“Army Gen. Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chair, just gave an honest yet brutal assessment of America’s decades-long war in Afghanistan.
Asked at a Washington, DC, think tank virtual event about the planned drawdown to 2,500 US troops in the country by January 15, President Donald Trump’s top military adviser tried to assure the audience that the US had somewhat completed its mission.
“We went to Afghanistan … to ensure that Afghanistan never again became a platform for terrorists to strike the United States,” he told the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon on Wednesday morning. “We believe that now after 20 years — two decades of consistent effort there — we’ve achieved a modicum of success.”
Let those last four words — “a modicum of success” — sink in for a moment. That’s Trump’s top military adviser saying out loud that after two decades of war, tens of thousands of Americans and Afghans killed, and more than a trillion dollars spent, the US can only boast of “a modicum of success” for its efforts there.
Milley’s remark is certainly more accurate than the rosy assessments top US officials offered the public as the war raged. Year after year after year, presidents and top generals insisted America’s effort to support Afghan government forces against the Taliban had “turned a corner” and that success was on the horizon.
But now, as US forces draw down from the country, Milley has made one thing painfully clear: The US never turned that corner. Instead, the US and its Afghan partners in Kabul made only modest gains over the past two decades.”
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“the US hasn’t suffered a terrorist attack on the homeland planned in Afghanistan since 9/11, and America helped set up a friendly government in Kabul, a capital city that in recent years has been safer than in the past. But the Taliban holds more ground in the country than when the war started, and danger remains for the insurgents to overrun the government in Kabul if and when US troops fully depart.
Milley acknowledged as much. “We have been in a condition of strategic stalemate where the government of Afghanistan was never going to militarily defeat the Taliban,” he continued, “and the Taliban, as long as we were supporting the government of Afghanistan, is never going to military defeat the regime.””
“Last month, Australia released the Brereton report, the result of a four-year inquiry into war crimes committed by the nation’s elite Special Air Services while fighting in Afghanistan.
Among the report’s shocking allegations was that soldiers were involved in the murder of 39 Afghan civilians, none of which occurred during battle. Senior commanders allegedly prompted junior officers to kill prisoners in a process called “blooding,” and weapons were planted on the dead captives to justify their executions.”
“More than 200,000 Indian farmers and their supporters have occupied the streets of New Delhi for days in protest against three new agriculture reform laws, blocking major highways into the capital city and vowing to remain camped there until the laws are repealed.
The legislation, enacted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in late September, aims to deregulate India’s agricultural industry in a move the government says will both provide farmers with more autonomy over choosing prices and make the agricultural sector more efficient.
Under the new policies, farmers will now sell goods and make contracts with independent buyers outside of government-sanctioned marketplaces, which have long served as the primary locations for farmers to do business. Modi and members of his party believe these reforms will help India modernize and improve its farming industry, which will mean greater freedom and prosperity for farmers.
But the protesting farmers aren’t convinced.”
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“Agriculture plays a crucial role in the Indian economy, as nearly 60 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people depend on farming for their livelihoods. But farming is also incredibly unproductive, as the sector accounts for only about 15 percent of India’s GDP.
By allowing farmers to sell to whomever they want, the government hopes to attract private business to agriculture, which will benefit some farmers.”
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“The problem, Dhume explained, is that there are simply too many farmers in India. He and others have argued that the country should make a similar transition away from farming to manufacturing, like China did.
But so far, India has not been able to generate the kind of manufacturing growth needed to support millions of farmers in their transition to new work. Manufacturing accounted for only about 17 percent of India’s GDP in 2020.
As Dhume said, “If the economy were creating jobs, then there wouldn’t be as much anxiety. In India, because job creation has been so weak, the thought of losing the guarantee is unsettling for farmers.””
“In letters to 11 whistleblowers on Wednesday night, the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC) — an investigative and prosecutorial government body — revealed that it had found “a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing” at the USAGM, which oversees four media organizations: Voice of America, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
With help from the Government Accountability Project (GAP), which represents more than 20 current and former staffers at the USAGM, 11 whistleblowers sent specific complaints to the OSC over the last few months.
They included allegations that USAGM leadership “repeatedly violated the Voice of America (VOA) firewall” and “engaged in gross mismanagement and abuse of authority.” Further, the whistleblowers claimed leadership “pressured career staff to illegally repurpose … congressionally appropriated funds and programs without notifying Congress.”
On Wednesday evening, the OSC replied to these and other allegations, noting that what the whistleblowers alleged seemed to be true.
“OSC has found a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing based on the information you submitted in support of your allegations,” wrote Karen Tanenbaum, an attorney with OSC’s Retaliation and Disclosure Unit.
However, OSC gives any offending agency — in this case, UASGM — 60 days to conduct its own probe and respond to the complaints. It’s not until that investigation ends that OSC makes a final determination.”
“At the beginning of the pandemic, there were understandably few tests available for detecting coronavirus infections. But the federal government made the situation much worse by screwing up the development and deployment of testing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention botched its own COVID-19 test while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) blocked the development of alternatives by private companies and universities. Months later, the United States still does not have enough tests.
The good news is that the FDA has since approved more than a couple hundred COVID-19 tests. But these tests are not available on the scale needed to stem the tide of infections by enabling Americans to test themselves, warn friends and family if they test positive, and then voluntarily isolate themselves to prevent the further transmission of the disease.”
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“Operation Warp Speed was successful at scaling up vaccine production in part because the federal government issued around $18 billion in contracts to their makers. Had the government similarly prioritized COVID-19 testing, the country would not now be piddling around with just 1.5 million tests per day. The Trump administration contracted in late August with Abbott Laboratories to purchase 150 million of its point-of-care BinaxNOW COVID-19 tests for $750 million. The tests, which take about 15 minutes to provide a result, began shipping to state public health agencies at the end of September.
That’s a start, but much more testing needs to be done. Instead of using tests primarily to diagnose COVID-19 cases, they should be used as part of disease surveillance approach in which every American can test themselves frequently.”
“whichever rules the Biden administration might impose, if they reduce worker density at meat plants that are already operating at capacity, then there simply won’t be room—or jobs—for all of the workers that currently staff these plants.
That’s because meatpacking plants are designed to maximize output while complying with existing rules. Changing the rules means changing the plants. That’s not easy.”
“Folajtar has been fighting that particular act of Congress in federal court since 2018. Last week, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit rejected her constitutional challenge.
“Persons who have committed serious crimes forfeit the right to possess firearms much the way they ‘forfeit other civil liberties,'” such as the right the vote, stated the majority opinion of Judge Thomas L. Ambro in Folajtar v. Barr. And in this case, because Congress has designated Folajtar’s crime to be a felony, “we defer to the legislature’s determination.” That deferential approach, Ambro argued, “safeguards the separation of powers by allowing democratically constituted legislatures, not unelected judges, to decide in most cases what types of conduct reflect so serious a breach of the social compact as to justify the loss of Second Amendment rights.”
Writing in dissent, Judge Stephanos Bibas faulted his colleagues for an “extreme deference that gives legislatures unreviewable power to manipulate the Second Amendment by choosing a label.” Yes, there are “historical limits on the Second Amendment,” he acknowledged. And yes, “those limits protect us from felons, but only if they are dangerous.” Lisa Folajtar “is not dangerous. Neither the majority nor the Government suggest otherwise. Because she poses no danger to anyone,” Bibas concluded, she has no business permanently losing one of her constitutional rights.
In 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit delivered a similar ruling in Kanter v. Barr. Writing in dissent, then-Judge Amy Coney Barrett—who is Justice Amy Coney Barrett now—insisted that the majority was dead wrong.
“History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns,” Barrett wrote. “But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791—and for well more than a century afterward—legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety.””
“The Russian Army has received its first batch of BMP-T tank support vehicles, more than 30 years after they were first conceived. The BMP-T, also known as the “Terminator,” is designed to accompany tanks on the battlefield, zeroing in on and terminating enemy anti-tank teams.”