America Has Given Up Trying To Define Success in Afghanistan

“The United States has spent more than $64 billion rebuilding Afghanistan’s military and police forces since 2001—but there is literally no way for American taxpayers to know whether their investment has been worth it.

“Most of the [indicators] of measuring success are now classified, or we don’t collect it. So I can’t tell you, publicly, how well a job we’re doing on training,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for the Afghanistan reconstruction effort told members of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee”

“”How many Afghan soldiers do we have? We’re still trying to figure out how many we are paying for. How many Afghan police are there, really? We don’t know,” Sopko said Tuesday. “This isn’t rocket science, but apparently it’s all secret, classified, and I can’t tell you what the results are.”

That the United States has sought to suppress negative information about the seemingly endless war in Afghanistan is not news to anyone familiar with The Washington Post’s bombshell “Afghanistan Papers” report. Published in December, the Post’s report included more than 2,000 pages of interviews conducted by Sopko’s office with “people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.” Those internal documents paint a picture of a nation-building effort that has lacked definable goals, wasted billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and done little to improve the internal security of Afghanistan—all while American officials have deliberately misled Congress and the public about the extent of the quagmire.”

“That audit is part of a disturbing trend. When there hasn’t been progress to show, America’s Afghanistan strategy has been to prevent showing the lack of progress.”

CIA Encryption Meddling and Chinese Espionage Allegations Make It Clear: We All Need Strong Data Protection

“The same U.S. government that wants tech companies and telecoms to create secret software doors that would allow it to snoop on our private communications and data is also worried that other governments will be able to use those same back doors to do the same thing. This is what tech privacy experts have been warning U.S. officials (and U.K. officials and Australian officials) all along: Any back door that allows law enforcement to circumvent user privacy protections will ultimately be used by people with bad intentions.”

Trump Will Raid Pentagon’s War on Terror Slush Fund To Build His Border Wall

“As part of an overall plan to divert $3.8 billion from the Pentagon to pay for the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico, President Donald Trump is planning to drain about $1.6 billion from the slush fund that pays for much of America’s post-9/11 wars in the Middle East.

Foreign Policy’s Lara Seligman reports that the White House sent a memo to Congress on Thursday outlining plans to redirect military spending for the border wall. The administration plans to move $2.2 billion originally earmarked for purchasing vehicles, ships, and aircraft into an anti-drug trafficking program that has already been tapped to provide for wall construction costs. The other $1.6 billion in border wall funding will come from the budget used to pay for America’s foreign wars”

Trump’s Budget Follows in the Footsteps of Giant Spenders

“during Trump’s first term, he displayed the same proclivity to jack up spending as his Republicans predecessors. The data shows that Trump increased defense spending in real terms by 18 percent, with an overall spending growth rate of 10 percent. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush increased defense spending by 28 percent and 36 percent, respectively (and overall spending by 9 percent and 24 percent). Compared with their Republican counterparts, Democratic presidents Obama and Bill Clinton look frugal.

Unlike Bush or Reagan, however, Trump has had a booming economy, no new wars, and no terrorist attacks since his term began. This context makes the massive increase in spending, along with the $1 trillion deficit in fiscal year 2020, even more shocking. With no serious changes, the Congressional Budget Office projects that these annual budget deficits will stay well above $1 trillion in the next 10 years.

To be fair, the president does plan to balance the budget eventually—in 2035. To achieve this goal, Trump proposes some $4.4 trillion in savings over 10 years, which is a step in the right direction. For instance, according to Marc Goldwein at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, this the budget would save Medicare $600 billion, reducing national health expenditures by almost $1 trillion. As Goldwein noted on Twitter, “That means lower premiums and out of pocket costs—don’t demagogue these policies!” Unfortunately, judging by the news headlines and reactions by Democrats in Congress, these savings are likely dead on arrival.

To achieve such savings, some very unrealistic assumptions would need to materialize. For instance, while the economy grew 2.4 percent in 2017, 2.9 percent in 2018 and 2.3 percent in 2019, the White House projects that the economy will grow at about 2.8 percent annually for a decade straight. The budget also counts on interest rates staying low, so as to not massively increase the amount of interest payments that will have to be made. The low interest rate, paired with the planned savings, would lower interest costs by $300 billion. Unfortunately, this is a mirage. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “Using more realistic economic assumptions, the budget deficit would be about $1.2 trillion (3.7 percent of GDP) in 2030,” as opposed to the $261 billion projected by the White House.”

“The plan is to cut projected spending on domestic programs by roughly $2 trillion. These “cuts” are mostly to the projected growth of spending increases, not reductions in the actual amount of spending. Still, to make the savings politically viable, the burden should be distributed enough to inspire a sense of shared sacrifice. Instead, the budget plans to extend the 2017 tax cuts at a cost of $1.4 trillion and increases military spending, making the cuts harder to stomach for some.

At the end of the day, and after much spilled ink analyzing the budget proposal, we can count on one thing: This actual budget won’t see the light of day. Instead, Congress and the administration will continue in the footsteps of those who came before them and increase the debt while pretending to be fiscally responsible.”

U.S. Faces Tough ‘Great Game’ Against China in Central Asia and Beyond

“words go only so far. The Americans fail to present an economical alternative to Huawei. And the Trump administration is discovering that its belligerent approach toward allies has a cost when it comes to China strategy. Withdrawing from the global Paris climate agreement and the landmark Iran nuclear deal, starting trade conflicts with friendly governments and berating members of NATO make those nations less likely to listen to Washington’s entreaties on China.

A recent policy report on China by the Center for a New American Security said “critical areas of U.S. policy remain inconsistent, uncoordinated, underresourced and — to be blunt — uncompetitive and counterproductive to advancing U.S. values and interests.””

“Beijing says it will help build up the region under what it calls the Silk Road Economic Belt, which is part of the larger Belt and Road Initiative, a blanket term for global infrastructure projects that, according to Beijing, amount to $1 trillion of investment. The Trump administration says the projects are potential debt traps, but many countries have embraced them.

The economic liberalization of Uzbekistan under Mr. Mirziyoyev, who took power in 2016 after the death of a longtime dictator, has resulted in greater trade with China.

China is Uzbekistan’s largest trading partner, and trade totaled almost $6.3 billion in 2018, a nearly 50 percent increase from 2017, according to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. Chinese goods, including Huawei devices, are everywhere in Samarkand, Bukhara, Tashkent and other Uzbek cities.”

“China’s People’s Liberation Army has gained a new foothold in the region, in the form of a base in Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains. For at least three years, Chinese troops have quietly kept watch from two dozen buildings and lookout towers near the Tajik-Chinese border and the remote Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.”

“Mr. Pompeo also made a demand regarding human rights in China as he met with officials in Tashkent and Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. He raised the issue of China’s internment camps that hold one million or more Muslims and urged the Central Asian nations, which are predominantly Muslim, to speak out against the camps. In Nur-Sultan, he met with Kazakhs who have had family members detained in the camps.

Yet, as in other predominantly Muslim nations, Central Asian leaders have remained silent on this.”

“Trump administration policies perceived as anti-Muslim undermine trust in Washington. On Jan. 31, Mr. Trump added Kyrgyzstan and five other nations, all with substantial Muslim populations, to a list of countries whose citizens are restricted in traveling to the United States. In an interview in Nur-Sultan, a Kazakh television journalist, Lyazzat Shatayeva, asked Mr. Pompeo, “What do you think that signals to the other countries and other governments in Central Asia on why it happened?”

Mr. Pompeo said Kyrgyzstan must “fix” certain things: “passport issues, visa issues, visa overstays.”

“When the country fixes those things,” he said, “we’ll get them right back in where they can come travel to America.””

Playing on Kansas City Radio: Russian Propaganda

“What was once Radio Moscow was reborn as Radio Sputnik in 2014. Mr. Putin backed the effort to create a central, state-run news organization — called Rossiya Segodnya, or Russia Today in English — designed to challenge the West’s global dominance on reporting news.

In a modern spin on propaganda, it focuses on sowing doubt about Western governments and institutions rather than the old Soviet model of selling Russia as paradise lost.”

Sweden’s lonely boxing match with Beijing

“Sino-Swedish relations took a sharp dip in 2015, when Gui Minhai, a Swedish bookseller known for publishing books critical of Chinese leaders, disappeared from his home in Thailand only to later show up in Chinese custody accused of causing a traffic accident.

Stockholm pushed for Gui’s release, but made little progress in securing his return to Sweden.

After years of simmering diplomatic tension over the case, relations worsened again in late 2019, when a Swedish NGO awarded Gui a prize and a Swedish minister attended the award ceremony in Stockholm.

The incident triggered a forceful response from Beijing: The Chinese ambassador to Sweden accused the government of “interfering in China’s internal affairs and judicial sovereignty” and trade missions to Stockholm were canceled.

In an interview with Swedish state television, he also compared Swedish media coverage of the Gui case to a lightweight boxer who keeps challenging a heavyweight to a fight and won’t back off. “What choice do you expect the heavyweight boxer to have?”

His comments sent a chill through Sweden’s political, diplomatic and business communities and were condemned by the foreign minister as “unacceptable.””