A secretive Pentagon program that started on Trump’s last day in office just ended. The mystery has not.
Craig Timberg
US pentagon building aerial view at sunset
WASHINGTON – A Pentagon program that delegated management of a huge swath of the internet to a Florida company in January – just minutes before President Donald Trump left office – has ended as mysteriously as it began, with the Defense Department this week retaking control of 175 million IP addresses.
The program had drawn scrutiny because of its unusual timing, starting amid a politically charged changeover of federal power, and because of its enormous scale. At its peak, the company, Global Resource Systems, controlled almost 6% of a section of the internet called IPv4. The IP addresses had been under Pentagon control for decades but left unused, despite being potentially worth billions of dollars on the open market.
Adding to the mystery, company registration records showed Global Resource Systems at the time was only a few months old, having been established in September 2020, and had no publicly reported federal contracts, no obvious public-facing website and no sign on the shared office space it listed as its physical address in Plantation, Fla. The company also did not respond to requests for comment, and the Pentagon did not announce the program or publicly acknowledge its existence until The Washington Post reported on it in April.
And now it’s done. Kind of.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon made a technical announcement – visible mainly to network administrators around the world – saying it was resuming control of the 175 million IP addresses and directing the traffic to its own servers.
On Friday the Pentagon told The Post that the pilot program, which it previously had characterized as a cybersecurity measure designed to detect unspecified “vulnerabilities” and “prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” was over. Parts of the internet once managed by Global Resource Systems, the Pentagon said, now were being overseen by the Department of Defense Information Network, known by the acronym DODIN and part of U.S. Cyber Command, based at Fort Meade.
The IP addresses had never been sold or leased to the company, merely put under its control for the pilot program, created by an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense and bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” that solves emergency problems and conducts experimental work for the military.
“The Defense Digital Service established a plan to launch the cybersecurity pilot and then transition control of the initiative to DoD partners,” Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, said in a statement to The Post. “Following the DDS pilot, shifting DoD Internet Protocol (IP) advertisement to DoD’s traditional operations and mature network security processes, maintains consistency across the DODIN. This allows for active management of the IP space and ensure the Department has the operational maneuver space necessary to maintain and improve DODIN resiliency.”
But the Pentagon statement shed little new light on exactly what the pilot program was doing or why it now has ended. It’s clear, though, that its mission has been extended even as it comes more formally under Pentagon control.
On the unusual timing of the start of the pilot program – which began the transfer of control of IP addresses at 11:57 a.m. on Inauguration Day, three minutes before President Joe Biden took office – Goemaere added, “The decision to launch and the scheduling of the DDS pilot effort was agnostic of administration change. The effort was planned and initiated in the Fall of 2020. It was launched in mid-January 2021 when the required infrastructure was in place.”
Global Resource Systems did not return a request for comment Friday.
The unusual nature of the program has been tracked by several people in the networking world, including Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company.
In April, Madory, a former Air Force officer, had come to believe the program was intended to collect intelligence. By announcing control of such a large section of the internet – especially one the Pentagon had left mothballed for years – it likely was possible to reroute information flowing across the internet to military networks for examination and analysis.
Madory said Friday that routine networking errors can make such operations fruitful.
“There are a lot of networks that inadvertently leak out vulnerabilities,” he said. “I’m sure they’ve been scooping that noise up for the past few months.”
Such tactics, he added, can allow cyberspies to discover weaknesses in the networks of adversaries or potentially detect evidence of how adversaries are surveilling your own networks, to help inform the creation of better defenses.
Madory shared one more tantalizing fact: His analysis of traffic flowing through the internet addresses once controlled by Global Resource Systems are still leading to the same place as they have for most of the year – a computer router in Ashburn, Va., a major hub of internet connections for government agencies and private companies – despite the official resumption of Pentagon control.
The Washington Post’s Alice Crites and Paul Sonne contributed to this report.
Donna Jones, the lead for serious and organized crime for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, said police chiefs were concerned the loss of UK and US forces’ checks on exports would pave the way for more heroin trafficking into the UK.
Afghanistan accounts for 82 per cent of global opium cultivation, according to the National Crime Agency, with most heroin that reaches the UK trafficked through the western Balkans.
“Having checks over airport borders and shipping containers has given us an element of control,” said Ms Jones, the police and crime commissioner for Hampshire.
“With an unstable government, with the Taliban in those key roles, do we believe that these organized crime issues could be overlooked or even possibly supported by the Taliban in Afghanistan? I’d say probably yes.”
The opium trade is a major source of income for a large proportion of the Afghan population as it is far more profitable than wheat or other crops.
For about a year before the Taliban were overthrown by the US-led coalition 20 years ago, they had declared opium production as un-Islamic and led a successful campaign eradicating almost all production in areas it controlled.
However, in the past 20 years, the drug trade has become a significant source of income for the Taliban insurgency against the US.
“It is highly unlikely the Taliban will prioritize a ban on opium production at a time when they are badly in need of funds. This is the cognitive dissonance that will be going on in the minds of their leadership: ideology versus necessity,” said a police source.
Ms Jones said the initial impact was expected to be limited. “I don’t think the increase is hitting the person on the street yet, but I think it will do over the next six to 12 months and I think it will do in quite large waves,” she said.
“As a commissioner who has responsibility for making sure that we are tackling drug-related harm, I am very concerned about the effect of heroin on the streets of Britain over the next year and beyond.”
The number of drug-related deaths are at their highest on record, at 4,561 in 2020 in England and Wales, with heroin and morphine accounting for more than a third.
The warning over heroin imports coincides with a national alert by Public Health England over a surge in overdoses that have accounted for at least 16 deaths in less than two weeks in southern England.
Three of deaths – linked to heroin adulterated with the synthetic opioid isotonitazene – had been in Hampshire, said Ms Jones. Isotonitazene is said to be 500 times stronger than morphine.
Jason Harwin, deputy chief constable and the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for drugs, said: “Heroin causes significant harm and misery in our communities and police continue to work hard to target those who import and sell it. We are monitoring and reviewing intelligence in relation to heroin being imported from overseas.”
Afghan allies in hiding, executed in the street — Jewish people know this haunting story
Will Berkovitz
The clock is ticking. As an American Jew, a rabbi, and the CEO of an organization trying to get the families of our staff out of Afghanistan, the bell tolls with every passing second.
The season of reflection and reconciliation is upon us. Our names are being inscribed for life or death.
Americans must make good on our pledge and take concrete, immediate action to get these Afghan families and allies out. President Joe Biden must direct his administration to create an expedited process to evacuate them. This is a moment when we can not wait until all the details are worked out.
I can’t imagine how terrifying it must have been for those left behind to see the gates at the Kabul airport shut and the last flight leave, knowing they would face the danger ahead alone.
The last member of Afghanistan’s Jewish community left the country this week. Yet there remain so many other people, our Muslim allies, who need help. In-text messages and voicemail we received, the desperation is palpable: We are left behind, they tell us. The gates are closed. The roads are unsafe. We are in hiding. Please help us, they beg.
I have heard the audio messages of gunfire in the streets. In a terrified call from a family in Panjshir province Tuesday we were told the Taliban dragged all males aged 10 to 65 from their homes and executed them in the street. Children as young as 10 years old murdered just for existing. Their blood is on our hands.
‘Never forget’ is a call to action
As Jews, we know this story all too well. We know what it’s like to fear for the death of our children. These families are in danger because of their work with the United States government and our military.
Our staff feels helpless. They’ve been working tirelessly to save 123 people, many of whom are family members of our team. Seventy-three of them are children forced to play a deadly game of hide and seek with the Taliban. In voice messages from Kabul, I’ve heard children’s hushed laughter in the background even as their parents talked in despair.
A Taliban soldier stands guard at the gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sept. 5, 2021. Some domestic flights have resumed at Kabul’s airport, with the state-run Ariana Afghan Airlines operating flights to three provinces.
As a Jewish social service organization, our reaction to this crisis is urgent and familiar. There are painfully obvious echoes between what is happening in Afghanistan today and what our people endured leading up to the Holocaust. People are being hunted. Families in hiding. We heard of children executed in the street.
“Never forget” is a call to action, not just a suggestion to always remember. For our Jewish community, it doesn’t matter that we are trying to save Muslims. As our tradition teaches, “One who saves a single life, saves an entire world.”
As Americans, we have a moral obligation. All people of faith have a religious one as well. The call of history echoes loud today. “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible,” said Rabbi Joshua Heschel back in 1972. Those words are as true today as they were 50 years ago.
We will be judged by our actions or indifference. Our words or our silence. Many of my colleagues in faith, as well as community leaders and heads of resettlement organizations, are mortified. We can’t accept the United States government isn’t doing better. We must do better. We have the resources. We just need the will.
What is the actual plan to save lives?
This must not be reduced to politics. We don’t need vague promises. We don’t need to hear, “we are working on it.” We can’t settle for being directed to dead-end websites or email addresses to which no one responds.
We need to know what the plan is to save these people’s lives. Who has the authority to act? People need to be empowered, not left waiting for guidance.
We have no clear answers. We are improvising, communicating with Special Immigrant Visa families in safe houses. They’re scared and are in fear the world will move on after the spectacle of the U.S.’s hasty withdrawal. We owe it to them not to move on until they are safe.
Earlier this summer, the State Department created a staffing surge to help ease the passport backlog so people could take their summer vacations. Why isn’t the State Department creating an even larger staffing surge to process Special Immigrant Visas so we can save the lives of our families and friends who fought and worked with our troops and our government?
The Biden administration must finish the mission. The mission isn’t complete if we leave these people to die.
Rabbi Will Berkovitz in Seattle, Washington, in August 2020.
We don’t have the luxury of time. The longer this drags on, the more desperate those left behind will become. We can’t urge people to take dangerous overland routes based on rumor, speculation, or hope. Cut the bureaucracy and prioritize evacuating these refugees to any intermediary country. Create safe corridors and charter flights. Get the airport in Kabul reopened. At the very least help us determine what is fact and what is fiction.
Each of us should feel we are standing before the gates of repentance this season as the ram’s horn blows a final time. As we are sealed in the book of life or death, let us never forget we can give our allies a chance for life as well. The mission won’t be complete if we leave our allies to die. We will all be judged on both what we do and what we fail to even try.
Rabbi Will Berkovitz is the CEO of Jewish Family Service, a Seattle-based social services agency founded in 1892 that helps vulnerable individuals and families achieve well-being, health and stability.
Thousands of flood-damaged cars may float back to market after Ida. How to spot one
Tanasia Kenney
Cars damaged in floodwaters caused by Hurricane Ida could soon be on the resale market, putting would-be buyers at risk.
Carfax spokesman Chris Basso estimates “378,000 flood-damaged autos were already on the roads” before Ida made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Southeast Louisiana last month, according to CNBC. The system left a trail of destruction stretching from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the Northeast, leaving parts of New York City underwater.
“If history holds true, we’re looking at several thousand more [flooded] vehicles,” Basso told CNBC, “and a decent percentage of them will make it back into the market.”
Flood-damaged cars can be repaired and resold. However, potential buyers aren’t always privy to a vehicle’s history. This is largely because waterlogged cars “are often transported well beyond their original region after major storms,” according to Consumer Reports.
If flood damage is disclosed on a car’s title, it can be legally resold once it has undergone the necessary repairs and a re-inspection, the consumer watchdog agency said. Still, some water-damaged cars will float back on the market with a clean history.
That’s why experts encourage consumers to do a thorough inspection before buying a new ride — or pay a trusted mechanic to take a look.
How to spot a flood-damaged car
When determining if a car has flood damage, the Better Business Bureau said shoppers should always ask to see the title.
“If the title is stamped ‘salvage’ or has arrived from a recently flood damaged state, ask questions,” the BBB’s website states. “[Also] consider purchasing a vehicle history report of the vehicle, which includes information [on] if the car has ever been tagged as ‘salvage’ or ‘flood damaged’ in any state.”
The vehicle’s dashboard and electronic components, such as lights, radio and turn signals, should be checked carefully to ensure everything is in working order, according to the BBB. Over time, water can make its way into vital systems, corroding metals, short-circuiting wires and warping brakes or rotors, says Consumer Reports.
Carpeting and upholstery should also be checked for signs of dampness, mud or silt.
A smell-test is also necessary, Carfax says. If a car smells of mold or mildew, it’s likely been underwater. Other tell-tale signs of water damage include:
Mud, dirt or debris under the seats or in the glove compartment
Visible rust around doors, under the dashboard, on the pedals or inside the hood
Brittle wiring under the dashboard
Fogging or moisture beads in exterior and interior lights
All in all, experts say it’s best to pass up a car with potential signs of flood damage, “even if [it] looks acceptable and may be working when you inspect it,” Consumer Reports chief mechanic John Ibbotson said.
The interior of a car damaged by the flood is seen covered in mud, Friday, Sept. 3, 2021, in Mamaroneck, N.Y. More than three days after the hurricane blew ashore in Louisiana, Ida’s rainy remains hit the Northeast with stunning fury on Wednesday and Thursday, submerging cars, swamping subway stations
Who to blame for Taliban takeover? Former Afghan envoy points finger at Kabul
Phil Stewart
FILE PHOTO: Afghan Ambassador to the United States Roya Rahmani speaks during an interview with Reuters in Washington.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Roya Rahmani, Afghanistan’s first female ambassador to the United States who left her post in July, is clearly horrified by the Taliban takeover of her country. But she is not surprised.
In an interview, Rahmani accused the former U.S.-backed government in Kabul of a failure to lead the country and of widespread corruption that ultimately paved the way for the Taliban’s victory last month.
She also warned the United States, still smarting from its defeat, that the rise of the Taliban would have far-reaching geopolitical consequences.
“I, as an Afghan, was not surprised by the fact that the Taliban took over Afghanistan the way they did and how quickly they did, partly because of the lack of leadership by the Afghan government that was in place at the time,” Rahmani said.
President Joe Biden acknowledged he and other officials were aware of the risk that the Afghan government could collapse following the U.S. military withdrawal.
But they say they were caught off-guard by the speed of the Taliban victory, a miscalculation that helped lead to a chaotic U.S. military airlift of U.S. citizens and vulnerable Afghans. Thirteen U.S. troops and scores of Afghans were killed in a suicide bombing during the operation.
Biden, in a speech last month, accused Afghan troops of lacking “the will to fight” for their country’s future.
Rahmani saw things differently.
“It was not the Afghan forces, that they were not willing to fight for their freedom and for protection of their people. It was the leadership that was corrupt. And they handed over, basically, the country to the Taliban,” she said, without providing specific allegations.
In particular, Ashraf Ghani’s decision to abandon the presidency and leave Afghanistan on Aug. 15 was “extremely disappointing and embarrassing,” she said.
Ghani said on Wednesday he left because he wanted to avoid bloodshed. He denied allegations he stole millions of dollars on his way out.
“Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life,” Ghani said.
Rahmani, who is 43, left the job as ambassador to the United States after nearly three years in the role. During her posting she wrestled with what she believed was a politically-motivated case over an embassy construction project.
She denied any wrongdoing and an anti-corruption court found flaws in the case, sending it back even before the Afghan government crumbled.
“I invite any investigative body to look at all the documents,” she said.
But Rahmani’s accusations of broad corruption and mismanagement in Kabul carry echoes of warnings by current and former U.S. officials for years. Experts say corruption was steadily eroding ordinary Afghans’ faith in the U.S.-backed government and even turning some of them to the Taliban.
Rahmani described being cut out of discussions between Washington and Kabul, including during the Trump administration. Neither capital appeared to be fully preparing for consequences of the U.S. withdrawal, she said.
She warned of geopolitical shifts that will impact the United States and its allies.
Pakistan – a prickly U.S. ally that is close to the Taliban – will have gained leverage in its dealings with the Washington, she said.
“I believe that the United States will be facing a new Pakistan,” she said, while cautioning the Taliban’s takeover will have ripple effects on India, China, Turkey and beyond.
LAUDS AFGHAN WOMEN PROTESTERS
The last time the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, girls could not attend school and women were banned from work and education. Religious police would flog anyone breaking the rules and public executions were carried out.
The Taliban have urged Afghans to be patient and vowed to be more tolerant this time.
But Rahmani says the Taliban’s decision to exclude women from all of the top government positions announced on Tuesday was proof that dark times may be ahead for women.
On Tuesday, a group of Afghan women in a Kabul street had to take cover after Taliban gunmen fired into the air to disperse hundreds of protesters.
“I salute all the brave women of Afghanistan. It is quite risky to do what they are doing,” Rahmani said. “And it’s also an indication to the rest of the world that they have everything to lose at this point.”
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Mary Milliken and Angus MacSwan)
“I owe the Afghan people an explanation”: Ashraf Ghani apologizes for fleeing Kabul
Zachary Basu
Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani issued a statement Wednesday apologizing to Afghans for fleeing Kabul on the day the Taliban entered the capital city, calling it “the most difficult decision” of his life.
Why it matters: Ghani’s decision to flee Kabul and seek asylum in the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 15 precipitated the collapse of the Afghan government.
In a White House address the day after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, President Biden criticized Ghani and the Afghan security forces for choosing not to “fight for their country.”
Ghani was also accused of stealing millions of dollars worth of public money as he fled Kabul, allegations he has vigorously denied. He said Wednesday that he and his top aides would submit to an independent investigation or audit to prove his innocence.
The big picture: Ghani’s statement — his most extensive public remarks since the fall of Kabul — comes one day after the Taliban announced the formation of an acting government that features top loyalists and several internationally sanctioned terrorists.
What they’re saying: “I owe the Afghan people an explanation for leaving Kabul abruptly on August 15th after Taliban unexpectedly entered the city. I left at the urging of the palace security who advised me that to remain risked setting off the same horrific street-to-street fighting the city had suffered during the Civil War of the 1990s,” Ghani said.
“Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life, but I believed it was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul and her 6 million citizens,” he added.
“Now is not the moment for a long assessment of the events leading up to my departure — I will address them in detail in the near future. But I must now address baseless allegations that as I left Kabul I took with my millions of dollars belonging to the Afghan people. These charges are completely and categorically false.”
“Corruption is a plague that has crippled our country for decades and fighting corruption has been a central focus of my efforts as president. I inherited a monster that could not easily or quickly be defeated.”
The bottom line: “It is with deep and profound regret that my own chapter ended in similar tragedy to my predecessors — without ensuring stability and prosperity. I apologize to the Afghan people that I could not make it end differently,” Ghani concluded. “My commitment to the Afghan people has never wavered and will guide me for the rest of my life.”
Go Ahead, Worry! A Worst-Case Scenario for American Democracy
The American far right has transformed politics in unprecedented ways. Can this be reversed?
By Robert Crawford September 1, 2021
With Trump no longer president and the January 6 insurrection thwarted, the danger may appear to be behind us. “Democracy survived.”
Yet few observers and activists on the left are sanguine about what the future holds. Most alarming are the bald attempts by Republican state legislatures to suppress likely Democratic voters, along with redistricting and other moves to control or even override elections. President Biden called these machinations an “assault on democracy.” However Republican voter suppression might be the tip of a much larger iceberg. Are Americans now be living in the last years of a hard-fought democratic project?
Could the United States be on the cusp of a far-right takeover of the federal government—as early as 2024?
Like climate catastrophe, the signs of severely compromised democracy and impending political disaster are present everywhere in our political life. Shouldn’t we have seen the emergency earlier? The racial justice movement has long directed attention to how racism and racialized structures of power have undermined American democracy from the beginning. Historical amnesia engenders continuing somnolence on the perverse influence of money, radical inequality, obstructed social democracy, militarism and impunity for human rights violations abroad and at home.
The last six years have shocked many of us into a new apprehension. We need to listen to historians like Timothy Snyder and others who have researched the final years of democracy in Weimar Germany before the Nazi takeover. If the peril we face is remotely similar to 1933—a more apt comparison might be Orban’s authoritarian takeover of Hungary—all progressive movements should put this threat at the forefront of their strategic calculations. Yet, with some notable exceptions, what is lacking is a comprehensive grasp of the dangers we still face.
I offer here a tentative map of the multiple and interlocking dimensions of the threat from the contemporary far right. Most are already familiar to readers of The Nation. My intent, however, is to help us avoid reductionist explanations and strategies.
An assessment of the American far right should at minimum pay close attention to the following dimensions—which taken together compose the threat we face.
1) A popular, authoritarian leader who transformed the political landscape during his four years in office and who still retains broad public support, the loyalty of a radicalized “base” and Republican activists and leaders who either ideologically identify with Trumpism or who instrumentally choose to align themselves with it. Donald Trump popularized and legitimized a violent, authoritarian, and cruel style of politics that now reaches far beyond the question of whether he will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
2) An attempted coup on January 6, orchestrated by the sitting president and his Republican party and militia collaborators, aimed at overturning the election and preventing the peaceful transfer of power. Republicans have blocked or undermined official investigations which would have laid bare their party’s complicity with Trump. The “Stop the Steal” movement—backed by a network of far-right funders—and other attempts by the president and Republicans to negate the results of a free and fair election strike at the heart of the democratic system. Bitterness and resentment about the election continue to be widespread among Trump supporters. As of late May 2021, a Reuters/Ipsos poll indicates that 61 percent of Republicans still believe the election was stolen. The myth of a fraudulent election is also used to justify ongoing voter suppression maneuvers.
3) Dangerously faltering commitments to nonviolent, democratic values. Millions of Americans now think the use of force is a legitimate option. In a January 2020 YouGov poll of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 50.7 percent agreed that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” Over 40 percent agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” Making clear the connection with racism, the poll also found a high correlation between “ethnic antagonism” and the acceptance of violent acts. Further, a CBS/YouGov poll reported on January 13, 2021, found that one in five Republicans—that is, millions of Americans—approved of the January 6 perpetrators. When asked what words would best describe the actions of those “who forced their way into the U.S. Capitol,” 43 percent of Republicans chose “patriotism” and 50 percent chose “defending freedom.” Those percentages remained at that level and slightly higher in a July 20 CBS/YouGov poll.
4) A proliferation of preexisting and new white-supremacist/far-right militia and other groups training for violence. They have organized armed “gun rights” and anti-lockdown demonstrations at state capitols, confrontations with antifa, the “defense” of communities against imagined invasions of antifa or Black Lives Matter activists, and openly racist rallies. In October 2020, a militia group, inspired by Trump’s tweet from the White House to “liberate Michigan,” plotted to kidnap its Democratic governor. Many of the January 6 participants were militia members, demonstrating their willingness to overthrow the government. One week later, the FBI issued a warning that “armed protests are being planned in all 50 state capitols…and at the US Capitol.” The federal and state security mobilizations that followed dampened such plans—but for how long? A barrage of death threats against election officials over the 2020 election continued into 2021. Acts of domestic terrorism by far-right/white supremacist groups and individuals have soared in recent years, climbing to new highs in 2019 and 2020. Targets have included Blacks, Jews, immigrants, LGBTQs, Asians and other people of color.
5) Far-right/white supremacist radicalization within, or infiltration of, state institutions that exercise “legitimate” (law-protected) violence—a critical element of state capture used to control populations and suppress opposition. These include police, military, ICE, and Customs and Border Patrol. In an era of Black Lives Matter protests and demands for constraining police violence, the protection of prerogatives to use violence (even for private citizens, as in the various Stand Your Ground laws) has become a key mobilizing issue on the right.
6) A thriving far-right media juggernaut dominated by Fox News on cable, along with print media, talk radio, and internet sites. Right-wing groups effectively use social media to amplify messaging and create followers. Social media is also well-suited for rapid dissemination of conspiratorial other kinds of disinformation. Encrypted messaging platforms such as Telegram operate as recruitment and organizing vehicles for underground organizations. Tucker Carlson’s recent broadcast from Hungary, after meeting with and praising Viktor Orban, the country’s authoritarian leader, is just one indication of what far-right media personalities have in mind for America.
7) A steady acceleration of right-wing political movements since the election of Barack Obama, shifting further to the right with Trump. Dating back at least to the late 1970s, “pseudo-populist” and “America First” narratives have been advanced by Republicans and right-wing media (although Bernie Sanders demonstrated that the left could also draw on populism’s long history to respond to economic precarity and dislocation, concentrated wealth and corporate control). Trump’s pseudo-populism—after all, his singular legislative achievement was a tax cut for the rich—promotes a hateful and militant politics of resentment, displacing economic anxieties onto to social, religious, and racial antagonisms. Nativism and white fears of demographic “replacement” dominate the Trumpian world-view, followed by anti-tax/anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-gay views and hysteria about the left. The success of Trumpism as far-right ideology, including a cult-like loyalty to the leader, has facilitated the tectonic shift to the right among people who identify as Republican.
8) The Republican Party’s transformation into a far-right party, currently controlled by Trumpists but extending beyond Trump to right-wing and white supremacist politicians who came out of the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus. The party’s racist Southern strategy has gone national. In addition to its long-standing subservience to money and a corporate agenda, the GOP is backed by various right-wing interest groups and foundations, evangelical religious groups, and wealthy dark-money donors. At the state level, Republicans already control 30 state legislatures; in 22 states they control both legislature and the governorships. In several of these states, the party has already taken steps that must be described as authoritarian and repressive, enacting measures that criminalize protest; suppress the teaching of anti-racist history and diversity or the struggle for social justice; ban transgender people from public spaces; further restrict abortion rights; and oppose local and federal public health measures.
9) The Supreme Court and many appellate and local courts falling under the control of right-wing judges. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority is poised to rule or has already ruled on several cases that will likely block key progressive policies such as Biden’s eviction moratorium extension, union access to workplaces, restrictions on gun rights, abortion rights, and Biden’s efforts to reverse Trump administration immigration policies. The chances for campaign finance reform remain nonexistent. Ominously, the court has further weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and has demonstrated its hostility toward other federal government efforts to ensure free and fair elections.
10) Last, but not least: voter suppression, gerrymandering and related initiatives enacted by Republican state legislatures, all designed to undermine Democratic-leaning, especially Black, voting blocs and ensure favorable electoral outcomes in 2022 and 2024. In a transparent authoritarian turn, Republicans are also passing legislation aimed at giving state legislatures the power to overturn election results they don’t like. As of July 14, 18 states had enacted 30 laws restricting access to the vote. On the national level, two major voting rights bills put forward by Democrats remain stymied by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
So many contingencies make the future impossible to predict. Yet, taken in full measure, the transformations outlined above call for a sober assessment of possibilities. Two scenarios point to the 2024 election, which is why most progressives are so focused on protecting the vote. Most likely, the Republican nominee will be Donald Trump.
In one scenario, Trump wins and with the Supreme Court and a Republican Congress behind him takes the country as far to the right as he can. The electoral system will be further reworked to ensure long-term Republican control. Steeped in a media-fed rhetoric of fear and hate, America will become a fortress state. Police, with the likely help of militia groups, will suppress resistance mounted by progressive movements.
Another scenario is a closely contested presidential election, marked by intimidation of voters and possible violence. If a Democrat narrowly wins, Republicans are likely to declare the election illegitimate and attempt another coup, this time more carefully executed. If the nation descends into violence or mass civil disobedience, the military and police would then move to restore order in support of their own version of the legitimate claimants to power, likely backed by the Supreme Court.
My purpose in highlighting these 10 dimensions is to urge that we grasp the contemporary far right as a totality. No matter how loosely integrated or internally conflicted, today’s far-right movement aims to capture power and is frighteningly close to achieving that end. The far-right/white supremacist movement must be confronted in all its interconnected dimensions. If we fail to rouse ourselves to oppose the threat, we may easily fall into a racist and brutal autocracy lasting generations. Our present may come to be understood as “The Before”—the period when history might have taken a different turn but, because of inertia and lack of political will, did not.
It’s time to summon up that political will. The choice is still ours to make.
‘America After 9/11’ Review: Frontline’s Outstanding Deconstruction of the War on Terror Is a Must-Watch
“America After 9/11” examines the nation’s policy failures over the last two decades and how the War on Terror has impacted the homefront.
Tyler Hersko September 7, 2021
“America After 9/11”
PBS
America’s War on Terror began with ill-defined intentions and led to 20 years of brutality that eroded the country’s international goodwill while fostering paranoia, mistrust of public institutions, and xenophobia at home. This is the crux of “America After 9/11,” the latest investigative journalism project from PBS’ Frontline team, and it’s a belief that the two-hour film effectively relays via its facts-first reporting and extensive sourcing.
To call the film timely is both stating the obvious and an understatement; while “America After 9/11” is one of numerous media productions being published this month to coincide with the 20th anniversary of World Trade Center attacks, the film’s release also comes just weeks after the United States’ contentious exit from Afghanistan. As its title implies (and as is to be expected from Frontline), “America After 9/11,” which is directed by longtime political documentarian Michael Kirk, centers on the United States’ political and military actions following the 2001 terrorist attack — it’s a must-watch deconstruction of the War on Terror explained in clear and illuminating terms by numerous experts involved in or affected by the last 20 years of American politics.
“America After 9/11” analyzes numerous developments and individual incidents that stemmed from the last 20 years of the country’s policy-making but most of these topics are used to answer two key questions: How did America’s War on Terror affect the international community’s perception of the country, and what were its impacts inside the United States’ borders?
On the latter question: One of the film’s earliest scenes shows prominent Democratic and Republican politicians coming together at the U.S. Capitol to sing “God Bless America” the evening after 9/11; the scene is followed by footage of the Donald Trump-inspired insurrection at the same building around 20 years later. The juxtaposition of the War on Terror and the January attack on the U.S. Capitol may sound unusual, but “America After 9/11” makes strong, repeated points about how the United States’ foreign policy decisions have had starkly negative influences on domestic politics. As Ben Rhodes, a White House staffer during Barack Obama’s presidency and one of over 30 sources interviewed in the film, argues: “The January 6 insurrection at the Capitol was the logical endpoint of the 9/11 era. When you have people who can’t trust institutions anymore, who are angry that the wars they were promised great victories in didn’t turn out well, they start to look for people to blame.”
“Who are we and what do we want to do as a nation? We answered that question too simply on 9/11: ‘We’re the good guys,’” journalist Thomas E. Ricks said in one of the film’s interviews. “And 20 years later, we found out that we are the enemy. That the biggest national security threat facing the United States is internal, and it has grown partly as a result of American leadership failures over the last 20 years since 9/11.”
The United States’ attempts to postulate itself as “the good guys” in the War on Terror is a key point in the film’s first hour, which primarily hones in on the foreign policies of George W. Bush’s administration. Ample time is dedicated to the tactical mistakes in the war, as well the United States’ many violations of human rights, particularly the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison and the nation’s ongoing failure to close Guantanamo Bay. The film clearly lays out the government’s initial intentions behind the war — go to Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden — and details how the initial failure to do so, amplified by fear-mongering about threats ranging from nuclear weapons to anthrax, influenced the White House.
One of the film’s most surreal anecdotes concerns Vice President Dick Cheney: “This was Cheney’s nightmare come true. He’d been getting ready for doomsday for years and thought a lot about it,” The New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer said in the film. “And then on 9/11 , it seemed like it was almost coming true. He felt death was stalking him. He kept a gas mask and a hazmat suit in a bag in the back seat.”
“America After 9/11” later pivots to the United States public’s erosion of trust in the government and in the media as the war continued and public support waned. The film cites lie-riddled speeches from Democratic politicians such as Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Joe Biden: “People who knew better voted for it because they were afraid of being called weak,” Rhodes said in one of the film’s interviews. “You have Democratic, as well as Republican members of Congress, voting for a war that does anybody really believe if they were president they would have chosen to do that? That undermined, I think, confidence in the American public in their leaders. ‘Who can I trust anymore? The Democrats voted for this war too. Why should I trust them anymore than I trust the Republicans?’” The news media’s role on the erosion of public trust after 9/11 — leading newspapers effectively gave credibility to the lies of politicians via pro-war op-eds and reports, while television news channels drummed up fears of potential terrorism attacks for ratings — is also examined in the film.
These segments come into sharp focus in the second half of “America After 9/11,” which analyzes the War on Terror under the Obama and Trump administrations and aptly connects the public’s growing war fatigue and paranoia to issues that are more topical than ever, ranging from racism and conspiracy theories to hyper-partisanship and the devaluation of basic facts. The roughly 30-minute section of the film that revolves around Obama’s presidency focuses on his messages of hope and de-escalation during his 2008 campaign, and how his war policies — namely, the expansion of drone strikes, the short-lived exit from Iraq, and a failure to close Guantanamo Bay — further eroded trust in the government at home and abroad, despite the eventual killing of bin Laden. As the wars dragged on, the right-wing media helped to direct the country’s growing sentiments of nationalism and racism towards Obama and Muslims.
As the film notes, those attitudes contributed to Trump’s election. Trump’s presidency is the focus of the documentary final 20 minutes, which notes that he further escalated targeted killings and affirmed his support for Guantanamo Bay. That said, the film primarily focuses on how the consequences of the War on Terror impacted America under Trump during the George Floyd protests and the Capitol insurrection.
‘It seemed to be the wars came home. You can look at police in America and you can see all the kit that they’ve got,” Emma Sky, a former political advisor to U.S. generals, said in the film while footage of militarized police and federal agents attacking, intimidating, and detaining peaceful protestors in the summer of 2020 plays. “They’ve taken all the surplus from Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s come back and a lot of these weapons, a lot of these vehicles, are now being used by law enforcement. […]By the time you get to January 6, so much doubt has been sown in the system, so much fear, that how this opposition is described by Trump and Trump supporters, it looks terrifying.”
There is a call to action near the end of “America After 9/11”: a need for America to take a proper accounting of what it has done in the last 20 years and what the impacts of those actions. After that, the film closes with a brief look at the United States’ exit from Afghanistan under Biden and a note that a war in the country will likely persist — with deadly consequences for those who supported America over the last two decades. It’s a grim, albeit suitable sendoff; Frontline’s latest film is equal parts a fearless deconstruction on the United States’ foreign policy failures over the last two decades and an illuminating analysis on how those failures have impacted the home front.
The Afghanistan Meltdown Proves Vietnam Taught Us Nothing
James A. Warren
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The American war in Afghanistan came to a long-overdue end on the evening of Aug. 30, when the last U.S. military plane, a C-17 transport, lumbered into the skies above the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Among its passengers was the last American soldier to depart this hard, mountainous, war-ravaged country, Maj. Gen. Chris Donahue, the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. Shortly thereafter, the Taliban’s senior spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, announced to the Afghan people: “This victory belongs to us all.”
The harried American withdrawal, replete with scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to the rear of a giant U.S. Air Force transport as began its takeoff, parents passing a baby to Marine guards on the tense perimeter of the airport, and horrific mayhem following two massive suicide bombings by Islamic State of Khorasan terrorists, succeeded in evacuating about 123,000 people—an astonishing feat, carried out with great skill and courage by the American military.
Nonetheless, the evacuation will be seen by historians for generations for what it was: the sobering last act in yet another lost American war.
Inevitably the exhausting saga of the final U.S military operation in Afghanistan evokes memories of another grim evacuation: Operation Frequent Wind, the dramatic, last-ditch effort to evacuate the last Americans remaining in Saigon, along with their South Vietnamese allies on April 29-30, 1975. That operation, also carried out with extraordinary cool-headedness by U.S. Marines under intense pressure, succeeded in bringing out every American, but thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked for the United States as faithful servants of the cause were left to fend for themselves. Many ended up serving multiple-year tours in communist re-education camps, or drowning in rickety boats in the South China Sea as they tried to make their escape.
The Marines who took the last chopper off the embassy roof around 7:50 a.m. on April 30, 1975, were blinded for a few minutes by tear gas they had fired to keep desperate Vietnamese from trying to jump into their overloaded aircraft. It was somehow fitting that the last Americans who left Vietnam did so when they were for all intents and purposes blind.
Any soldier or Marine can tell you that orchestrating a “retrograde movement” is among the trickiest and most delicate of military maneuvers. In Kabul, this extremely difficult operation was unnecessarily complicated and compromised by the failure of senior decision-makers in the White House and State Department to anticipate the rapid collapse of the Kabul government’s armed forces and government in the face of a determined and well-organized adversary, the Taliban. Their failure is all the more inexplicable in light of the fact that both the CIA and the State Department provided the president with sound intelligence estimates during the last weeks of the Taliban’s stunning advance.
The same thing happened in 1975, more or less, as the ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, mysteriously refused to give the order to evacuate when the writing was on the wall, and CIA operatives had already begun evacuating their Vietnamese allies surreptitiously.
The forced withdrawal from Afghanistan ranks among the most humiliating episodes in all of America’s 400-year history, for it symbolizes in dramatic fashion the end of a horrendously destructive failed crusade to export American-style democracy by arrogant policymakers transfixed by their own country’s raw military power.
It is depressing, to say the least, but we failed in Afghanistan for many of the same reasons we stumbled in Vietnam, almost 50 years ago.
At the outset of each conflict, U.S. policymakers were woefully ignorant of the political and cultural dynamics of the nation they aimed to transform. And so, to a greater degree than is usually realized, the United States went into both conflicts half-blind, convinced that the righteousness of the cause would compensate for ignorance, and ensure success.
The Johnson administration made the absurd assumption that deep in the heart of every Vietnamese there was an American yearning to be born. George W. Bush and his advisers made the same assumption about the Afghan people. Time proved the utter bankruptcy of this assumption in both cases, as well several others, including the idea that the United States possessed the wisdom and wherewithal to crush a well-organized insurgency while it simultaneously built an entirely new government apparatus.
Like Vietnam, Afghanistan was an “irregular war,” a brutal counterinsurgency struggle in which the United States failed to find a way to counter the ingenious protracted war strategy adopted by its adversary. The Taliban’s way of war, much like the Vietcong’s, pivoted largely on hanging on and outlasting the Americans and their vast array of war machines. They were willing to suffer innumerable tactical setbacks—including being driven out of Afghanistan entirely back in 2002—sure in the knowledge that eventually the United States would weary of supporting a corrupt and dysfunctional government, pack up, and go home. Like the Vietcong, the Taliban drew comfort and sustenance from its possession of a sanctuary, in this case Pakistan, and from the inability of the United States or its allies to seal off the flow of enemy fighters into Afghanistan.
Once America grew tired of the fighting, the Taliban high command reckoned, it would be a relatively simple matter to conquer the broken and illegitimate administration that the United States had tried to create and support. So it was.
The strategy worked brilliantly, just as it had in Vietnam.
In both wars, the United States had enormous military power at its disposal, but very little political power, and even less understanding of how politics actually functioned locally. But as the history of irregular war tells us again and again, in conflicts between powerful conventional armies and local insurgencies, politics, political organization, and mobilization are invariably more important factors in determining the outcome than battles.
In irregular warfare, coercive politics—assassination, terrorism, subversion, propaganda, the methodical construction of a shadow government—figure prominently, and cannot be countered by strictly military means alone. Human relationships and political mobilization are more important than military technology, and restraint in the use of armed force, rather than sheer firepower, is often critical to success. In these kinds of conflicts, said a prominent recent U.S. Army Special Forces officer, “You can’t kill your way to victory.”
When Major Harry Summers told his North Vietnamese counterpart on a small team of officers who were negotiating the terms for the American evacuation of Saigon that the communists had never defeated the Americans in a major battle, the officer, a Colonel Tu, replied, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.” How right he was!
The United States never lost a multi-battalion battle in Afghanistan, but in light of the failure to build a legitimate, functional government, the Americans’ tactical victories were essentially “irrelevant.”
In both of these tragic counterinsurgency conflicts, the lion’s share of the nation-building work fell by default on the U.S. military, which is neither properly trained to undertake such work, nor temperamentally suited for it. The efforts of the State Department, USAID, and other civilian agencies and NGOs were notoriously disjointed and ineffective. In both Afghanistan and Vietnam, billions were spent each year on ambitious social engineering projects, but the host governments remained dysfunctional, corrupt and utterly unresponsive to the needs of the population.
As both conflicts morphed from stalemate to quagmire to looming disaster, the American public was fed a steady, unremitting diet of upbeat assessments of progress being made on the ground, served up by presidents, their advisers, and commanding generals. These assessments, it is now all too clear, were fairy tales, born of a lethal amalgam of wishful thinking, obtuseness, and outright dissembling.
As the futility of the fighting became more and more apparent in both these conflicts, American ground forces were ultimately withdrawn, and the American people were assured by the White House that the cause was not lost, that the good fight would be carried on by our local allies.
But this, too, was dissembling.
Only the most naïve observers of the scene in Vietnam in 1973 on the eve of the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces believed the South Vietnamese Army could stand up to the combined forces of the North Vietnamese army and the Vietcong on its own. They had invariably been bested by the enemy during the war with the Americans. How could they be expected to survive against such powerful, well-motivated forces as the Vietnamese communists without them?
Even granting that, the South Vietnamese managed to hang on for more than two years after the last Americans departed Vietnam in March 1973, and they were defeated by a powerful conventional army force of more than 20 divisions, several of them amply supplied with tanks. So corrupt and hollow was the regime in Kabul that it folded just four months after President Biden announced the final American withdrawal.
This precipitous collapse of the Kabul government certainly has no upside for the long-suffering Afghan people, who seemingly cannot escape the curse of devastating civil war. Indeed, it may not be long before the country’s warlords resume the fight against the Taliban. But the failure of the government or the army to put up much a fight, I think, go a long way toward confirming the wisdom of President Biden’s decision to withdraw. The Kabul government was fatally, irrevocably shaky, and had been kept on life support by the United States troops and dollars. Yet the very presence of the world’s largest, most powerful foreign army only served to erode the government’s sliver of legitimacy in the eyes of its own people.
Where these two failed wars differ fundamentally is on the question of their impact on American society. Vietnam was at the heart of a tumultuous social revolution in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The war pervaded every aspect of American life, and came perilously close to tearing the social fabric of the country irrevocably. “Nothing did more than the conflict in Vietnam to alter the course of post–World War II society and politics, or unleash the emotions that polarized the nation after 1965” than Vietnam, writes Brown historian James T. Patterson. Few historians would disagree. More than any single event of this time, the war broke the trust between the government and the people. It was the first war the United States had ever lost.
Afghanistan has aroused no such passions, nor has it altered significantly the lives of many Americans outside the relatively small universe of the American military and their families. The conflict went on and on, and Americans in general seemed to care less and less about it. In truth, the major reason the war lasted so long is that the American people didn’t care enough about it to demand that it end.
The collective weight of three lost wars—Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan—surely demands a searching re-examination of how the United States goes about making the decision to go to war, and how it develops strategies for achieving its objectives. It would also seem to call for a less activist foreign policy—a foreign policy of military restraint that would focus on the use of the United States’ economic and political power rather than the military to shape the world.
But don’t count on any of this happening soon. As Mary L. Dudziak, a law professor at Duke who has written extensively about war, told TheNew York Times, “In our toxic political environment, Republicans are likely to use this moment to undermine President Biden, and partisanship may foreclose the deeper re-examination of American war politics that is sorely needed now, and was also needed after the war in Vietnam.”
The alleged corruption and abuse by Afghan leaders that the US ignored was a ‘big factor’ in the country’s fall, human rights expert says
Ryan Pickrell
A member of the Afghan army stands guard at a high point overlooking the Panjshir Valley Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The Afghan institutions the US and its allies propped up for years collapsed in a matter of weeks.
One key problem, experts argue, was overlooked corruption and human rights abuses at senior levels.
One expert told Insider that when it came to Afghanistan, the US and its allies were “choosing the least bad partner.”
The US and its NATO allies propped up the Afghan government and security forces for years, but the moment they withdrew, both crumbled in a matter of weeks.
The stunning collapse of these institutions, which allowed the Taliban to retake Afghanistan, have raised a host of questions about what went wrong after decades of international support.
Some experts contend that persistent and troubling allegations of corruption and abuse surrounding Afghan leaders that were largely ignored by the US and its NATO allies crippled efforts to build a government and military able to withstand the Taliban, gain strong popular support, and meet Afghanistan’s needs.
There were generals put in place through connections rather than capability, soldiers in the Afghan security forces that existed only on paper, and supply lines disrupted by officials who siphoned off essential resources. The problems in Afghanistan ran much deeper though, experts said.
Patricia Gossman, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher who has interviewed Afghans and international officials and conducted on-the-ground investigations in Afghanistan, told Insider that problems such as human rights abuses and corruption were “a big factor” in the country’s fall.
In Afghanistan, the US and its allies aligned themselves with “some very notorious figures reviled by many communities that they were in because of previous atrocities,” Gossman told Insider, explaining that they also empowered some people that later became problematic while focusing on short-sighted needs.
Ryan Crocker, a career diplomat who served the US as the ambassador to Afghanistan during the Obama administration, once recounted for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) a truly uncomfortable encounter with Mohammed Fahim, an Afghan defense minister who later became a vice president.
Fahim giggled as he related to Crocker a story of another senior Afghan minister who had been killed, the ambassador recalled in a conversation obtained as part of The Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers.” Later, Crocker revealed, it came out that Fahim might have actually had the official killed.
Crocker explained that he “certainly came out of those opening months with the feeling that even by Afghan standards” he “was in the presence of a totally evil person.”
For example, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s defense minister Asadullah Khalid, previously the head of the National Directorate of Security, allegedly personally engaged in or ordered torture, sexual violence, and extrajudicial killings, according to Human Rights Watch.
And Abdul Raziq, a powerful Afghan National Police chief until he was killed, was accused of running secret detention centers and carrying out or ordering torture and extrajudicial killings.
Soldiers with the U.S. Army’s 4th squadron 2nd Cavalry Regiment and the Afghan National Army (ANA) return to their vehicles following a patrol through a village on March 5, 2014 near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Scott Olson/Getty Images
‘Choosing the least bad partner’
Experts say that issues at the top exacerbated problems at other levels. “There was this sense that nobody was held accountable for anything,” Gossman said. “You have a trickle down lack of accountability.”
A US Army veteran of the Afghan war that Insider spoke to recently revealed that he encountered police leaders that expected bribes for information on the Taliban, security checkpoints that had made deals with the Taliban, and some security forces members engaged in child sex trafficking.
Some other veterans had similar experiences. Capt. Dan Quinn, a former US Special Forces soldier, was famously relieved after he beat up a US-backed militia leader sexually abusing a young boy.
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” Quinn told The New York Times in 2015.
“But,” he added, “we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did – that was something village elders voiced to me.”
A senior US official reflecting on the situation in Afghanistan in 2015 said that “our money was empowering a lot of bad people,” adding that “there was massive resentment among the Afghan people,” according to The Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers.
Another US official said that “we were giving out contracts to pretty nasty people, empowering people we shouldn’t have empowered, in order to achieve our own goals.”
“Successive US administrations have largely perceived human rights more as an obstacle than as an essential component of addressing Afghanistan’s problems,” Gossman asserted in a recent Just Security column, adding that “this approach has been catastrophic.”
“It affected the legitimacy of the government,” Gossman, who has spent years documenting human rights abuses in Afghanistan, told Insider. “Maybe it didn’t make people want the Taliban, but they may have seen the Taliban as a better option in certain circumstances.”
Sarah Chayes, who ran non-governmental organizations in Afghanistan and served as a senior advisor to US military leaders in country, told PBS last month that “Afghan government officials would shake people down at every interaction.”
She added that “from Afghans’ perspective, it almost looked like the United States was in favor of this system because our officials were always seen partnering with these venal Afghan leaders.”
Chayes explained that when she was working with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2011, interagency policy was to ignore high-level corruption and other misdeeds.
“Why would a population take risks to fight the Taliban on behalf of a government that is treating them almost as badly as the Taliban do?” she asked.
That said, not every interaction between the US and NATO and their Afghan partners was necessarily plagued by problems.
“Did we back bad horses across the country? I think probably the answer is no,” Erol Yayboke, a Center for Strategic and International Studies expert and a former international development contractor, told Insider, saying there was likely a mix of both good and bad actors.
“I think the question is less did we back a bad horse and is more were there actual alternatives? What you hear from people who spent years and years working in Afghanistan is that the option was backing people that we had concerns about over corruption, etc., or leaving,” he said.
With US leaders largely against leaving, “we had to find some local partners,” Yayboke said. “I think that a lot of folks that were out there would argue that, in many cases, it was not choosing the best partner. It was choosing the least bad partner.”
“I think that decisions that people were making, including our people in the field, American leaders, were based primarily on least bad options,” he said.
