devotion. In 2015, a survey of 1,657 police officers in 11 provinces conducted by the Afghan Institute for Strategic Studies found that only 11 percent of respondents had joined the force specifically to fight the Taliban; most of them had joined to serve their country or to earn a salary, motivations that did not necessarily warrant fighting, much less dying. Many interviewees agreed with the claim that police “rank and file are not convinced that they are fighting for a just cause.” There can be little doubt that a far larger percentage of Taliban fighters had joined the group specifically to confront the United States and the Afghans who were cooperating with the Americans.
This asymmetry in commitment explains why, at so many decisive moments, Afghan security forces retreated without putting up much of a fight despite their numerical superiority and their having at least an equal amount of ammunition and supplies. As a Taliban religious scholar from Kandahar told me in January 2019, “The Taliban fight for belief, for jannat [heaven] and ghazi [killing infidels]. . . . The army and police fight for money. . . . The Taliban are willing to lose their heads to fight. . . . How can the army and police compete with the Taliban?” The Taliban had an edge in inspiration. Many Afghans were willing to kill and be killed on behalf of the Taliban. That made all the difference.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
These powerful factors have kept the United States and the Afghan government from prevailing. But failure was not inevitable. The best opportunities to succeed appeared early on, between 2001 and 2005. The Taliban were in disarray. Popular support for the new Afghan government was relatively high, as was patience with the foreign presence. Unfortunately, U.S. decisions during that time foreclosed paths that might have avoided the years of war that followed.
The first mistake was the Bush administration’s decision to exclude the Taliban from the postinvasion political settlement. Senior Taliban leaders tried to negotiate a peace deal with Karzai in December 2001. They were willing to lay down their arms and recognize Karzai as the country’s legitimate leader. But U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shot down the deal—in a press conference, no less. After that, between 2002 and 2004, Taliban leaders continued to reach out to Karzai to ask to be allowed to participate in the political process. Karzai brought up these overtures to U.S. officials only to have the Bush administration respond by banning negotiations with any top Taliban figures. In the end, the new government was established without the Taliban getting a seat at the table. Whether or not the entire group would have compromised, enough senior leaders were interested that future violence could have been lessened.
Obama’s decision to use airstrikes only in extremis virtually ensured defeat.

After pushing the Taliban back to war, Bush and his team then moved far too slowly in building up the Afghan security forces. After the initial invasion, a year passed before Washington committed to building and funding a small national army of 70,000. Recruitment and training then proceeded haltingly. By 2006, only 26,000 Afghan army soldiers had been trained. So when the Taliban struck back that year, there was little to stop them. In his memoir, Bush concedes the error. “In an attempt to keep the Afghan government from taking on an unsustainable expense,” he writes, “we had kept the army too small.”
The Bush administration thus missed the two best opportunities to find peace. An inclusive settlement could have won over key Taliban leaders, and capable armed forces could have held off the holdouts. Overconfidence prevented the Bush team from seeing this. The administration presumed that the Taliban had been defeated. Barely two years after the Taliban regime fell, U.S. Central Command labeled the group a “spent force.” Rumsfeld announced at a news conference in early 2003: “We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability and stabilization and reconstruction activities. . . . The bulk of the country today is permissive; it’s secure.” In other words, “Mission accomplished.”
The ease of the initial invasion in 2001 distorted Washington’s perceptions. The administration disregarded arguments by Karzai, Khalilzad, U.S. Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry (then the senior U.S. general in Afghanistan), Ronald Neumann (at the time the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan), and others that the insurgents were staging a comeback. Believing they had already won the war in Afghanistan, Bush and his team turned their attention to Iraq. And although the fiasco in Iraq was not a cause of the failure in Afghanistan, it compounded the errors in U.S. strategy by diverting the scarce time and attention of key decision-makers.
“I DO NOT NEED ADVISERS”
After 2006, the odds of a better outcome narrowed. The reemergence of the Taliban catalyzed further resistance to the occupation. U.S. airstrikes and night raids heightened a sense of oppression among Afghans and triggered in many an obligation to resist. After the Taliban offensive that year, it is hard to see how any strategy could have resulted in victory for the United States and the Afghan government. Nevertheless, a few points stand out when Washington might have cleared a way to a less bad outcome.
The surge was one of them. In retrospect, the United States would have been better off if it had never surged at all. If his campaign promises obligated some number of reinforcements, Obama still might have deployed fewer troops than he did—perhaps just the initial tranche of 21,000. But General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. Central Command, did not present the president with that kind of option: all their proposals involved further increases in the number of U.S. military personnel deployed to Afghanistan. Both generals believed that escalation was warranted owing to the threat posed by the possible reestablishment of Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists. Both had witnessed how a counterinsurgency strategy and unswerving resolve had turned things around in Iraq, and both thought the same could be done in Afghanistan. Their case that something had to be done and their overconfidence in counterinsurgency crowded out the practical alternative of forgoing further reinforcements. Had Obama done less, U.S. casualties and expenses would likely have been far lower and still the conditions would have changed little.
It is worth noting that the much-criticized 18-month deadline that Obama attached to the surge, although unnecessary, was not itself a major missed opportunity. There is scant evidence to support the charge that if Obama had given no timeline, the Taliban would have been more exhausted by the surge and would have given up or negotiated a settlement.

A funeral for a victim of a drone strike in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, September 2019 Parwiz Parwiz / Reuters

But Obama did err when it came to placing restrictions on U.S. forces. Prior to 2014, U.S. airstrikes had been used when necessary to strike enemy targets, and commanders took steps to avoid civilian casualties. That year, however, as part of the drawdown process, it was decided that U.S. airstrikes in support of the Afghan army and police would be employed only “in extremis”—when a strategic location or major Afghan formation was in danger of imminent annihilation. The idea was to disentangle U.S. forces from combat and, to a lesser extent, to reduce civilian casualties. As a result of the change, there was a pronounced reduction in the number of U.S. strikes, even as the Taliban gained strength. Into 2016, U.S. forces carried out an average of 80 airstrikes per month, less than a quarter of the monthly average for 2012. Meanwhile, over 500 airstrikes per month were being conducted in Iraq and Syria against a comparable adversary. “If America just helps with airstrikes and . . . supplies, we can win,” pleaded Omar Jan, the frontline commander in Helmand, in 2016. “My weapons are worn from shooting. My ammunition stocks are low. I do not need advisers. I just need someone to call when things are really bad.” The decision to use airstrikes only in extremis virtually ensured defeat. Obama had purchased too little insurance on his withdrawal policy. When the unexpected happened, he was unprepared.
Bush had enjoyed the freedom to maneuver in Afghanistan for half his presidency and had still passed up significant opportunities. Facing far greater constraints, Obama had to play the cards he had been dealt. The Afghan government had been formed, violence had returned, and a spirit of resistance had arisen in the Afghan people. Obama’s errors derived less from a willful refusal to take advantage of clear opportunities than from oversights and miscalculations made under pressure. They nevertheless had major consequences.
FEAR OF TERROR
Given the high costs and slim benefits of the war, why hasn’t the United States simply left Afghanistan? The answer is the combination of terrorism and U.S. electoral politics. In the post-9/11 world, U.S. presidents have had to choose between spending resources in places of very low geostrategic value and accepting some unknown risk of a terrorist attack, worried that voters will never forgive them or their party if they underestimate the threat. Nowhere has that dynamic been more evident than in Afghanistan.
In the early years after the 9/11 attacks, the political atmosphere in the United States was charged with fears of another assault. Throughout 2002, various Gallup polls showed that a majority of Americans believed that another attack on the United States was likely. That is one reason why Bush, after having overseen the initial defeat of al Qaeda and the Taliban, never considered simply declaring victory and bringing the troops home. He has said that an option of “attack, destroy the Taliban, destroy al Qaeda as best we could, and leave” was never appealing because “that would have created a vacuum [in] which . . . radicalism could become even stronger.”
Only after the surge and the death of bin Laden did withdrawal from Afghanistan become conceivable.
The terrorist threat receded during the first half of Obama’s presidency, yet he, too, could not ignore it, and its persistence took the prospect of a full withdrawal from Afghanistan off the table in the run-up to the surge. According to the available evidence, at no point during the debate over the surge did any high-level Obama administration official advocate such a move. One concern was that withdrawing completely would have opened up the administration to intense criticism, possibly disrupting Obama’s domestic agenda, which was focused on reviving the U.S. economy after the financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent recession.
Only after the surge and the death of bin Laden did a “zero option” become conceivable. Days after bin Laden was captured and killed, in May 2011, a Gallup poll showed that 59 percent of Americans believed the U.S. mission in Afghanistan had been accomplished. “It is time to focus on nation building here at home,” Obama announced in his June 2011 address on the drawdown. Even so, concerns about the ability of the Afghan government to contain the residual terrorist threat defeated proposals, backed by some members of the administration, to fully withdraw more quickly. Then, in 2014, the rise of the Islamic State (or ISIS) in Iraq and Syria and a subsequent string of high-profile terrorist attacks in Europe and the United States made even the original, modest drawdown schedule less strategically and politically feasible. After the setbacks of 2015, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that if the drawdown went forward on schedule, security could deteriorate to the point where terrorist groups could once again establish safe havens in Afghanistan. Confronted with that finding, Obama essentially accepted the advice of his top generals to keep U.S. forces there, provide greater air support to the Afghan army and police, and continue counterterrorism operations in the country. The intention to get out had met reality and blinked.
So far, a similar fate has befallen Trump, the U.S. president with the least patience for the mission in Afghanistan. With Trump agitating for an exit, substantive talks between the Taliban and the United States commenced in 2018. An earlier effort between 2010 and 2013 had failed because the conditions were not ripe: the White House was occupied with other issues, negotiating teams were not in place, and Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, was in seclusion—and then died in 2013. By 2019, those obstacles no longer stood in the way, and Trump was uniquely determined to leave. The result was the closest the United States has come to ending the war.

Khalilzad, once again serving as a special envoy, made quick progress by offering a timeline for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces in return for the Taliban engaging in negotiations with the Afghan government, reducing violence as the two sides worked toward a comprehensive cease-fire, and not aiding al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. Over the course of nine rounds of talks, the two sides developed a draft agreement. The Taliban representatives in the talks and the group’s senior leaders refused to meet all of Khalilzad’s conditions. But the initial agreement was a real opportunity for Trump to get the United States out of Afghanistan and still have a chance at peace.

Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan, in Kabul, January 2019 Jim Huylebroek / The New York Times

It fell apart. Although Trump toyed with the idea of holding a dramatic summit to announce a deal at Camp David in September 2019, he was torn between his campaign promise to end “endless wars” and the possibility of a resurgent terrorist threat, which could harm him politically. During an interview with Fox News in August, he was distinctly noncommittal about fully withdrawing. “We’re going down to 8,600 [troops], and then we’ll make a determination from there,” he said, adding that a “high intelligence presence” would stay in the country. So when the Taliban drastically escalated their attacks in the run-up to a possible announcement, killing one American soldier and wounding many more, Trump concluded that he was getting a bad deal and called off the negotiations, blasting the Taliban as untrustworthy. Trump, like Obama before him, would not risk a withdrawal that might someday make him vulnerable to the charge of willingly unlocking the terrorist threat. And so yet another chance to end the war slipped away.
The notion that the United States should have just left Afghanistan presumes that a U.S. president was free to pull the plug as he pleased. In reality, getting out was nearly as difficult as prevailing. It was one thing to boldly promise that the United States would leave in the near future. It was quite another to peer over the edge when the moment arrived, see the uncertainties, weigh the political fallout of a terrorist attack, and still take the leap.
EXPECT THE BAD, PREPARE FOR THE WORST
The United States failed in Afghanistan largely because of intractable grievances, Pakistan’s meddling, and an intense Afghan commitment to resisting occupiers, and it stayed largely because of unrelenting terrorist threats and their effect on U.S. electoral politics. There were few chances to prevail and few chances to get out.
In this situation, a better outcome demanded an especially well-managed strategy. Perhaps the most important lesson is the value of forethought: considering a variety of outcomes rather than focusing on the preferred one. U.S. presidents and generals repeatedly saw their plans fall short when what they expected to happen did not: for Bush, when the Taliban turned out not to be defeated; for McChrystal and Petraeus, when the surge proved unsustainable; for Obama, when the terrorist threat returned; for Trump, when the political costs of leaving proved steeper than he had assumed. If U.S. leaders had thought more about the different ways that things could play out, the United States and Afghanistan might have experienced a less costly, less violent war, or even found peace.



This lack of forethought is not disconnected from the revelation in The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” that U.S. leaders misled the American people. A single-minded focus on preferred outcomes had the unhealthy side effect of sidelining inconvenient evidence. In most cases, determined U.S. leaders did this inadvertently, or because they truly believed things were going well. At times, however, evidence of failure was purposefully swept under the rug.
Afghanistan’s past may not be its future. Just because the war has been difficult to end does not mean it will go on indefinitely. Last November, Trump reopened talks with the Taliban. A chance exists that Khalilzad will conjure a political settlement. If not, Trump may decide to get out anyway. Trump has committed to reducing force levels to roughly the same number that Obama had in place at the end of his term. Further reductions could be pending. Great-power competition is the rising concern in Washington. With the death last year of ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the shadow of 9/11 might at last recede, and the specter of terrorism might lose some of its influence on U.S. politics. At the same time, the roiling U.S. confrontation with Iran is a wild card that could alter the nature of the Afghan war, including by re-entrenching the American presence.
But none of that can change the past 18 years. Afghanistan will still be the United States’ longest war. Americans can best learn its lessons by studying the missed opportunities that kept the United States from making progress. Ultimately, the war should be understood neither as an avoidable folly nor as an inevitable tragedy but rather as an unresolved dilemma.

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Barnett R. Rubin

 

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A new strategy for Central Asia

Washington is finally starting to take this critical region seriously.

thehill.com

A new strategy for Central Asia
By Frederick Starr and Svante Cornell, opinion contributors — 02/18/20 04:00 PM EST 22
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

This month, the Trump administration released its strategy for Central Asia. This marks the first time in more than two decades that the United States has come up with a serious approach to a region where vast economic, geopolitical, and civilizational stakes are at issue. It follows visits by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the first trip to the region by someone in that role in half a decade.
Long seen as a stagnant land of Soviet holdovers, Central Asia has been undergoing a dramatic transition led by its two most powerful countries, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Leaders in both countries have plunged into meaningful domestic reforms that are now focused on expanding citizen rights, governmental responsiveness, and the rule of law. They have also taken some important steps toward establishing their own structures for regional cooperation, a process that could result in a kind of Central Asian version of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Other world powers have certainly taken notice. Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the behemoth Belt and Road Initiative in the capital of Kazakhstan seven years ago. Moscow, desperate not to be marginalized by Beijing, is coercing regional states to join its Eurasian Economic Union, and has also launched a fanciful vision of a “Greater Eurasia” in which all would be subordinated to Russia and China. Indian, Japanese, and South Korean leaders have all extensively toured the region. The European Union released its own strategy for Central Asia last year, focused on supporting regional cooperation rather than mere bilateral ties.
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Neither George Bush nor Barack Obama bothered to think strategically about Central Asia, shifting their attention instead to Afghanistan and the war on terror. Afghanistan has been intimately linked with Central Asia for 3,000 years, but for the past two decades, the United States treated the two as separate worlds. Subordinated to concerns in Afghanistan, Russia, and China, Central Asia became an afterthought. However, in an era where great power competition is seen as the most serious challenge to national security, the United States should care about countries sandwiched between Russia, China, India, Iran, and Pakistan.
The new strategy emphasizes American support for the sovereignty and independence of the Central Asian states. It encourages the growth of regional cooperation among them, and acknowledges positive steps toward political and economic reform. It also supports the expansion of relations between Central Asian states and Afghanistan. It emphasizes the importance of partnership with regional states to achieve progress on sensitive topics such as human rights and religious freedom.
In releasing this strategy, the Trump administration makes clear that it views Central Asia as a world region where the United States has intrinsic national security and economic interests. This is an important departure from the past practice of allowing this region to slip between the cracks. We have long argued for exactly this approach to the region and have ample reason to applaud the strategy drafters. However, the task has not been completed, for several omissions must be attended to.
First, Washington has yet to grasp the key role of Central Asia as a bastion of Muslim societies with secular governments, laws, and education. The United States should acknowledge this role, and work to sustain and promote secular government in Central Asia and elsewhere. Next, the United States has yet to fully recognize that, as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has noted, Afghanistan is itself a Central Asian country. Noting this, the logical next step is for the United States to fully include Afghanistan in its mechanism for consultations with Central Asian states.
The strategy does not mention the crucial east to west corridor linking Central Asia to Europe through the Caspian Sea and the South Caucasus. Expanding the Central Asian linkages with lands to the west should be a priority of American engagement. Finally, the strategy acknowledges the security challenges Central Asian states face from Russia and China, but it offers little detail on how the United States should address them.
Central Asia, including Afghanistan, presents geopolitically important real estate. Building on their rich indigenous cultures, its countries now look to the Americans to provide a balance to other major powers in the region. They believe that such an arrangement can provide the basis for better relations among all involved. Until now, the United States has hesitated to embrace this challenge. The new strategy indicates that at long last Washington is beginning to take Central Asia seriously. Having finally taken important first steps, it should now finish the job.
Frederick Starr and Svante Cornell are the chairman and director of the Central Asia Caucasus Institute of the American Foreign Policy Council.

 

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China-Japan-US triangle: Abe’s balancing act | Lowy Institute

China’s rise, alliance management, and hedging against US abandonment is testing Japan’s policy choices.

www.lowyinstitute.org

China-Japan-US triangle:
Abe’s balancing act

Titli Basu

China’s rise, alliance management, and hedging against
US abandonment is testing Japan’s policy choices.

Published 21 Feb 2020 06:00   0 Comments  

• Japan

The legacy for Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo will be defined by how skilfully he navigates fluid geostrategic and geo-economic variables in the US-Japan-China triangle, at a time when regional order is fragmented and global governance is heavily contested. And of those points, China poses a particular challenge.
Since the establishment of the diplomatic relations in 1972, the international and domestic structures that initially framed China-Japan relationship have evolved considerably. One of the salient features in East Asia since the 1990s has been a rising China and a stagnating Japan. Consequently, a key fault line in China-Japan relations is their contending versions of regional order.
Post-war Japan, being an anchor of traditional hub-and-spokes San Francisco system of alliances, envisioned its role of a “stabilizer for the US led system”. China threat arguments in Japan vary from concern over regional hegemony to contested sovereignty with reference to remote islands.
Abe has a delicate
challenge. He seeks
to maximise security
guarantees from
Donald Trump on
one hand, and
optimise economic
gains from Xi
Jinping on the other.
Meanwhile, China has challenged Pax Americana. For the Chinese Communist Party, the US-led order is flawed since American liberalism is inclined to export values of democracy and human rights. Meanwhile, the alliance system is seen as an instrument for encirclement or containment of China. Beijing’s view of the US-Japan alliance has changed since the end of the Cold War, with assessments shifting from the alliance being seen to serve as an effective restraint on Tokyo’s remilitarisation in 1990s, to the observation that advanced US-Japan security cooperation compromises Beijing’s interest in 2000s.
With China’s challenge to American hegemony, Washington’s strategy involve Japan in helping the US to balance Beijing’s growing power. The US-Japan alliance – celebrated last month with the 60th anniversary of Mutual Cooperation and Security Treaty – constitutes the core of post-war Japan’s foreign and security policy, and Abe will continue to invest in it as the top priority. However, alliance management and hedging against US abandonment under Trump’s narrow “America First” attitude is testing Japan’s policy choices.
Tokyo’s strategic calculations are significantly shaped by policy debates on whether Trump, with his lack of a nuanced understanding of alliance politics, risks American retrenchment from the region.
Trump’s unpredictability has forced Abe to revisit Japan’s China policy, leading to a tactical detente and renormalisation efforts since 2017 – although not without some rifts among policy elites in Tokyo. Japan subsequently opted to rebrand its Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy as a vision, adopting a relatively more cooperative approach – unlike the US – primarily due to reservations about taking a purely confrontational posture towards China with regard to economic and non-traditional security issues. Thus, Japan’s FOIP features “duality” in terms of being both a competitive and a cooperative strategy towards China. The aim is not to project FOIP as a divisive strategy, to allow Tokyo to garner more support from partners including ASEAN, Australia and India. But what is does show is a “China gap” between Tokyo and Washington regarding best way to manage Beijing.

US Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships sail in formation during 2015 exercises near Guam (US Navy/Flickr)
Geo-economically, Japan also has concerns. As Brexit continues to unfold alongside Trump’s economic recalibration advocating protectionism over globalisation and multilateral trade frameworks, Abe assumed leadership in defending the international economic order. Tokyo worries the US-China trade war over global technological dominance may adversely affect intricate supply chains. He championed the cause of free trade, including pushing ahead with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTTP) without the US, intensifying negotiations within the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and in concluding the Japan-European Union Economic Partnership Agreement. America’s transactional approach has pushed the business lobbies to strengthen China-Japan economic cooperation, with the resumption of High-level Economic Dialogue in 2018, following an eight-year hiatus.
Third country cooperation on infrastructure has also spurred a conversation on Japan’s posture towards China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Tokyo has started a cautious engagement with Beijing with the aim of shaping it as a responsible actor. To clarify Japan’s position on BRI, Abe has sought to emphasise the need to keep infrastructure open, transparent, economically viable and financially sound. In truth, Japan’s approach has not really changed – whereas before apprehensions over global governance standards were seen as deterrents to Tokyo’s engagement with Chinese projects, now Japan is employing the same set of variables as prerequisites for its participation in the BRI.
This evolution in China-Japan relations is influenced by tactical calculations and should not be misconstrued as fundamental shifts. Issues around contested sovereignty, history, and nationalism remain unresolved. Japan’s cooperation with China on projects in third countries will be contingent on Tokyo’s ability to find a way to support regional economic connectivity without compromising the present geopolitical architecture on which Japan’s security interests continue to rest.
Abe has a delicate challenge. He seeks to maximise security guarantees from Trump on one hand, and optimise economic gains from Xi Jinping on the other. Japan’s negotiating skills will be put to test around the renewal of the Host Nation Support/Special Measures Agreement, just as Trump campaigns for re-election. US base relocation debates will continue to test the alliance, along with defence procurement and issues related to interoperability, networking and integration of capabilities. Meanwhile, as much as Japan detests the idea of a Sino-centric regional order, it cannot afford to engage in a zero-sum game or decouple from China. Stakes are high as Japan keenly awaits the first state visit by Xi, expected in April and the first by a Chinese president since 2008.


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A reborn quadrilateral to deter China

 

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Escalating Burkina Faso violence brings wider Sahel displacement emergency into focus

Deadly attacks on villages in Burkina Faso have forced 150,000 people to flee in just the last three weeks, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday, warning of a displacement emergency in the wider Sahel region.

news.un.org

Escalating Burkina Faso violence brings wider Sahel displacement emergency into focus
21 February 2020
Migrants and Refugees
Deadly attacks on villages in Burkina Faso have forced 150,000 people to flee in just the last three weeks, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Friday, warning of a displacement emergency in the wider Sahel region.

Amid a devastating surge in terrorist attacks against civilian and military targets which the UN says have risen five-fold in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger since 2016, UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic said that survivors needed safety, shelter, food and water “everywhere”.
Help is particularly needed in northern Burkina Faso, where displaced families are staying with host communities who have little in the way of resources themselves.

Some 4,000 people a day flee violence

The new arrivals are “occupying whatever space is available”, the UNHCR official explained, stressing that more than 4,000 people a day have fled attacks in Burkina Faso, since 1 January.

“So far, 765,000 people have already been displaced, of whom more than 700,000 in the past 12 months,” he noted.

Those forced to flee “report attacks on their villages by militant groups, killing, raping, and pillaging,” the UNHCR official said. “Terrified of these attacks, residents have left everything behind to find safety.”

A similar pattern of violence has driven people from their homes in Mali and Niger, adding to the longstanding insecurity crisis further afield in the Lake Chad region, where the UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) estimates that 2.3 million people are displaced.

Following a recent string of attacks in Niger’s Tillaberi and Tahoua regions, UNHCR reported that 4,400 people have fled into neighbouring Mali, while the same wave of violence has displaced around 11,000 people inside Niger.

“They have found refuge in nearby towns of Banibangu and Ouallam, where assistance is being provided,” Mr. Mahecic said, noting that the regions of Tillaberi and Tahoua host 58,000 refugees from Mali and nearly 81,000 displaced people.

In central Mali, the UNHCR official noted that the latest attacks on the village of Ogossagou on 14 February had claimed 30 lives.
‘Too afraid to move’

“Safety is needed for these people,” he said. “In some of these situations, people are so afraid of the insecurity and violence around them that even though they are under attack or fearing of an attack, they do not dare to move.”

The Sahel region encompasses an area south of the Sahara Desert spanning 10 countries from Senegal in the west to Eritrea, in the east.

Violence there intensified after the 2011 revolution in Libya, and an uprising in Mali a year later. As a result, terrorist groups, organized criminal groups and others took advantage of weak governance and ethnic tensions to move across borders and terrorize local populations.

Highlighting severe challenges in accessing the needs of victims of violence throughout the Sahel region, Mr. Mahecic explained that safety, shelter food and water were a priority.

Clothing and other basic items, including dignity kits for women and girls, were also urgently needed, he said, along with counselling for survivors of atrocities.

“What we know right now, is that the violence and the frequency of these attacks have increased, the intensity has increased, and we know that this is the key reason behind this massive displacement,” he said.

Safe access vital to traumatized communities

UNHCR and its partners have stepped up their response, including by strengthening health and education facilities for communities, Mr. Mahecic added, before appealing for safe access for humanitarians to deliver assistance.

According to the UN Special Representative and Head of the UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), violence in the Sahel claimed more than 4,000 lives in 2019, compared to 770 in 2013.

In a briefing to the Security Council last month, Mohamed Ibn Chambas described “relentless attacks” that had shaken public confidence in the authorities.

“Most significantly,” he said, “the geographic focus of terrorist attacks has shifted eastwards from Mali to Burkina Faso and is increasingly threatening West African coastal States.”

Mr. Chambas also explained how the attacks were often perpetrated by extremists looking to engage in illicit activities that included capturing weapons and illegal artisanal mining.

“Extremists provide safety and protection to populations, as well as social services in exchanged for loyalty”, he said.

 

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US and partner forces kick off annual exercise to better counter violent extremism in Africa

US special operations forces will train alongside troops from 30 other countries to sharpen intelligence-sharing skills, in order to help better counter violent extremism in the Sahel region.

taskandpurpose.com

US and partner forces kick off annual exercise to better counter violent extremism in Africa
Haley Britzky
Feb 17, 2020 11:21 AM EST

U.S. special operations forces linked up with troops from 30 other countries in Africa to start an annual military exercise on Monday to sharpen their intelligence-sharing skills in the face of growing extremism in the Sahel region.

• Flintlock, an exercise that has taken place since 2005, "brings people together in order to talk and communicate," Air Force Brig. Gen. Dagvin Anderson said last week, according to Military Times.
• Over 1,600 troops from more than 30 countries — including Germany, France, Niger, Morocco, and more — plan to participate.
• They hope to improve intelligence sharing abilities, Military Times reports, and "beef up partner nations' capacity to counter violent extremist organizations" in the Sahel.
• The partner forces will focus on "small unit tactics," battle drills, and even conduct a mock investigation to learn how to develop intelligence, per Military Times.
• Violence from extremist groups has grown in West Africa; in the last year alone, hundreds of thousands of people became displaced in Burkina Faso because of extremism.
• "If existing African and international efforts are unable to contain the spread of terrorist groups in the Sahel it certainly presents a looming security challenge beyond the continent," Air Force Col. Chris Karns, spokesman for U.S. Africa Command, told Military Times.
• In January, Defense Secretary Mark Esper didn't rule out the possibility of drawing down troops in Africa, though he said no final decisions had been made.

 

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French actions 'neutralize 50 terrorists' near Mopti in central Mali

The France-led Operation Barkhane targeted ISIS and al-Qaeda affiliated fighters near Mopti in central Mali, 'neutralizing' around 50 militants

thedefensepost.com

French actions ‘neutralize 50 terrorists’ near Mopti in central Mali
Barkhane operations between February 9 and 17 targeted Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliated militants

Fergus Kelly February 21, 2020

Around 50 militants were “neutralized” in actions carried out by the France-led Operation Barkhane targeting Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliated fighters in Mali, according to an Armed Forces Ministry release.

The operations, conducted in two phases between February 9 and 17 around the central town of Mopti, were the result of “preparatory work and intelligence gathering that made it possible to characterize with certainty the activity of armed terrorist groups,” the Thursday, February 20 release said.

Around 30 motorcycles and two pickup trucks were destroyed, and weapons, telephones and electronic equipment were seized during the actions.

In the first operation, carried out northwest of Mopti between February 9 and 10, airstrikes conducted by Reaper drones and Mirage 2000 jet fighter aircraft along with combat helicopter engagements “neutralized some 20 armed combatants” including an Islamic State in the Greater Sahara officer.

The French Armed Forces groups fighters killed, injured or taken prisoner under the terms “neutralized” or taken “out of action,” according to AFP.

A second action was carried out between February 16 and 17 south of Mopti, “in a region where Katiba Macina is rampant.”

Katiba Macina is one of the constituent groups of JNIM, which has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda.

Airstrikes and helicopter fire were accompanied by a helicopter-borne assault, and “some 30 jihadist fighters were put out of action.”

“These two operations, with their very heavy material and human toll, weaken the offensive potential of the armed terrorist groups in this region,” the ministry said.
FAMa ‘captures 3 foreign terrorist leaders’ near Mopti

On February 18, the day after the French action south of Mopti, the Malian Armed Forces (FAMa) tracked “terrorists” in the Somadougou area of the Mopti region, a FAMa release said.

“FAMa helicopters carried out precision airstrikes in the Somadougou sector as far as the village of Diallo on the Bankass road,” the release said.

Somadougou is around 28 km (17 miles) south of Mopti town, and Diallo is around 25 km further southeast.

“Several terrorists were killed, some weapons were abandoned, others destroyed,” and three “foreign terrorist leaders” were captured.

It is unclear whether the Barkhane and FAMa operations were related.
French military personnel deployed to Operation Barkhane in Mali. Image: @EtatMajorFR/Twitter
Earlier this week, the French ministry released information on two other Barkhane actions on February 8 and 13 near Hombori, which is around 280 km east of Mopti town.

Between February 6 and 7, the Barkhane force ‘neutralized’ around 20 terrorists “in the west of the Gourma region,” in an area where the “katiba is rampant.”

In mid-January, the ministry said more than 30 “terrorists” were “put out of action” in two commando operations in Mopti that apparently targeted Katiba Macina.
Growing French presence in the Sahel

The French military presence in the Sahel began in 2013 with Operation Serval in Mali, and evolved in August 2014 into Operation Barkhane, which has a mandate for counter-terrorism operations across the region. The Barkhane force focuses activity in insurgent-hit Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, working alongside local troops and other international operations, including the regional G5 Sahel Joint Force (FCG5S), which comprises troops from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania, and MINUSMA, the U.N. stabiliization mission in Mali.

Earlier this month, Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly said that the number of French troops deployed to the Sahel would increase from 4,500 to 5,100.

France and the G5 Sahel states in January injected new urgency into the counter-terrorism fight, announcing a new Coalition for the Sahel which will see increased coordination between French and local forces. Barkhane and FCG5S forces operating under joint command will focus on the Mali-Burkina Faso-Niger tri-border zone, targeting Islamic State as a priority.

Barkhane is already building command coordination with Sahel Coalition partner forces, setting up dedicated coordination mechanisms in Niger’s capital Niamey and Chad’s capital N’Djamena, where Barkhane is headquartered, while Mali has launched Operation Maliko, a new counter-terrorism operation that will take into account cross-border, regional and international cooperation.

France has also been trying to build support for the new special operations Task Force Takuba that will train, advise, assist and accompany local forces in their fight against Islamic State and al-Qaeda affiliates in the region. Takuba will declare initial military capability in the summer and will be fully operational by the autumn.

France hopes that Takuba will comprise around 500 special forces personnel, according to Le Monde. The new French deployment will include around 50 special forces personnel who will form the nucleus of Takuba, Le Monde reported.

So far, Estonia, the Czech Republic, and Sweden have announced plans to contribute to Takuba, and discussions with Finland and Norway are reportedly ongoing, but Germany and the U.S. have declined.

Belgium is to contribute three staff officers to Takuba according to the Belga news agency, but the current caretaker government’s Foreign Minister Philippe Goffin told AFP on February 13 that committing troops to such an operation would require a government with a full mandate, plus the approval of parliament.

Barkhane already has an international dimension, with European partners contributing troops and equipment. Estonia is to almost double the size of its force protection contingent this year, Denmark has deployed two Merlin helicopters, and three Chinook helicopters from the United Kingdom currently support the operation.
A French soldier fires a machine gun mounted to a Panhard VBL light armoured vehicle during the France-led Operation Aconit, which targeted Islamic State militants in Mali and Niger between between June 7 and 19, 2019. Image: État-major des armées Islamist insurgents in the Sahel

The complex insurgency in the Sahel began in Mali in 2012, when a Tuareg separatist uprising was exploited by al-Qaeda-linked extremists who took key cities in the desert north. Former colonial power France began its Operation Serval military intervention the following year, driving the jihadists from the towns.

But the militant groups morphed into more nimble formations operating in rural areas, and the insurgency gradually spread to central and southern regions of Mali and then into Burkina Faso and Niger.

More than 4,000 people were reported killed in militant attacks in the three countries last year, according to the U.N., and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the spiraling violence in the Sahel has spread to coastal states of West Africa.

Many armed groups including Islamic State are active in the Sahel region, but the majority of attacks are attributed to JNIM, which formed in March 2017 from a merger of several smaller groups. JNIM’s leadership has pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Since May 2019, ISIS has attributed insurgent activities in the Sahel area to ISWAP, its West Africa Province affiliate that split from Boko Haram in 2016, rather than to Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. ISWAP’s main area of operations is the Lake Chad area of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Macron has said the Sahel Coalition would prioritize the fight against ISIS in the Mali-Burkina Faso-Niger tri-border area because it is the most dangerous.

 

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Mexican cartel leader 'El Menchito' extradited to U.S. - Breitbart

Feb. 21 (UPI) — A leader in one of Mexico’s major drug cartels appeared in a Washington, D.C., court Friday on drug trafficking charges, one

www.breitbart.com

Mexican cartel leader ‘El Menchito’ extradited to U.S.
UPI21 Feb 20200

Feb. 21 (UPI) — A leader in one of Mexico’s major drug cartels appeared in a Washington, D.C., court Friday on drug trafficking charges, one day after he was extradited to the United States.

Ruben “El Menchito” Oseguera Gonzalez had been in custody in Mexico since his arrest in 2015, during which time he fought the United States’ efforts to have been extradited to face charges there.

U.S. prosecutors’ efforts, though, came to fruition this week amid an increase in extraditions from Mexico after Attorney General William Barr’s visit to the country in December.

“The numbers are up dramatically,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post, estimating about 40 people have been extradited in recent weeks.

Oseguera Gonzalez faces one count of conspiracy to distribute significant quantities of narcotics for illegal importation to the United States and a single count of use of a firearm during and in relation to one or more drug trafficking crimes.

He’s accused of being a top figure in the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel and previously said he’s not guilty of the charges.

 

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Kidnapped Mexican Journalist Rescued After Shootout

Police officers carried out a raid at a home in Central Mexico where they rescued a kidnapped journalist and arrested 10 armed captors.

www.breitbart.com

Kidnapped Mexican Journalist Rescued After Shootout
44

AFPIldefonso Ortiz and Brandon Darby21 Feb 202027
3:18

Federal and state police officers carried out a raid at a home in Central Mexico where they rescued a kidnapped journalist and arrested 10 armed captors. The alleged kidnappers tried to fight off authorities, triggering an intense firefight with AK-47s and AR-15s.

The case began on Wednesday night when gunmen stormed a bar called Mexico Lindo in downtown Cuernavaca, Morelos. The gunmen allegedly shot an employee prior to kidnapping 58-year-old Adrian Fernandez Guerra, the director of the political magazine Perfil. The victim was celebrating his birthday at the time.

According to the Morelos Attorney General’s Office, authorities were able to track the kidnappers to a house in the town of Jiutepec.

Gracias a una intervención conjunta con autoridades federales, la Fiscalía General del Estado de #Morelos logró la liberación de un periodista secuestrado la noche de este miércoles y la detención de 10 presuntos secuestradores. pic.twitter.com/83Zjo4EH4s
— FISCALIA MORELOS (@Fiscalia_Mor) February 21, 2020

With the help of Mexico’s Army and National Guard, authorities carried out a raid. As they tried to enter the home, two gunmen fired until officials were forced to use armored vehicles to enter the property. Authorities arrested 10 gunmen and found Fernandez Guerra alive. It remains unclear if any gunmen died in the clash. Police seized eight rifles described as AK-47s and AR-15s and six handguns.

FGE logra liberación de Periodista secuestrado
•Intervención táctica UECS-PIC-@SEDENAmx–@GN_MEXICO_ permite rescate
•Liberado con vida el periodista y empresario#Morelos @CONASE_mx @GobiernoMorelos @SG_Morelos @altoalsecuestro @urielgandara @MorelosCongreso pic.twitter.com/3n7LoB7pA1
— FISCALIA MORELOS (@Fiscalia_Mor) February 21, 2020

Mexico is labeled one of the most dangerous places for journalists by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2019, Breitbart Texas reported on the murder of 11 journalists, while in 2018 there were 19 cases.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted at Iortiz@breitbart.com.

Brandon Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.

Tony Aranda from Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project contributed to this report


Border / Cartel ChroniclesMedia

 

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Assad pledges to continue onslaught that has displaced 900,000

As government forces make gains in northwestern Syria, UN warns of ‘horrifying’ crisis amid ‘indiscriminate’ violence.

www.aljazeera.com

• News
• /
• Bashar al-Assad

Assad pledges to continue onslaught that has displaced 900,000
As government forces make gains in northwestern Syria, UN warns of 'horrifying' crisis amid 'indiscriminate' violence.

17 Feb 2020

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has pledged to continue an onslaught on the country's last major rebel stronghold, saying the war was not yet over but a "complete victory" was in sight.
The fierce Russian-backed government offensive has displaced 900,000 people in the northwestern region since the start of December, the United Nations said on Monday, warning that the "horrifying" crisis was forcing those fleeing to sleep outside in freezing temperatures and had resulted in babies dying of cold as camps are full.
More:

• 'Breaking point': Babies dying in the freezing cold amid Idlib push

• What is happening in Idlib?

• Three scenarios for the battle for Idlib

But in a rare address carried on state television on Monday, al-Assad congratulated his forces for recent gains that led to them consolidating control over Aleppo province and pledging to press ahead with a military campaign in Idlib province.
"This liberation does not mean the end of war and it does not mean the end of the schemes nor the end of terrorism or the surrender of enemies and it doesn't mean our enemies will surrender," he said.
"But it means that we rubbed their noses in the dirt as a prelude for complete victory and ahead of their defeat sooner or later.
"We should not rest, but continue to prepare for coming battles, and therefore, the battle of liberating the Aleppo countryside and Idlib will continue."

The offensive has disrupted the fragile cooperation between Turkey and Russia, which back opposing sides in the conflict but have collaborated towards what they say is a political solution to the nearly nine-year war.
Ankara, which supports several Syrian rebel groups in the northwest, has been outraged since Syrian attacks in Idlib province killed 13 Turkish troops in two weeks. It has called on Moscow to stop the attacks, warning it would use military power to drive back Syrian forces unless they withdraw by the end of the month.

Turkey has, so far, sent thousands of troops and hundreds of convoys of military equipment to reinforce its observation posts in Idlib, established under a 2018 de-escalation agreement with Russia.

In his address, al-Assad also alluded to Ankara's warning, saying the offensive will go ahead despite "empty voices that are coming from the north".
Al Jazeera's Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from the Turkey-Syria border, said al-Assad appeared to want "to tell his own people that this [offensive] is something that might take longer than expected.
"Particularly if Turkey continues its involvement and there is no deal between Turkey and Russia about implementing a ceasefire," Ahelbarra added.
Humanitarian crisis
Rami Khouri, a professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, said it is not clear what al-Assad's defiant message means for Syria's relationship with Turkey.
Khouri said that Turkey was unlikely to engage in conventional warfare with Syria because it would threaten its own ties with Russia.
"The Turkish-Russian relationship is way more important than the Turkish-Syrian government [relationship," he said.
Separately, Mark Lowcock, the UN head of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, warned on Monday that the violence in the northwest was "indiscriminate".
"Health facilities, schools, residential areas, mosques and markets have been hit. Schools are suspended, many health facilities have closed. There is a serious risk of disease outbreaks. Basic infrastructure is falling apart," he said in a statement.
"We are now receiving reports that settlements for displaced people are being hit, resulting in deaths, injuries and further displacement."
He said a massive relief operation under way from the Turkish border has been "overwhelmed. The equipment and facilities being used by aid workers are being damaged. Humanitarian workers themselves are being displaced and killed."

NewsFeed

What is happening in Idlib?



SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

oops. I cross posted this, n then had the temerity to grouse coz you hadn't. I know it's no biggie, but still. sowwie.
...nice map! : )

 

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Russian patrol vehicle in clash with US convoy in Syria violated deconfliction rules, OIR says

A video making rounds on social media appears to show a U.S. Oshkosh M-ATV force and nearly ram what looks to be a Russian police vehicle off the road. The Russian vehicle can be seen trying to aggressively push pass an American convoy.

www.militarytimes.com

Flashpoints
Russian patrol vehicle in clash with US convoy in Syria violated deconfliction rules, OIR says

Shawn Snow
1 day ago

In this frame grab from video, Russian, Syrian and others gather next to an American military convoy stuck in the village of Khirbet Ammu, east of Qamishli city, Syria, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2020. Syrian media and activists say a Syrian was killed and another wounded in a rare clash between American troops and a group of government supporters in northeast Syria. (AP Photo)

The U.S. military said Thursday that the Russian patrol vehicle involved in a road incident with a U.S. military convoy in Syria violated deconfliction rules and was escorted out of the area of U.S. operations.

“On Feb. 19, 2020, a Russian patrol violated the de-confliction protocols and did not adhere to the de-confliction measures, and was escorted out of the area of U.S. operations,” Col. Myles B. Caggins III, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve told Military Times in an emailed statement.

U.S. Central Command is also reviewing a widely distributed video of that incident, showing the American military convoy running a Russian military vehicle off the road.

The video appears to show the latest in a series of escalating tensions between Russian and U.S. forces in congested northern Syria where a number of state and militia groups have filled a void of departing American troops.

The 45-second video, making the rounds on social media starting Wednesday, appears to show a U.S. Oshkosh M-ATV force and nearly ram what looks to be a Russian military police vehicle off the road. The Russian vehicle can be seen trying to aggressively push pass an American convoy.

Officials with Operation Inherent Resolve — the U.S.-led mission to defeat ISIS in Iraq in Syria — said they were reviewing the incident.

“The Coalition’s goal is to de-escalate any unplanned encounters with other forces operating in northeastern Syria. The videoed driving incident is under review," Caggins said.

It’s unknown if American forces attempted to flag or warn the Russian vehicle not to pass the convoy.

Capt. William Urban, the lead spokesman for U.S. Central Command, told Military times that CENTCOM is aware of the video and that they are looking into it.

Convoy operations in Iraq and Syria are inherently dangerous and American forces are trained to take appropriate precautions when dealing with vehicles approaching or operating in close proximity to U.S. military vehicles.

The exact location the video was shot is unknown. Social media clips claim the incident took place near eastern Qamishli in eastern Syria where Russian forces have a heavy presence.

#US army vehicle pushes #Russia police vehicle off the road, today, eastern Qamishli NE #Syria. pic.twitter.com/X5RNPyqafL
— Mohammad (@ibrashino) February 19, 2020

U.S. officials have sounded alarm bells over recent attempts by Russian forces to ratchet up tensions with U.S. troops in the region that could spark a broader conflict or lead to violence.

Urban told reporters Wednesday that the U.S. military continues to maintain a “robust deconfliction line” with Russia. He said that “by and large” interactions with the Russians in Syria have been professional.

“Russian patrols routinely violate de-confliction protocols. Overall, most interactions remain professional and controlled,” Caggins said.

“We typically do not publicly share details of our frequent Russian deconfliction communications,” Caggins said.

The top U.S. envoy to Syria told reporters in early February that he was worried about the increasing number of incidents of Russian contractors pushing deep into U.S.-backed partner force territory in northeastern Syria.

A number of photos taken in January by Agence France-Presse photographer Delil Souleiman have depicted American Oshkosh M-ATV vehicles interdicting and blocking Russian armored vehicles along strategic roads in northeastern Syria.

James Jeffrey, the U.S. envoy to Syria, said Russians have on a “limited” number of occasions violated deconfliction agreements with U.S. forces by moving deep into Syrian Democratic Force’s territory.

“Now, more serious is we have seen a number — a limited number of occasions, but we have seen them — were they have tried to come deep into the area where we and the SDF are patrolling, well inside the basic lines that we have sketched, not right along the borders. Those are the ones that worry me,” Jeffrey said told reporters in February.

Locals opning fire at US military vehciles in Khirbat Amo in northern al-Hasakah today. Earlier US forces hadkilled a 14 year old teenager from the town. pic.twitter.com/fTA5NxrCMr
— Within Syria (@WithinSyriaBlog) February 12, 2020

“But of course, any commander would be concerned about this, and we call upon the Russians to adhere fully to the deconfliction agreements we’ve made with them,” Jeffrey said.

In February, a U.S. military convoy came under fire and returned fire when it attempted to cross a checkpoint in northeastern Syria.

The Associated Press reported that pro-Syrian regime elements in northern Syria attempted to block the U.S. convoy which led to the clash. One Syrian was killed in the altercation, according to AP.

There are roughly 500 U.S troops in Syria.

About Shawn Snow
Shawn Snow is the senior reporter for Marine Corps Times and a Marine Corps veteran.

 

[night driver]

Yer just CHOC FULLA CARP today, aintcha?

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Global watchdog FATF places Iran on terrorism financing blacklist

After more than three years of warnings from the Paris-based Financial Action Taskforce (FATF), the global dirty money watchdog placed Iran on its blacklist on Friday after it failed to comply with international anti-terrorism financing norms.

www.indiatoday.in

Global watchdog FATF places Iran on terrorism financing blacklist
After more than three years of warnings from the Paris-based Financial Action Taskforce (FATF), the global dirty money watchdog placed Iran on its blacklist on Friday after it failed to comply with international anti-terrorism financing norms.

Reuters Paris
February 22, 2020
UPDATED: February 22, 2020 08:59 IST

The global dirty money watchdog placed Iran on its blacklist on Friday after it failed to comply with international anti-terrorism financing norms, a move that will deepen the country's isolation from financial markets.

The decision came after more than three years of warnings from the Paris-based Financial Action Taskforce (FATF) urging the Islamic Republic to either enact terrorist financing conventions or see its reprieve from the blacklist lifted and some counter-measures imposed.

"Given Iran's failure to enact the Palermo and Terrorist Financing Conventions in line with the FATF Standards, the FATF fully lifts the suspension of counter-measures and calls on its members and urges all jurisdictions to apply effective counter-measures," the group's 39 members said in a statement after a week-long plenary session.

These would entail more scrutiny of transactions with Iran, tougher external auditing of financing firms operating in the country and extra pressure on the few foreign banks and businesses still dealing with Iran.

"The consequence of (Iran's) inaction is higher costs of borrowing and isolation from the financial system," a Western diplomat told Reuters.

The United States commended the task force's action after what it said was Tehran's failure to adhere to FATF's standards.

Iran "must face consequences for its continued failure to abide by international norms," US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement.

Iran's central bank chief dismissed FATF's decision. "(It) is politically motivated and not a technical decision," the state news agency IRNA quoted Abdolnasser Hemmati as saying. "I can assure our nation that it will have no impact on Iran's foreign trade and the stability of our exchange rate."

The FATF appeared to leave the door open for some engagement with Iran saying in its statement: "Countries should also be able to apply countermeasures independently of any call by the FATF to do so."

"It's a middle solution. A sort of a fudge to leave the door open for the Iranians," said one of the diplomats.

Foreign businesses say Iran's compliance with FATF rules is essential if it wants to attract investors, especially since the United States reimposed sanctions on Tehran in 2018 after quitting a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and other big powers.

Iran's leaders have been divided over approach to the FATF.

Supporters of cooperation say it could ease foreign trade with Europe and Asia, offsetting U.S. sanctions. Hardliners argue that passing legislation to join the FATF could hamper Iran's support for its allies, including Lebanon's Hezbollah.

MAXIMUM PRESSURE
Washington has since pushed a policy of "maximum pressure" on Iran, saying a broader deal should be negotiated to encompass nuclear issues, Iran's ballistic missile program and Iranian support for proxy forces around the Middle East.

France, Britain and Germany have tried to salvage the nuclear accord but have faced growing pressure from the United States to join its efforts to isolate Iran.

"The United States was pushing for the toughest position [by FATF], while other countries like China and Russia preferred something more flexible," said a European official. "The Europeans were looking for something in between."

US sanctions have crippled Iran's economy, decimating its oil exports and largely sealing it off from the international financial system.

"Until Iran implements the measures required to address the deficiencies identified with respect to countering terrorism-financing..., the FATF will remain concerned with the terrorist financing risk emanating from Iran and the threat this poses to the international financial system," the FATF said.

Iran's action plan to meet with the FATF requirements, implemented in 2016, expired in January 2018.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif this week appeared resigned to the FATF blacklisting, accusing Washington of using its maximum pressure campaign to exert influence at the FATF.

In another important decision on Friday, the FATF granted Pakistan an extra four months to meet anti-terrorism financing norms, keeping Islamabad for now on its "grey list" of countries that do not adequately comply with its rules.

Also Read | FATF continues Pak in Grey List, warns of action if it fails to check terror funding
Also Watch | FATF decides to keep Pakistan in Grey Lis

 

[Housecarl]

Yer just CHOC FULLA CARP today, aintcha?

You know that saying about "interesting times" right?......