Trump and Biden were both foolish about Afghanistan. Now we’re all paying the price, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are the author’s own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Whether it’s providing a safe haven for terrorist groups like al Qaeda or installing officials who face United Nations sanctions in cabinet positions, the Taliban is up to its old ways, according to a new report issued by the UN on Friday. While the report does not mention former President Donald Trump or President Joe Biden by name, it is an indictment of their administrations’ failed policies in Afghanistan.

The 25-page report says that the Taliban “remains close” with al Qaeda, which now has “increased freedom of action” in Afghanistan.

Underlining that increased freedom of action, the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, “has issued more frequent recorded messages,” appearing in eight videos since the Taliban took over Afghanistan last August, according to the UN report. And al Qaeda has renewed its pledge of allegiance to the leader of the Taliban.

The UN also points out that an astonishing 41 members of the Taliban who are on the UN sanctions list have been appointed to the cabinet and other senior-level positions in Afghanistan.
Among them is Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban Haqqani Network, which the UN says now controls key Afghan ministries such as the interior ministry and the departments of intelligence, passports and migration.

A previous UN report identified Haqqani, Afghanistan’s acting interior minister, as being part of the leadership of al Qaeda, marking the first time that the terrorist group has had a member in a senior cabinet position anywhere in the world. Haqqani is also on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

All of this demonstrates how deeply flawed a strategy it was for the Trump administration to negotiate a “peace” agreement with the Taliban — and how misguided it was for Biden to abide by that agreement once he assumed office
In 2018, the Trump administration started negotiating directly with the Taliban, eventually coming to an agreement that the United States would withdraw from Afghanistan providing that the Taliban would not let the country become a haven for terrorists and agree to enter into genuine peace negotiations with the Afghan government.

The Trump team signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 and Biden, who said he was forced to either abide by that deal or escalate the fighting in Afghanistan, chose to pull out all US troops in August last year.

It’s worth noting this agreement wasn’t ratified by the US Senate, and instead was a deal negotiated with a terrorist/insurgent group that failed to stick to their end of the agreement. It was also a deal that had been struck without any substantive involvement of the elected Afghan government.

As the new UN report makes clear, the Taliban did not break with al Qaeda, noting that the terrorist group has instead “used the Taliban’s takeover to attract new recruits and funding” while the core al Qaeda leadership “is reported to remain in Afghanistan: more specifically, the eastern region from Zabul Province north towards Kunar and along the border with Pakistan.”

And of course, the Taliban didn’t come to a peace agreement with the Afghan government. As the Americans hastily withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban instead overthrew the elected Afghan government.

After they seized power in Afghanistan in August, Taliban leaders gave their first press conference and told the assembled journalists bald-faced lies about how they respected women’s rights. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, “Our sisters, our men have the same rights; they will be able to benefit from their rights.”

This was, of course, nonsense, but some wishful thinkers had bought into the fantasy of some kind of “Taliban 2.0.”

Instead, we now have just the same old Taliban. They have banned girls from school above the sixth grade; they have insisted that women need a close male relative to escort them if they travel long distances; they have declared that women need to be covered from head to toe and have instituted punishments for male “guardians” who don’t enforce this; more than 200 media outlets have closed in Afghanistan, and the Taliban have presided over an economy that is in free fall.

The UN report states that the Taliban “are, in large part, the same Taliban movement that was deposed in 2001.” The UN also notes that the top posts in the Taliban government “have been given to the Taliban’s ‘old guard.'”

Meanwhile, the Taliban continue to allow foreign terrorist groups to use Afghanistan as a base. The largest such group is the Pakistani Taliban, which numbers several thousand fighters, according to the UN.

For the past six months, the Taliban have also imprisoned without charge five British citizens, including businessman Peter Jouvenal, a friend of mine who once worked with CNN as a cameraman. The Taliban have also held American contractor Mark Frerichs for more than two years.

The UN report does have some qualified good news, concluding that the Afghanistan branch of ISIS and al Qaeda are not believed to be “capable of mounting international attacks until 2023 at the earliest.”

This is a more optimistic projection than the one delivered by a top Pentagon official, Colin Kahl, in October 2021. Kahl testified before a US congressional committee that ISIS’s affiliate in Afghanistan could mount external operations “somewhere between six and 12 months” while “al Qaeda would take a year or two to reconstitute that capability.”
That said, the Taliban is in a stronger position today than the last time it was in power. That was before the 9/11 attacks, when it was fighting the Northern Alliance, a not insignificant opposition force.

The Taliban today hasn’t significantly changed any of its social policies, nor has it abandoned its alliance with al-Qaeda. We have seen how this movie plays out in the past. To paraphrase an observation attributed to Mark Twain, while history may not repeat itself, it certainly may rhyme.

Mass shootings in the US are a national security issue, CNN.com

Opinion: This is how we stem America’s mass shootings

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)It’s long past time that mass shootings in the United States should be treated as a national security issue; it is about our security as a nation of Americans.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 213 mass shootings already this year in the United States. And there have also been 27 shootings at schools causing injuries or deaths, according to Education Week.

This. Is. Not. Normal.

In any given year, Americans are many thousand times more likely to be killed by a fellow citizen armed with a gun than by a terrorist. There were, for instance, 19,384 gun homicides in the US in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Meanwhile, four people were killed by terrorists in the country that same year, according to research done by New America.

Americans think of themselves as citizens of an exceptional nation; and yes, the US is exceptional. No other country is as heavily armed as the US. The closest country is Yemen — a place in the throes of a long civil war — and even then, gun ownership is less than half the US.

Contrary to the claims of the gun lobby, this has not made Americans safer. Adjusted for population size, you are roughly 90 times more likely to be killed by an assailant with a gun in the US than you are in England and Wales, which have a population under a fifth the size of the US and where there were 30 homicides by shooting in the year ending March 2020, according to the most recent data available from the Office of National Statistics (ONS). The same year in the US, according to CDC data, there were more than 14,800 homicides with a firearm.

So, let’s dispose of the National Rifle Association talking point that we will surely be hearing ad nauseam in the coming days; that it’s not about the weapon, it’s about the shooter.

Are Americans really drastically more mentally unstable than the British? Of course not. The issue is easy access to guns.

And I’m not talking about the guns that any of my in-laws in Louisiana use to hunt deer. They never use assault rifles.

Assault rifles have one purpose which is to maim and kill as many humans as possible efficiently and quickly. They have no place on American streets.

The Texas suspect purchased two AR-15-style assault rifles days before his assault, as reported by CNN. Also, according to Sgt. Erick Estrada with the Texas Department of Public Safety, the perpetrator in the Texas massacre at the school was wearing body armor. Why is this OK? Why should American citizens easily be able to purchase body armor, other than those who legitimately need it for their jobs, such as security guards?

There are some common sense actions that can be taken to reduce the number of mass shootings in the US. Law enforcement officials and teachers need to better understand the issue of “leakage,” which was identified a couple of decades ago as a possible predictor of school shootings. It’s where a student planning to do something violent often intentionally or unintentionally reveals something about their plans to peers or family members.

The Texas shooter texted photos of his semi-automatic weapons and a bag of ammunition to a classmate days before the shooting, according to CNN. He also posted pictures of his weapons on social media.

“Leakage” can also be found in acts of domestic terrorism as was the case of the suspect in the attack at the Buffalo supermarket in a Black neighborhood in which 10 people were killed earlier this month. The perpetrator made a “generalized threat” a year before he carried out his attack with an assault rifle that was investigated by police. Despite that threat, he was still able to legally purchase a semi-automatic rifle.

As the conservative writer David French has pointed out, more states should pass “red flag” laws and they should be better enforced. Such laws would prevent the purchase of guns by those like the Buffalo terrorist who had made the threat that had come to the attention of law enforcement.
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Let’s see if anything substantive comes of the tragedy in Texas that reduces the toll of gun violence in the United States. We have all seen too many terrible tragedies unfold and then watched as nothing really changed.

Let’s hope this time is different. America’s mass shootings are a national shame and tragedy and an outlier globally. And they will surely continue if Americans revert to business as usual, which has tragically been the case now for decades.

The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and The World

NEW YORK TIMES (Editor’s Choice)

REVIEWS

“A respected national security analyst at New America and CNN, Bergen provides a deeply informed study, written with clarity and flair. Reflecting fresh research and nearly 100 interviews with some key players, his retelling of Trump’s foreign policy skillfully synthesizes what’s already known and adds gossipy tidbits… it is the best single account of Trump’s foreign policy to date.” —DEREK CHOLLET, WASHINGTON POST

“A fair and comprehensive overview of Trump’s foreign policy.” —MAX BOOT, FOREIGN AFFAIRS

“Timely . . . insightful . . . Through meticulously documented interviews and research, the author amply shows how the Trump administration has stubbornly stuck with this free-wheeling playbook of slash and burn.” —KIRKUS

“As Bergen, the author of several books on national security, shows, Donald Trump’s relationship to the American military is fraught because he has no understanding of the martial virtues and seems to assume that soldiering is simply a matter of violence, even uncaged brutality.” —NEW YORK TIMES (Editor’s Choice)

OVERVIEW

It is a simple fact that no president in American history brought less foreign policy experience to the White House than Donald J. Trump. The real estate developer from Queens promised to bring his brash, zero-sum swagger to bear to cut through America’s most complex national security issues, and he did. If the cost of his “America First” agenda was bulldozing the edifice of foreign alliances that had been carefully tended by every president from Truman to Obama, then so be it.

It was clear from the first that Trump’s inclinations were radically more blunt force than his predecessors’. When briefed by the Pentagon on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, he exclaimed, “The next time Iran sends its boats into the Strait: blow them out of the water! Let’s get Mad Dog on this.” When told that the capital of South Korea, Seoul, was so close to the North Korean border that millions of people would likely die in the first hours of any all-out war, Trump had a bold response, “They have to move.” The officials in the Oval Office weren’t sure if he was joking. He raised his voice. “They have to move!”

Very quickly, it became clear to a number of people at the highest levels of government that their gravest mission was to protect America from Donald Trump. Trump and His Generals is Peter Bergen’s riveting account of what happened when the unstoppable force of President Trump met the immovable object of America’s national security establishment–the CIA, the State Department, and, above all, the Pentagon. If there is a real “deep state” in DC, it is not the FBI so much as the national security community, with its deep-rooted culture and hierarchy. The men Trump selected for his key national security positions, Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and H. R. McMaster, were products of that culture: Trump wanted generals, and he got them. Three years later, they would be gone, and the guardrails were off.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria and Iran, from Russia and China to North Korea and Islamist terrorism, Trump and His Generals is a brilliant reckoning with an American ship of state navigating a roiling sea of threats without a well-functioning rudder. Lucid and gripping, it brings urgently needed clarity to issues that affect the fate of us all. But clarity, unfortunately, is not the same thing as reassurance.

Deadly shootings like the one in Buffalo could be prevented. Here’s how, CNN.com

Peter Bergen:

The story is all too familiar: A man allegedly armed with grievance and a gun kills fellow citizens who are strangers to him, singling them out only because of their race or creed.

It’s a very American tale of domestic terrorism which appears to have struck once again on Saturday, this time in the city of Buffalo, New York. And it is playing out with increasing frequency in the United States.

Just as school shooters learn from other school shootings, terrorists learn from — and are inspired by — other terrorists. A manifesto allegedly published online by the Buffalo attacker named and celebrated several other racist terrorists.

And like the white supremacists accused in multiple recent mass shootings, the alleged attacker in Buffalo was obsessed with the idea that whites are being “replaced” by other ethnic groups.

This Great Replacement theory animates many white nationalists, like those who attended a racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where they chanted, “Jews will not replace us!”

In the long shadow of the 9/11 attacks, Americans tended to think of terrorism as emanating from jihadists, but today, far-right terrorists are the leading cause of lethal terrorist attacks in the United States. If we include the 10 people killed in the Buffalo attack, right-wing extremists have killed a total 122 people in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, while 107 people have been killed by jihadist terrorists, according to data compiled by New America, a research institution.

This trend has been accelerating over the past several years. The assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division, Michael McGarrity, in 2019 testified before a US congressional committee that individuals “adhering to racially motivated violent extremism ideology have been responsible for the most lethal incidents among domestic terrorists in recent years.”

And FBI director Christopher Wray testified last year that in “the past 16, 18 months or so, we’ve more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload, from about a thousand to around 2,700 investigations.”

The FBI has considerably increased its focus on investigating cases of domestic terrorism, but what else can be done?

First, let’s do something simple: Let’s stop naming the terrorists. When an alleged terrorist is arraigned, naming him may be unavoidable, but stories like the one you are reading can function perfectly well without mentioning the names of any terrorists.

These misguided individuals are typically zeros trying to be heroes, so let’s not give them any of the “glory” that they often are hoping to achieve by naming them in the media.

Second, social media continues to be a key source of radicalization for many terrorists, and it’s clear that social media companies are not capable of policing themselves to the extent that is necessary.

There was, of course, plenty of white nationalist violence before the internet ever existed, but now the speed of radicalization for would-be militants is much faster because those who radicalize on the internet can more easily find like-minded believers — as well as a reams of propaganda that can fuel their radicalization.

Social media companies say they are doing their best to self-regulate and to remove content that encourages violence, but in Congress there is a growing sense that they are not doing nearly enough. Some lawmakers have even proposed creating a federal watchdog for social media.

Such a body, if properly resourced and staffed with expert commissioners from both parties, could help the government navigate the complicated technological and First Amendment issues that arise when policing content that could inspire violence.

Third, how do you identify radicalized individuals before they carry out acts of violence? This is not easy, but the growing discipline of “threat management” attempts to address the issue.

Threat management doesn’t focus on any particular ideology such as Islamism or white nationalism, but rather on the actions of suspects who often follow a predictable “pathway to violence.” That pathway begins from nursing a grievance, such as believing in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and can eventually end up with a militant taking violent action.

This is a sound approach, since holding radical ideas in the United States is not a crime.

Fourth, officials need a better understanding of the concept of ”leakage,” which was identified a couple of decades ago as a predictor of future school shooting: A student planning to do something violent would often intentionally or unintentionally reveal something about the impending act.

Similarly, a U.S. government study of dozens of terrorism cases found ”leakage” by the perpetrator to individuals referred to by the FBI as “bystanders,” more than 80% of the time. Bystanders included peers, family members, authority figures such as teachers or clerics, and strangers. Peers had the most useful information about attack planning, but were the least likely to come forward with relevant information to law enforcement.

This finding has important implications for investigating potential acts of terrorism since law enforcement should focus on those who are most likely to have relevant information. Indeed, the Buffalo suspect made a ”generalized threat” a year ago that was investigated by state police.

Fifth, last year, the Biden administration released the first-ever U.S. domestic terrorism strategy which contained useful policy prescriptions. This strategy was long overdue given the fact that the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and was carried out by far-right extremists happened back in 1995.

In that strategy, the administration promised to circulate a booklet detailing “mobilization indicators” to law enforcement officials around the country highlighting potential signs and signals of domestic terrorism. This kind of information can be quite useful to local law enforcement, since terrorists often tread a predicable path toward violence.

The Biden administration said it would also disseminate intelligence about “domestic terrorism iconography, symbology, and phraseology” — information that can be hard to come by, since it is often so tightly held by extremists.

Finally, limiting access to assault rifles that are designed to kill multiple victims would, of course, also cut the number of mass shooting deaths in the United States.

But given the current state of American politics, a limit on the sale of semi-automatic weapons is unlikely, even though it might have helped prevent the sale of such deadly firearms to perpetrators like the alleged shooter in the racist assault in Buffalo.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst.

Michael Osterholm: Covid-19 keeps firing 210-mph curveballs at us, CNN.com

After more than two years, the United States has now passed the tragic milestone of a million Covid-19-related deaths – and the pandemic is not remotely done. To learn more about where we are in the deadliest pandemic in American history, I spoke with Michael Osterholm, who has publicly warned of the dangers of a global pandemic for more than a decade and half and was a member of Joe Biden’s Covid task force during the presidential transition. Osterholm said Covid-19 keeps firing “210-mph curveballs” at us and anyone who tries to predict what will happen in the coming months is using a crystal ball caked with 5 inches of hardened mud.

Osterholm is also the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of The New York Times bestseller “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs.” Our conversation was edited for clarity, and the views expressed are his.

BERGEN: There seems to be a big disconnect between the White House recently predicting up to 100 million cases in the fall and earlier this month the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only making a recommendation about wearing masks on public transportation.

OSTERHOLM: Yes, I think this has been kind of a whiplash moment for the public on Covid-19. You also had the statement made recently saying that we are on the downside of the pandemic.

BERGEN: And that was by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

OSTERHOLM: Yes, his comment was obviously interpreted by most to mean that the pandemic was over. I realize that he was referring to the fact that we’re out of the big peak of cases right now, which is true.

BERGEN: And he walked that statement back a day or two later.

OSTERHOLM: On the other hand, I’ve seen no data which supports the possibility of a fall or winter surge in the US resulting in 100 million cases. No one should make that kind of statement without providing the assumptions behind that number. Could it happen? Sure, but it’s more likely if a new variant shows up that is more infectious and more likely to evade existing immune protection than Omicron. Any modeling that looks beyond 30 days out is largely based on pixie dust. I worry that the White House has gotten way ahead of their skis on this one, but I understand the administration is trying to emphasize the need for Covid relief money.

I strongly support the administration’s efforts to secure the additional Covid relief money, but it needs to be used efficiently. We don’t need more vaccines right now; we have plenty. What we really need is for people to get fully vaccinated. By my definition, that means at least three doses of vaccine. Only 30% of Americans have had three doses, and that number has changed little in recent months.

One of the key parts of the administration’s request for additional support is the need to secure a variant-specific vaccine. But such vaccines, like the ones being developed for the subvariants of Omicron, may be less effective against any new emerging variant.

And finally, when considering what our future with this virus looks like, we must consider waning immunity protection. How long has it been since people had their last vaccination, booster or previous infection? No one knows what the impact of waning immunity will be in the months ahead. And we must have the humility and the honesty to say that.

We’re currently seeing an increase in cases, but I think they are grossly underreported due to the prevalence of rapid home tests, which are largely left out of official case counts.

If you look at hospitalizations, there has been a very moderate increase so far compared with previous surges. And with deaths, the difference this time around has been even more striking. As of today, we are averaging approximately 325 Covid deaths a day in the US, according to the CDC. During the height of the Omicron surge, we saw 2,600 deaths a day, and during the Delta surge, it was around 2,000 a day, according to the CDC. This is the new phase of the pandemic. Now, with the BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 variants, there is immune protection from previous infections, previous vaccinations or both. It means there’s much less severe illness, and it’s not the same kind of pandemic we saw 18 to 24 months ago.

Now, the problem is that can all change tomorrow. We’re still trying to understand what the emerging Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 portend. Those two subvariants have completely taken over in South Africa, and there is a major increase in cases, but they, too, are milder. And many of the cases involve people who have previously been infected. The data shows that South Africans who have both previous infections and were vaccinated likely have the best protection against BA.4 and BA.5.

I’ve heard people say over and over again, “This thing is as infectious as it’s going to get,” and yet it keeps getting more infectious. Obviously, there’s a limit to that increasing infectiousness. It can’t go to the speed of light, but surely, you can expect to see new variants that survive and capitalize on microbial evolution by being more infectious.

Also, the whole issue of waning immunity is really an underappreciated situation, but the key point is that we don’t know what’s going to happen six months from now. So, we could have 100 million cases, but on the other hand, if we don’t see a new variant develop, maybe we won’t. I think that that’s the uncertainty that we have to convey to everyone and make clear that we’ve got to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

The virus is not done with us yet. We are going to have an ongoing pandemic with this virus for some time now.

I think there was an important event in recent weeks that should have been a clarion call to the world of what we’re up against: Taiwan announced it was no longer going to maintain its zero-Covid policy. The Omicron subvariant is like the wind – you can deflect it, but you can’t stop it.

Taiwan acknowledged that it can’t control Omicron. So, we have to understand that we’re now living with this virus, and no one has the perfect plan to get us out of it.

For the past two years, if I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, “Well, if we just did it like China or we did it like Taiwan, we would control this.”

And look what’s happened to each of those countries. Over time, no one in the world had the perfect solution for controlling this virus.

President Xi Jinping of China is maintaining his zero-Covid policy: Is he trying to show the power of the Chinese government to suppress this virus? Well, if that’s the case, it sure backfired. Look what’s happened in Shanghai. They locked down. They started to let up. And now they’re shutting down again. China is a clear example of what won’t work.

At the same time, you can’t let this thing just go willy-nilly, and that’s why vaccinations still remain so key. Getting antiviral drugs to those at highest risk for severe disease is also a really important aspect of our response.

BERGEN: What about vaccinations for the under 5s?

OSTERHOLM: I think that we should have them available. We have had major transmission of Covid in schools and day cares to parents, grandparents and other family contacts. So if you can cut down transmission in that group, it would likely have a knock-on effect. Remember that more than 400 children in the US under 5 years of age have died from Covid.

I realize there are a lot of parents of younger kids who say, “Oh, this is an experiment. I’m going to wait. My child is not that high risk of having it happen,” and so I think even if a vaccine is approved in the next weeks, by the time school starts again in the fall, you’ll see only very limited uptake.

BERGEN: Should people get the second booster if they’re over 50 or are immunocompromised?

OSTERHOLM: The whole issue with boosters is going to be a challenge. What is it going to look like in October and November for those people who had their booster in March and April? I don’t know.

The data suggests that people who were vaccinated with mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna are going to need perpetual boosters, but this is going to be a huge challenge. Look at the issue right now with the third dose. The last data I saw, only 46% of people that had two doses got the third dose.

These are not vaccine-hesitant people. We need to better understand why they haven’t gotten a third dose and ask ourselves whether uptake is going to get any better with a fourth dose. And what if we need a fifth dose?

And so I think that we have to take a step back right now and ask ourselves what can we accomplish with our mRNA vaccines, and be prepared for the possibility of a brand-new variant. Will we set ourselves back if we adopt an Omicron-specific vaccine, only for a different new variant to emerge?

We’re very fortunate that the number of deaths per number of cases has decreased dramatically, but if you are in high risk, if you’re over 65, you’re overweight, you have diabetes, you have hypertension, these are all risk factors for severe disease. Vaccinations will surely help provide some critical protection, but I know way too many of my younger, otherwise healthy colleagues right now who are at home, sick for seven to 10 days even though they have been fully vaccinated with the booster dose.

I think the additional challenge right now is that people want to get out and live their lives like they did before the pandemic. But my question is, what do you do if we see a new variant? Will people be willing to adapt, isolate or distance themselves again? I don’t think they will at this point.

BERGEN: Did you go to the White House Correspondents’ dinner?

OSTERHOLM: I wasn’t invited, and if I had been, I would not have gone. I’ve not been out in indoor public places like that.

BERGEN: Was the White House Correspondents’ dinner an accident waiting to happen?

OSTERHOLM: Oh, absolutely, it was. And it’s not just the Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s all the parties around it.

BERGEN: What’s surprised you about the last couple of years?

OSTERHOLM: I’m surprised that more people won’t admit that they’re surprised.

We need to stay humble and realize this virus is throwing 210-mph curveballs at us, day after day. Who would have thought that Omicron, which wreaked havoc in December, January and early February, would rear its ugly head and come back at us with all these subvariants?

We haven’t seen that biologic array of subvariants before. We didn’t see them with Delta or Alpha, Gamma and Beta. What we’re learning is that this virus really has a very dynamic ongoing evolutionary process. And what does that mean relative to the future? That’s a trillion-dollar question I can’t answer.

BERGEN: Speaking of the future, how well-positioned are we for the next pandemic?

OSTERHOLM: We’re not. We’ve suffered numerous setbacks, and our society’s trust in public health is probably at its lowest level since my career began 47 years ago. And public health has relied not just on the volunteerism and goodwill of the people but the ability for the public to understand why we’re sometimes asking them to do difficult things to save lives and to reduce the impact of this illness. Trust in the CDC as an organization has eroded significantly during this pandemic.

Second, at a time when we need more support for better vaccines and more drugs, we have a Congress that is debating whether or not to provide more funding.

Also, 500,000 people in the United States have left the health care field since the pandemic began, in large part due to burnout. We’re shorter-staffed now than we’ve ever been in my career.

And there is going to be a long tail to this pandemic that we still have not fully appreciated, given that so many people have long Covid. I think our response to this issue in the United States has been really lacking.

From a public health standpoint, I’m not seeing any systematic changes that would suggest we’re in better shape to face future pandemics. Our health care systems have done little to reform themselves around the world.

We still have all the challenges of low vaccination rates in the low- and middle-income countries. What does that mean? What happens if we need to vaccinate the world for a new avian influenza virus that becomes the next influenza pandemic virus?

BERGEN: Isn’t the CDC setting up some kind of early warning system?

OSTERHOLM: Yes, but if you have a virus that is highly infectious early on even before symptom onset, you’ve already lost control of virus transmission. All you can do is try to contain the impact globally. Think about what happened with Omicron and what we saw happening in South Africa after scientists there sounded the alarm. Countries responded by issuing travel bans against South Africans.

It turns out that wastewater surveillance retrospectively found the Omicron variant circulating in New York City before South Africa had announced its emergence. It was already around the world before we even knew it existed.

That doesn’t mean you give up. What it says is you’ve got to be prepared. If you can’t prevent the fires from happening, you’ve got to have a good fire department. And what we don’t know yet is how would we make new vaccines for the next bad bug. We were fortunate with the mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives. That may not work for the next pandemic.

Retired US major general: What it will take for the Ukrainians to win, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst,
Updated 10:00 AM EDT, Thu May 5, 2022

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” View more opinion on CNN.

The former commander of the US Special Operations Command in Europe, retired US Army Maj. Gen. Mike Repass, says the international community has to greatly increase its support for Ukraine if the embattled nation is ever going to be able to drive the Russians out.

Repass has advised the Ukrainian military for the past six years on a US government contract. Last month he visited Poland and western Ukraine to get a better feel for the trajectory of the war in Ukraine. I spoke to him Friday and Monday.

He says the Ukrainian supply chain for military equipment is inefficient and that additional military forces are required to drive the Russians out of Ukraine.

To win the war in Ukraine, Repass advocates that the US and its allies build up a Ukrainian strategic force amounting to five brigades of up to 40,000 soldiers capable of mounting offensive operations to force the Russians out of their country.

Disclosure: Repass is on the advisory council of the Global Special Operations Foundation, where I am the chairman of the board. Our conversation was edited for clarity and length.

BERGEN: What did you learn on your trip?

REPASS: One, that Ukraine still needs a lot of help. Two, NATO is moving too slow. Three, we don’t have visibility on what happens to military equipment when it gets into Ukraine.

The military equipment supply business is personalized as opposed to professionalized: The senior leadership establishes the distribution priorities and, from what I could observe, those priorities are not based on an understanding of consumption rates, or of future operations or objective data. It’s based on commander of brigade X or sector Y calling and saying, “Hey, I need 27 Javelin missiles.” So, it’s highly personalized, and that is not how to run wartime logistics. What should be going on is there should be an understanding of what the consumption rates are on important things like fuel, ammunition, batteries.

BERGEN: Is the likely outcome in Ukraine a bloody conflict that just goes on and on and on?

REPASS: The three obvious future scenarios are: Russia has a battlefield decision in their favor, the Ukrainians have a battlefield decision in their favor, or there’s a stalemate. Two out of three of those outcomes give Russia a victory.

In the stalemate scenario, Russia would simply claim victory based on facts on the ground and continue its occupation over expanded terrain in Ukraine into the indeterminate future. This would give Russia a less than total victory over Ukraine, but a victory with significantly expanded terrain under Russian control nonetheless.

So, what are we, the West, collectively doing to ensure that two out of those three possibilities don’t happen? Everybody is thinking about the immediate fight right now, which means we’re running supplies to the Ukrainians. The problem is that the Ukraine’s army needs additional capabilities to be able to drive Russia out of Ukraine.

BERGEN: Why?

REPASS: Because they don’t have enough combat power to do that, meaning enough equipment, firepower and trained soldiers at the moment.

Russia is always going to have more forces, not necessarily better forces, but more of them. As Stalin once said, “quantity has a quality all its own.” Most people recognize that this is going to be a battle of attrition and, at some point in time, it will start to tip in Russia’s favor unless additional Ukrainian forces are generated.

I think there’s a growing realization among NATO countries and the international community that we’re going to have to do something besides resource Ukraine’s current fight. So, there are four things that the US and its allies need to do. First, we need to weaken Russia by strengthening Ukrainian capabilities. Second, we need to further deter Russia by increasing our own and NATO’s capabilities. Third, is degrading Russia’s armed forces and capabilities. Finally, we need to ensure Russia’s defeat in Ukraine, and that is done by building a strategic and operational reserve force for Ukraine that can do offensive operations to kick the Russians out of Ukraine and secure its borders.

BERGEN: What does that look like in practice?

REPASS: You need to have the US, French, Poles, UK and the Germans each build a brigade’s worth of Ukrainian combat power. Those nations have significant military capacity and could generate forces by equipping Ukrainian units and then training them in their own nations. So, that would be five brigades, in five operational sectors. And you would need probably six to eight months to implement that. These five brigades would have Western equipment fighting in Western ways, an integrated air-land battle approach where you have all the means available to you, to include NATO-interoperable tanks, close-air support and air defense.

BERGEN: Five brigades is not a huge number, right?

REPASS: No, it’s not. I think it’s doable in the near term. There are up to 8,000 soldiers or so in a brigade, so that’s up to 40,000 people in five brigades. I believe the Ukrainians are capable of finding that many soldiers given the current national emergency.

Historically, when a Western military has come up against an army that has been supplied by the Russians, the Russian-backed army has been totally annihilated by an inferior number of forces, as was the case, for instance, during the first Gulf War when the US military destroyed much of Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait. We know that the Western armaments have a significant qualitative edge over Russian equipment, so numbers and force ratios are skewed when it is Western military equipment up against Russian-made equipment.

BERGEN: Why do the Russians stick to a model that doesn’t really work well?

REPASS: They are hidebound in their ways. Specifically, what they tried to do at the beginning of the war in Ukraine was a coup de main, taking out Kyiv with a rapid strike. That didn’t work. Russian troops got their asses handed to them. So, they brought all their firepower around to the east and to the south by employing massive artillery fires on the objective or along their avenues of approach. Once they have destroyed almost everything in front of them, then they advance their troops methodically. So, it’s not maneuver warfare. It’s attrition warfare by fire. It’s a fire-based army as opposed to what we have in the West, which is a maneuver-based army.

BERGEN: What do you make of the new Russian commander in Ukraine, Gen. Aleksandr Dvornikov?

REPASS: He is a dyed-in-the-wool, fire-based, attrition warfare guy. He’s not a maneuver warfare guy. He’s going to do everything that he’s done all his life, which is blow up and destroy everything in his path, and then send the troops in. Those troops will forcefully evacuate Ukrainian citizens to ensure there is no potential for a resistance movement in the land bridge from Russia through Donbas to Crimea.

BERGEN: How would you characterize the state of the war in the east and the south right now? Are the Russians, in their own minds, winning?

REPASS: The state of play today is Russia is making methodical advances both in the north and the south. It’s trying to fix forces defending in the east and envelop the Ukrainian defenders, then defeat them in the south. The Russians also want to encircle Mykolaiv, reduce the defense and destroy the defenders, and then have a free run at Odesa. They can’t get to Odesa until they either envelop or destroy the forces around Mikolaiv.

BERGEN: And Odesa is the prize because?

REPASS: Because that completes the cutoff of Ukraine from the Black Sea, and it’s also the gateway to Transnistria and Moldova.

BERGEN: What did you make of the comments by the Russian general about going on to Moldova? Do you take them at face value?

REPASS: I do take it as a serious threat, and I do think they have their eyes on Moldova. If they can take it, they will. To be specific, they talk about going to Transnistria. If they can build a southern land bridge to Transnistria, they will do it. That will put Russia on Moldova’s doorstep and Moldova won’t be able to effectively defend against a Russian invasion.

BERGEN: Is the Ukraine war widening?

REPASS: It’s a fact that Belarus has been a haven for Russia since the start of the war on February 24. It’s an article of faith with the Europeans that I’ve talked to that Belarus is a client state and is controlled and essentially ruled by Moscow. Belarus has not contributed military units to the fight, but they’ve housed, based and supported Russia forces. They’ve allowed them to launch operations from their territory – both ground, air, and precision strike missiles have been launched from there.

Putin’s officials have also said that the Baltic have no historical basis and they’re illegitimate states – the same thing they said about Ukraine before the war. The three Baltic states, and Poland, firmly believe that after Ukraine that they’re next on Russia’s hit list. They see Russia as an existential threat. And there’s no evidence that Putin is willing to stop at Ukraine.

BERGEN: What about all this nuclear saber-rattling? Do you think it’s just mostly posturing?

REPASS: Yes, I think it’s mostly posturing. It would be one thing if Putin said it. To have Foreign Minister Lavrov say it is another thing. I think it’s posturing if it comes from Lavrov. On their nuclear doctrine, they will use so-called tactical nuclear weapons if they feel that there’s a significant threat to the Russian homeland. Those are the kind of circumstances that Russia has communicated to the West where they would use their nuclear weapons.

BERGEN: So, it’s a high threshold.

REPASS: Right.

BERGEN: As a result of the sinking in mid-April of the Moskva, the Russian missile cruiser serving as the Black Sea Fleet flagship, do you think that the Chinese are looking at this and doing a little bit of soul-searching about whether attacking Taiwan would be wise?

REPASS: Yes, I do. Not only the sinking of the Moskva, but also the ability of a well-trained solid opposition to halt an invasion. Russia is getting very heavily degraded by a numerically inferior force, and they don’t have a water bridge to cross. They’re crossing Ukraine by land, while the Chinese would have to cross 100 miles of water to get to Taiwan. So, they must be thinking that this is going to be a lot harder than expected.

BERGEN: If you’re Putin today, how are you feeling?

REPASS: Probably better than the day after the Moskva was sunk. I think he’s probably feeling conflicted and confused but realizes that he has to press forward to get a victory here. And he’s held captive by a beast of his own creation in that he rarely uses the internet himself. You’ve never seen him at a computer, and, at least as of late 2020, he reportedly didn’t have an iPhone.

He has no connection to the outside world and all his information is either given to him by his inner circle or by what he reads in the Russia news media, which is, of course, controlled by the state and only puts out state-controlled messages. So he’s in a North Korean-like echo chamber and he is not getting accurate information.

BERGEN: Starting a war, that’s often the easy part. Wars have their own logic. Unfortunately, this war might go on for a year or even two years.

REPASS: I fear that you’re right. This will be a grinding, agonizing war if it lasts more than a year, and I think it’s going to last at least two years. But we can’t let it get into a stalemate. If it gets into a stalemate, Putin’s going to claim success followed by a brutal occupation of the Ukrainian territory that he controls.

Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies The Challenge of Long-Term Thinking Amid Uncertainty, New America online

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[ONLINE] – Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies
The Challenge of Long-Term Thinking Amid Uncertainty
Event

How can American policymakers adequately value the long term given the uncertainty of the future and the resulting pressure to focus on the short term? In his report, “Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies,” New America International Security Program Senior Fellow J. Peter Scoblic examines how the Coast Guard and other national security agencies have planned for the future, with a particular focus on the practice of strategic foresight. Among the report’s recommendations is a call for the president to establish an office to lead strategic foresight efforts at the national level in order to coordinate current piecemeal efforts.

To discuss how the U.S. government and the national security establishment engage in long-term anticipatory thinking, J. Peter Scoblic is joined by Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, who served as Director of Policy Planning for the State Department from 2009-2011. In addition to authoring the report, J. Peter Scoblic is a Senior Fellow with New America’s International Security program and co-founder of Event Horizon Strategies, a foresight consultancy. Anne-Marie Slaughter is also the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Join the conversation online using #StrategicForesight and following @NewAmericaISP.

Speakers:

J. Peter Scoblic, @PeterScoblic
Author, “Strategic Foresight in U.S. Agencies”
Senior Fellow, New America International Security Program
Co-Founder, Event Horizon Strategies

Anne-Marie Slaughter, @SlaughterAM
CEO, New America
Former Director of Policy Planning, U.S. State Department

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America
When
May. 9, 2022
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
Webcast link
RSVP

Slain journalist James Foley’s mother is grateful justice prevailed, CNN.com

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His forthcoming paperback is “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)On Thursday, El Shafee Elsheikh was convicted by a jury in Virginia of eight charges of assisting in the kidnappings and deaths of four American journalists and aid workers in Syria. Elsheikh, who was stripped of his British citizenship four year ago, was a member of the notorious group of sadistic ISIS members known as “the Beatles” because of their distinctive London accents. Elsheikh, 33, now faces a life sentence.
Sitting in court during Elsheikh’s trial in Alexandria, Virginia was Diane Foley, the mother of American journalist James Foley, who was murdered by ISIS in 2014.

“I’m relieved and incredibly grateful that justice prevailed,” Diane Foley told me after the verdict.

In 2012 James, aged 39, was a freelance photographer covering the war in Syria. While he was traveling to the Turkish border in 2012, he was kidnapped. It has been a decade-long search for some measure of justice for Diane and her family as well as the families of the other American hostages held by ISIS, Steven Sotloff, Kayla Mueller and Peter Kassig, who were also killed when they were held by the terrorist group.

Diane, who is 72, worked as a family nurse practitioner before becoming a well-known advocate for hostages held around the world through the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which she founded.

Our conversation was lightly edited for clarity. (Disclosure: I used to serve on the board of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for American hostages and journalists in war zones. My wife Tresha Mabile now serves on the board.)

Bergen: What’s your reaction to the verdict?
Foley: Well, I’m relieved and incredibly grateful that justice prevailed. It was not an easy case to prove because members of ISIS were very savvy about their security. They always wore black hoods. They also always made the hostages turn away from them when they came in the cell. They knew how to cover their tracks and protect their identities. So, it was a difficult case to prove, and it really required Scotland Yard as well as the FBI and the best of our prosecuting attorneys to make this happen. It was quite a feat in many ways.
Bergen: Were you surprised that Elsheikh was found guilty on all counts?

Foley: I wasn’t surprised, but I was concerned that it was tough for witnesses to physically identify him because he was always hooded. So, he really protected himself and it was not easy to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he was one of the brutal Beatles.
But he really implicated himself thanks to the media interviews he gave before he was in US custody and because of some of the interactions he had with his brother in London.

Bergen: The interviews that he gave was when he was first in custody in the Middle East helped implicate him?

Foley: Yes, Elshikh had done media interviews over the period of 18 months, and so the prosecution was very skillfully able to use his own statements regarding what had happened with the four Americans that ISIS held.

Bergen: What do you think the most damaging statements that he made freely in those interviews were?

Foley: Well, he very freely talked about the fact that he obtained an email address from a hostage. He freely admitted a lot of a lot of what he did. And he was good friends with other ISIS members Alexanda Kotey and Mohamed Emwazi (known as “Jihadi John”). They were friends from London. And then he boasted to his brother in London about some of the horrible, horrible things they did.

Bergen: Did you ever think that they would get inside a US courtroom and be tried?

Foley: Well, we kept hoping. The FBI kept telling us that they were collecting information. Scotland Yard certainly was also doing so, but this really was a team effort with a lot of committed people on both sides of the Atlantic working to make this happen. When the Trump administration’s Attorney General William Barr waived the death penalty, that was a big step because that allowed us to work together with the Brits to really make this happen and get a strong case.

Bergen: Because the Brits would not allow Elshiekh to come to the United States if the death penalty was on the table?
s
Foley: Yes, plus the Brits wouldn’t be allowed to share their important evidence. Our Department of Justice felt we really needed their implicating evidence too. When Barr took the death penalty off the table, then we were able to secure the British evidence. Our prosecuting team really wanted to prove how into all this violent jihad Elsheikh was, and he was sending information to his older brother in London using some sort of an encrypted app. So, Scotland Yard was able to get those exact texts and even photographs of what he sent to his brother.
Bergen: What was the reaction to the guilty verdicts in the courtroom?

Foley: Well, relief, exhaustion, deep gratitude on my part. The prosecution worked on this for years. So, it’s been a long time coming, and we’re particularly grateful because mercy and justice prevailed. We didn’t use any armed drones or bombs to achieve accountability. We were able to prove in a courtroom beyond a reasonable doubt that Elsheikh was, in fact, guilty. Now, he’ll be able to spend the rest of his life incarcerated and be able to ponder what he did. And who knows, maybe he’ll be remorseful at some point?

Bergen: It is rare for somebody to have been involved in these kidnappings and murders to be prosecuted successfully?
Foley: It is. Impunity is what normally happens, and that’s why this is such a big deal, because without any accountability, this terror continues, right?

Bergen: Are there other points that would be important for CNN’s readers to understand?

Foley: Well, I think the biggest one is that there are 60-plus publicly known cases of US nationals currently in the same situation that Jim, Steve, Kayla, and Peter were in, and I can’t help but think how many Americans must die before our country prioritizes their return.

This trial was very expensive. And it was a victory for justice, yes, and for accountability, yes, but it didn’t bring our kids home, and we have more than 60 US nationals really counting on our country to find ways to negotiate their freedom.

Bergen: These detainees are held both by authoritarian regimes and by terrorist groups?

Foley: Yes. But most are held by states at this moment, by the Russians, the Syrians, the Iranians, Venezuela, and China. Because they’re states, it makes it more complicated because negotiations involve much more than ransom or even the exchange of prisoners. There’s often lots of other things other countries want from the United States. So, it makes it incredibly complicated but incredibly important that we get them out as soon as possible because we are finding the longer, they’re held, the more the captors want from our government.

Why sanctions won’t deter Putin, CNN.com

Updated 10:33 PM ET, Thu April 7, 2022

(CNN)The Biden administration Wednesday slapped sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughters, as well as imposing sanctions on two of Russia’s biggest banks.
The ratcheting-up of sanctions on Russia gives the world the illusion that real action is taking place on Ukraine, but will they have any effect on Putin’s decision-making? History suggests that this is quite unlikely.
Indeed, the whole theory behind sanctions is fundamentally flawed since it assumes that strongmen like Putin will change their policies if enough pain is inflicted on them, their cronies and their populations.

This theory was outlined by an anonymous senior Biden administration official who explained to CNN on Wednesday that as a result of the escalating sanctions on Russia, Putin would eventually have to reckon with his people.

Well, maybe. Strongmen typically don’t give much of a damn about the feelings of their people and preside over governments that prohibit a free press and free assembly. They also generally have accumulated vast mountains of ill-gotten wealth in their own countries and therefore may no longer need access to the international financial system to maintain their extremely well-feathered nests.

Let’s not forget that after Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Russia was subjected to a range of sanctions by the US and the EU. Those sanctions did nothing to deter Putin from holding on to Crimea, nor from conducting a proxy war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine for eight years during which more than 14,000 people were killed.
For many years the US and the UN have imposed increasingly punitive sanctions on the regime of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which haven’t derailed Kim from continuing and even expanding his nuclear program.

Meanwhile, for more than a decade, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has imprisoned, tortured and murdered vast swaths of his own population despite an ever-escalating set of US sanctions that began in earnest in 2011 when the Syrian civil war first broke out. Today, Assad has effectively won that war.

In the years before the 9/11 attacks, the UN sanctioned the Taliban because they were sheltering al Qaeda. None of this deterred the Taliban from continuing to host al Qaeda, which launched the 9/11 attacks from Afghanistan.

Now, of course, the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan. More than half of the cabinet-level appointees to the Taliban government that were announced in September have some form of UN sanction against them. None of that stopped the Taliban from announcing last month that girls over the 6th grade could not attend school.

For its part, the Trump administration ratcheted up sanctions against the socialist authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro. Today, Maduro remains in power while the Venezuelan population is increasingly immiserated.

This is one area where sanctions do tend to take a toll: they impoverish the populations of the countries targeted by the sanctions.

Exhibit A for this is Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. After Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq. Almost a decade later, the Red Cross found that in Iraq “salaries are as low as US$2 a month, there is around 50% unemployment.” Meanwhile, Saddam’s hold on power remained as tight as ever.

And don’t even get me started on Cuba, which the US has sanctioned since the Kennedy administration. Cuba is now experiencing its worst economic crisis in three decades, while the Communist Party remains in control of the island, six decades after US sanctions first kicked in.

To be fair, “smart” actions on the Iranian regime that made it difficult for Iran to plug into the international financial system did bring the Iranians to the negotiating table during the Obama administration. That led to the nuclear deal in 2015 that halted the development of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

But when the Trump administration pulled out of the nuclear deal and re-imposed tough sanctions on Iran, the Iranians expanded their nuclear program and are closer now to having a nuclear weapon than at any time in the past.
One of the only cases where sanctions seem to have produced their intended outcome was against the apartheid regime in South Africa. International sanctions seem to have contributed to South Africa’s decision to end apartheid in the early 1990s.

Instead of turning the Russian population against Putin, the war in Ukraine and sanctions imposed by the West, seem to have produced a rally-around-the-flag effect for the Russian leader.

An independent Russian poll released at the end of March found that 83% of Russians approved of Putin’s actions, which is up from 69% in January. Even considering that some Russians may tell pollsters what they feel they are supposed to say, Putin appears to be more popular today than he was at the beginning of the year.

The “reckoning” that Putin is supposed to face from the Russian people doesn’t appear to be in the works, as yet. That, of course, could change as the US and its allies are imposing on Russia what are some the most stringent sanctions ever imposed on any state. But if the West wants to do something effective to undermine Putin’s war in Ukraine, sanctions are unlikely to be effective tools.

What would likely be effective — in addition to continue supplying anti-tank Javelins and Stinger missiles that are effective against helicopters—is to arm the Ukrainians with as many S-300 missiles as feasible, according to a group of senior retired US military officials and Eastern European former ministers of defense who published an open letter to this effect last month.

The S-300s can bring down high-flying Russian jets and ballistic missiles, which would create a de facto no-fly zone over Ukraine that would fall short of instituting a formal no-fly zone enforced by jet aircraft, a measure that the US and NATO have rejected as too provocative to nuclear-armed Russia.

Sanctions are feel-good measures for the sanctioning states, but they mostly inflict pain on the populations of the sanctioned, while leaving their rulers in place atop their piles of ill-gotten loot and determined to work their will.

What’s behind Russia’s history of atrocities, CNN.com

(CNN)The pictures emerging of atrocities in Bucha, Ukraine, are shocking, but are they really surprising?

Consider the Russian way of war during the past decades, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to Syria. All these wars were characterized by mass casualty attacks against civilians by the Russians, as well as credible allegations of the summary executions of civilians by Russian forces.

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union waged a nine-year war in Afghanistan during which time Human Rights Watch reported, “Over one million Afghan civilians are believed to have been killed … most in aerial bombardments. Tens of thousands have disappeared — many of them the victims of summary executions. …”

The atrocities continued in the following decade, this time closer to home. During Russia’s first war in Chechnya in 1994, according to Russian human rights experts, around 25,000 civilians died during just two months of fighting in the capital, Grozny.

During the second Russian war in Chechnya, Russian soldiers summarily executed at least 38 civilians in Grozny between late December 1999 and mid-January 2000, according to Human Rights Watch. And on February 5, 2000, Russian soldiers summarily executed “at least sixty civilians,” the group added.

The International Federation for Human Rights found the Russians in Chechnya in 2000 had engaged in “summary executions and murders, physical abuse and torture; intentionally causing grave harm to people not directly involved in hostilities; deliberate attacks on the civilian population. …”

During their two wars in Chechnya, the Russians flattened Grozny, once a city of more than 400,000 people. Indeed, the United Nations once declared Grozny the “most destroyed city on Earth.”

More recently during the Syrian civil war — a war that Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was in danger of losing before Russia intervened in 2015 — 8,683 civilians were killed by Russian bombardments, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Atrocities are not only committed by Russia’s conventional forces. Last year the European Union imposed sanctions on the Russian mercenary organization the Wagner Group, which operates as a proxy for the Russian government and military. The sanctions related to “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,” the EU said, citing the Wagner Group’s actions in Libya, Syria and the Central African Republic. The Wagner Group has reportedly deployed 1,000 of its men to Ukraine.

What we are seeing in Bucha now is the Russian way of war at work, which seems designed to bludgeon civilian populations into submission, so as to expunge any possible resistance. Unfortunately, we can expect to see more Buchas in coming weeks.