Why Putin will regret launching this war, 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. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)Has Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine outrun the resources he’s committed to it? That’s the view of retired US Army Major General Mike Repass, who has an informed vantage point on the conflict, having worked in the Ukrainian security sector since 2016. The former commander of the US Special Operations Command in Europe, Repass provides education and advisory support to the Ukrainian military on a US government contract.

In discussions Thursday and Friday, I spoke to Repass about why new leadership and the improved training of the Ukrainian military has markedly improved its performance in recent years, the kind of anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons the Ukrainians hope that the US and its NATO allies will supply them with and what he sees happening next as the war in Ukraine grinds on. He predicts a campaign by the Russians that could turn the cities of Ukraine into rubble, creating a refugee crisis that overwhelms bordering nations, and destabilizes Central and Eastern Europe.

But Repass believes that while the Russians may be able to overcome Ukraine’s stiff defense, they will not be able to hold onto the country because Putin doesn’t have sufficient forces in theater to occupy large swaths of Ukraine indefinitely. In short, Putin has bitten off more than he can chew.

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.

Repass: The bottom line is the Ukrainian military forces have acquitted themselves exceptionally well thus far in the war. Russia will have a very difficult time subduing them because they are willing to fight until it becomes seemingly “futile,” or they no longer have the resources to do so.
The Ukrainians have been overmatched by Russian technology and outmanned and outgunned — by Russian tanks, artillery, precision long range strike missiles, armored personnel carriers — but the terrain favors the defenders, especially in the north and east of Ukraine, although less so in the south.

I think time and mass are on the Russian side, and they’re going to be able to either create conditions for peace suitable to Putin’s liking, or they will outright destroy the cities of Ukraine and the Ukrainian military with it, which to me still leaves a resistance scenario for the Ukrainians. So, there are multiple plausible futures.
Bergen: Why are the Ukrainians fighting better than many had expected?

Repass: I’m not surprised at how well the Ukraine army is fighting. I am surprised at the lethargy of the Russian assault; it seems to be slow and plodding up north. In the east, they’re getting their butts handed to them. In the south, they seem to be making steady progress.

Putin expected the Ukrainians to capitulate like they did in 2014 when he took Crimea, but overall, NATO and the US have done a magnificent job in training the Ukrainian military and reforming it and building it into a viable national defense force since 2014. The difference between then and now is the leadership of Ukraine is set on unifying with the West, politically, militarily, and economically.
On the military side, President Zelensky had inherited an old cadre of guys that he has replaced. The military leadership he brought in last year are all younger general officers, and they served together in the Donbas region in combat against the Russians. The leadership he has on the military side is much more engaged and much more influential.

Zelensky also brought in a new minister of defense. The previous minister was not up to the task for several reasons, so he brought in Oleksiy Reznikov, and he’s been outstanding.
So, the new leadership has really picked up the pace of reforms they were on. Given another year or two, those guys would have been in a different place altogether, looking much more like a NATO country’s armed forces.

I’ve visited 100, 150, 200 tactical units in various places — in Afghanistan and Iraq, where I served two combat tours — and I know instantly when I walk into a tactical unit environment, what the dynamic is there. When I visited a Ukrainian Special Forces unit in September, I sensed that immediately these guys were well-trained; they looked like our guys. They had the same mannerisms. They had the same planning processes.

Bergen: I thought Putin’s attack on Ukraine would be like the US military seizing Baghdad in 2003 and that the Russians would decapitate the Ukrainian regime quickly.

Repass: I think that’s what the world expected. So, strategically, the NATO mindset was, “Hey, we’re not going to get involved because by the time we commit to this thing, we get cranked up and get engaged, the damn thing is going to be over. So we’re not going to risk the political capital with another nuclear power to do this.” Yet now, we have another geostrategic reality in that the Ukrainian defense is pretty doggone viable. I think Ukrainians are in the vanguard of protecting the liberal democracies of Europe.

Bergen: For the Ukrainians, what weapons are needed now from NATO and the US? Or is it at the point where it’s too late to get weapons in because of logistical issues?

Repass: No, it’s not too late. Every Ukrainian tactical commander is asking for air defense and anti-tank weapons. They want air defense weaponry like Stingers or SA-7s, and they want anti-tank weapons. They know where the enemy is. They know how to get to him, but they don’t have the means in the field.

There’s congestion in the NATO weapons delivery pipeline because the spigot was only turned on days ago, and they haven’t reached the Ukrainian tactical units yet.

I’m not speaking for NATO in any way, shape, or form when I say what I’m about to say, but one of the things is that they must have a common communication system. Right now, there are dissimilar and cumbersome communications between the Ukrainian commands and the nations that are providing support.

The second thing is because it isn’t a NATO operation, NATO hasn’t responded in a formalized way to stand up movement coordination centers and logistic control centers. So there’s a lot of improvisation going on with the coalition of the willing and able, putting together the transportation networks and the logistics networks. There’s a lot of work that can be done among and between the individual NATO member states to shore up efficiency and effectiveness and speed up the delivery of the lethal weaponry.

Bergen: Why is a 40-mile Russian convoy on the road trying to take Kyiv? It seems a strange approach.

Repass: Yes. Everybody is scratching their head about that. There are a couple things that I think feed into this. So, it’s 40 miles long now, but the convoy started out in segments. And those segments were somewhere between 50 and a couple hundred vehicles at a time. The idea was for these segments to deploy, but then the congestion started happening due to combat fatalities and breakdowns.

Also, if the vehicles and tanks get off that road, then they’re in a quagmire. There’s mud in the region that persists for basically the springtime, running from now for another six weeks or so.
So, cross-country mobility is exceedingly inhibited in the northern part of the country. The southern part of the country, you don’t have that problem. So you don’t see these massive convoys down south. You only see it up north where getting off the road is a problem.

Bergen: Why was this so poorly planned, or was it just that it was likely to not go well because of the weather circumstances we’re seeing?

Repass: We assume the Russians are capable of efficient planning, but they’re also capable of bad planning. They haven’t done this level of planning and execution in any of their training exercises. So, they’re somewhat unfamiliar with the large maneuver and sustainment aspects of what they’re attempting to do.

Bergen: What’s next?

Repass: A Russian campaign to turn the cities into rubble, creating a refugee crisis, overwhelming the borders and the border nations, and destabilizing Central and Eastern Europe.
They’re going to target government infrastructure and then means of command and control — public communications, internet, radio towers, cell phone towers — anything they can do to disrupt communications, so they separate the people from the government.

With this campaign, they want to create mass shock and panic in the society to create complex challenges for the government and degrade the will of the people. Already about a million refugees have crossed the borders out of a population of around 41 million. That’s going to go up significantly. You’re going to have several million people streaming to the west.
Belarus and Russia will likely declare martial law, and they’ll be able to clamp down on all manner of public discourse, media, internet, and cut down any potential for resistance or coup attempts internal to their countries.

They likely will combine forces, move to seal off the western border of Ukraine, first, to create a greater humanitarian disaster in Ukraine; and second, to cut off any resupply coming in from the West.

I think at that point in time, the Ukraine military, will continue to fight primarily west of the Dnieper River. In other places, particularly in the Ukrainian urban centers, you’re going to have an insurgency. A resistance will rise up either pre-planned or organically, and they will inflict pain and destruction on the Russians to the extent that they can.
This is where the term “indigestible” comes into play. The Russians may be able to consume Ukraine, but they cannot digest it. It will be too painful to hold onto it, and eventually they will have to spit it back out. In essence, the cost of occupation is too great compared to the returns.

The Russians may eventually control the urban areas, but there are vast areas between them — 50 kilometers, 80 kilometers apart — where there’s nothing. There are many small villages and small towns that are not controlled by Russians.

The devastation is going to horrify Europe and North America. The non-intervention argument will eventually be overridden by the human suffering problem. And then, potentially a coalition of the willing might impose something along the lines of a no-fly zone or safe havens for refugees and citizens of the major metropolitan areas.

Bergen: So those safe havens could look a little like the kind of safe haven that the US established in Kurdistan in Iraq in 1991?

Repass: Yes, something like that, in western Ukraine.

Bergen: What is the minimum that Putin wants to achieve in Ukraine?

Repass: The one critical thing that Putin must have is control of the North Crimea Canal.
Bergen: Why is that?

Repass: Because when he invaded Crimea and Donbas in 2014, the Ukrainians shut off the North Crimea Canal source at the Dnieper River. So, it dried up, and they’ve been relying on groundwater in Crimea since, and then the groundwater has all dried up. So, Putin has had no fresh water in Crimea until now.

The Russians captured the North Crimea Canal and fresh water just showed up in Crimea in the last day or so. So that’s the one thing he had to have.
What he also wanted to have is a land bridge from Donbas over to Crimea and to secure that land route and the North Crimea Canal source at the Dnieper River. He would essentially have control of all territory east of the Dnieper River, going up to Kyiv and then arcing north and eastward to Donbas. If Putin seizes enough land east of the Dnieper River, then he’s willing to bargain everything else away.

But even with the geographic territory that I just described, Putin’s circa 175,000 troops which are presently deployed in and around Ukraine are not enough to maintain control of that geography.
Bergen: How much manpower would Putin need to control the territory?
Repass: Difficult to say.

The Russians must have enough people to coerce the 41 million people in Ukraine to cooperate with the Russian government. It took a large part of the German Army’s Eastern Front to subdue the Ukrainians so they could pursue the campaign into southern Russia during World War II.
So, I don’t see how Putin’s going to be able to pull that off.

I think the Western liberal democracies have both a moral obligation and a political imperative to support a nation fighting for its independence and the pursuit of a liberal political order in the Western tradition. If not here, where will we take a stand against autocratic and revisionist forces? What should Georgia and Azerbaijan conclude from our timidity in the face of evil? Surely Taiwan is next.

I believe Russia’s assault on Ukraine is the leading edge of militarily strong states preying upon weaker ones. Few of us thought we would be here, but so it is. What are we going to do now?
History has been unkind to nations when they tolerate or appease such aggression. The concepts of territorial integrity and democracy cannot end at NATO’s borders. Is the rest of the world to be left to the wolves while there is but one island of security? Russia’s attack on Ukraine cannot succeed if we hope to build and sustain the benefits of democracy beyond NATO’s borders.

Foreign policy hasn’t taken center stage like this in two decades, CNN.com

Foreign policy hasn’t taken center stage like this in two decades

Not since President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union in January 2002, four months after the 9/11 attacks, has an American president delivered a speech freighted with as much foreign policy significance as the one President Joe Biden delivered on Tuesday night.

In 2002, Bush started laying the groundwork for the Iraq War, decrying a purported “axis of evil” that included Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. On Tuesday, Biden called out the Russian authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin for his “unprovoked” war in Ukraine, while making clear that US troops would not be deployed there.

Instead, Biden mounted a spirited defense of NATO and its 29 other members, vowing that the US would “defend every inch of territory of NATO countries with the full force of our collective power.”

After former President Donald Trump spent years gratuitously bashing NATO and embracing Putin, it was refreshing to hear a US president rousingly endorse the alliance, which Trump’s own Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis called “the most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.”

Putin has long tried to undermine NATO. Now, due to his reckless military assault on Ukraine, that alliance could grow to include more members. Over the past several days, Russia’s neighbor Finland, which has long held the position of military non-alignment, has taken a sharp turn and Finnish politicians are now actively considering joining.

In his State of the Union address, Biden positioned himself as the leader of the free world. Given what we’ve seen in the last week, it didn’t seem like a hollow boast.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.”

The Forever Prisoner: Abu Zubaydah and the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” Program, New America Online

INE] – The Forever Prisoner: Abu Zubaydah and the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” Program
EVENT

Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah and announced he was number three in Al Qaeda. Frantic to thwart a much-feared second wave of attacks, the U.S. rendered him to a secret black site in Thailand, where he collided with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell. The CIA authorized Mitchell and others to use brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques.” In their new book, The Forever Prisoner, Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy draw on four years of intensive reporting, interviews with key protagonists who speak candidly for the first time, and on thousands of previously classified documents to provide a powerful chronicle of a shocking experiment that remains in the headlines twenty years after its inception, even as US government officials continue to thwart efforts to expose war crimes. Abu Zubaydah, and others, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged with any crimes. The Forever Prisoner prompts the question as to whether he and others remain detained not because of what they did to us but because of what the United States did to them.

To discuss the book, New America welcomes Cathy Scott-Clark, co-author of The Forever Prisoner. Scott-Clark has written multiple other acclaimed books with her co-author Adrian Levy including The Exile, Deception, The Siege, The Amber Room, and The Stone of Heaven. Writing for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, they have won the One World award for foreign reporting and in 2009 were voted One World Media’s Press Journalists of the Year, and they won the 2016 CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction.

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

Speaker:

Cathy Scott-Clark, @cathyscottclark
Author, The Forever Prisoner

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America

Seven crucial questions about Putin’s war on Ukraine, 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 new book is “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)Vladimir Putin’s assault on Ukraine is a dramatic break in the history of post-World War II Europe, raising vital questions about the military operation’s origin, timing and likely course. Not since President George W. Bush attacked Iraq in 2003, or the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, has an invasion seemed as reckless as the one Putin launched this week.

The invasion prompts seven questions:
First, why did Putin choose to attack Ukraine during the administration of Joe Biden rather than when Donald Trump was president?

After all, Trump seemed an eager ally in Putin’s project to Make Russia Great Again, going out of his way to cozy up to Putin and also to undercut the NATO alliance, the undermining of which has long been a goal of Putin’s.

Perhaps, because for all of Trump’s personal coziness with Putin, his administration took a somewhat tough approach with Russia. In 2018, the Trump administration approved the sale of some $40 million of lethal weaponry to the Ukrainian government fighting Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine. The same year the Trump administration also expelled 60 Russian diplomats from the United States after the Russians had allegedly tried to assassinate a former Russian spy living in the United Kingdom using a nerve agent.

So, this leads us to a second question: To what extent did the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in August inform Putin’s decision-making on Ukraine?
Surely, Biden’s decision to abandon Afghanistan showed a United States in retreat, leaving its allies in the elected Afghan government to the tender mercies of the Taliban, while irritating America’s NATO partners who were also forced to pull out of Afghanistan as a result of the US withdrawal, since American forces provided much of the air power and intelligence that allowed allied forces to function in Afghanistan.

Chinese state-run media noted that the US abandonment of Afghanistan held lessons for the fate of Taiwan; that the US was both a fair-weather friend when it came to its allies and also a paper tiger. “The fall of Kabul marks the collapse of the international image and credibility of the US,” opined Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

In early November, a little over two months after the debacle of the total US pullout from Afghanistan, Putin started moving a sizeable Russian army of 90,000 troops towards the Ukrainian border, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

It is no secret that neither Russia nor NATO actually wants Ukraine to be in NATO, precisely because of what we are now seeing unfolding in Ukraine. If Ukraine were part of NATO, the Russian invasion would have triggered NATO’s Article 5, which would have in turn prompted a NATO-led war against Russia — and potentially a nuclear confrontation.

NATO countries do not have any appetite to send troops to war in Ukraine and President Biden has said no American troops will be deployed there, although Biden has also made clear that if the war expanded to a Russian attack on a NATO ally in eastern Europe that US forces would intervene. So why a war now? Maybe, Putin simply felt he could get away with it.

But Putin’s seeming calculus of US and NATO weakness has somewhat backfired as the Biden administration has worked with its NATO partners closely and the alliance has held together, presenting a united front against Russian aggression.

Meanwhile, the US intelligence community has done a good job of what it is supposed to do, which is to provide strategic warnings to American policymakers, predicting accurately that Putin could invade Ukraine at any time—likely using the cover of “false flag’ operations—with the aim of overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government. The Biden administration also has publicized this intelligence information to good effect.

Another question: Would a quick military victory by Putin in Ukraine replicate the 2003 US “victory” in Iraq, which was followed by a long messy insurgency and a civil war? That is certainly possible. As Machiavelli noted five centuries ago: “Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.”

Would the CIA then start funding Ukrainian insurgents as they did in 2013 with the Syrian insurgents who were battling the regime of Bashar al-Assad? That CIA effort failed and Assad’s regime was effectively saved by Russia’s intervention in the Syrian war in 2015. Might a CIA effort in Ukraine fare better?

Will stringent US sanctions on Putin’s inner circle and the Russian economy work to force Putin to rethink his policy on Ukraine? Doubtful. Authoritarian regimes generally shake off even draconian sanctions at the expense of their own people. Look at Kim Jung Un’s North Korea today or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1990s; punishing US sanctions helped to immiserate the North Korean and Iraqi populations with scant consequences for their regimes.

Will Trump pay any political price for saying that Putin’s move on Monday to recognize two breakaway regions of Ukraine was “genius?” As with so many actions by Trump, it is unprecedented for a former president to be publicly undercutting a sitting president’s foreign policy against an adversary. Trump’s comments about Putin’s “savvy” and “genius” were made on Tuesday before Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine.

Trump has led a wing of the Republican Party to become Putin’s cheerleaders. One of the key leaders of the Putin apologists is Tucker Carlson of Fox News, who last month said, “Why is it disloyal to side with Russia but loyal to side with Ukraine?”

On Tuesday, on his show, Carlson upped the ante with his defense of Putin asking rhetorically whether the Russian autocrat had ever promoted “racial discrimination,” had tried “to snuff out Christianity,” had manufactured fentanyl, or had eaten dogs.

Carlson forgot to ask whether Putin and his cronies had ever murdered political opponents, poisoned them with exotic weapons, imprisoned them on spurious charges, invaded neighboring countries, or looted the Russian people.

Finally, who will win the war in the long term? No one knows, of course. When the Soviets invaded neighboring Afghanistan in December 1979, it looked like a cakewalk. They immediately seized the capital Kabul, yet a decade later the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan –a move that hastened the demise of the Soviet Union. Conversely, Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and still retains it. War is always the most uncertain of enterprises.

Putin has effectively ruled over Russia for the past 22 years and in 2020 a referendum was passed allowing him to remain president until 2036.

If natural causes don’t intervene — and judging by his almost complete isolation from the outside world, he cares a lot about his own health — Putin may linger on his Russian throne longer than Stalin who ruled for 30 years or Catherine the Great who reigned for 34 years. (There is of course always the possibility that Putin might be overthrown by forces unknown, but given his current total lock on power this seems like a very remote possibility.) So Putin likely has many more years left to try to implement his vision of restoring the Soviet empire and Making Russia Great Again.

Lotos Club, NYC

Understanding U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Operations: In Memory of Michael Sheehan, New America online

Understanding U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Operations: An Event in Honor of the Memory of Michael Sheehan

DATE: March 14, 2022
TIME: 12:00 – 1:00 PM

Terrorist groups have evolved substantially in the two decades since 9/11. While the understanding of terrorism has grown immensely over the past two decades, similar advancements in the understanding of counterterrorism lag. In the Routledge Handbook of U.S. Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations, a range of contributors place the focus of analytic attention on U.S. counterterrorism efforts and how it has adapted alongside the changes in terrorist activity. In honor of the memory of Ambassador for Counterterrorism Michael Sheehan, who edited the volume, New America has convened a discussion of these topics.

To discuss the changes in counterterrorism and terrorism over the past two decades, New America welcomes four contributors to the volume: Peter Bergen, Liam Collins, Luke Hartig, and Elisabeth Kendall. Peter Bergen is Vice President at New America. Col. (ret.) Liam Collins is Executive Director of the Viola Foundation, a fellow with New America’s International Security Program, former director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, and founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point. Luke Hartig is a fellow with New America’s International Security program, previously served as Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, and is president of National Journal Research. Elisabeth Kendall is Research Fellow in Arabic & Islam at Oxford University (Pembroke). The discussion will be moderated by Karen J. Greenberg. Greenberg is the Director of the Center for National Security at Fordham Law, a fellow with New America’s International Security program, and author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Trump.

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

PARTICIPANTS

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President, New America

Col. (ret.) Liam Collins, @LiamSCollins
Executive Director of the Viola Foundation
Fellow, New America International Security Program
Former Director, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point

Luke Hartig, @LukeHartig
Fellow, New America International Security program
Former Senior Director for Counterterrorism, National Security Council
President, National Journal Research

Elisabeth Kendall, @Dr_E_Kendall
Research Fellow, Oxford University (Pembroke)

MODERATOR

Karen J. Greenberg, @KarenGreenberg3
Director, Center on National Security at Fordham Law
Fellow, New America International Security Program
Author, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Trump

At least 6 British citizens and 1 American are being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan, CNN.com

At least 6 British citizens and 1 American are being held by the Taliban in Afghanistan

By Kylie Atwood and Peter Bergen, CNN

(CNN)At least eight Westerners have been arrested by the Taliban in Afghanistan during different incidents in the last two months, CNN has learned, marking a sharp escalation of Taliban actions against Westerners living in the country.

No formal charges appear to have been lodged against the detained men. The people being held now include six British citizens, one of whom is an American legal resident, and one US citizen, according to the sources with direct knowledge of the matter in Afghanistan, the United States, and the UK.

The former vice president of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, tweeted that “nine” Westerners had been “kidnapped” by the Taliban, naming journalists Andrew North, formerly of the BBC who was in the country working for the United Nations, and Peter Jouvenal, who has worked with the BBC and CNN. Both are British citizens.

The wife of North, Natalia Antelava, had confirmed to CNN that her husband was detained. Antelava tweeted Sunday confirming North’s release.

North was in Afghanistan on assignment for the United Nations’ refugee agency (UNHCR).

The reason for each of the specific detentions is unclear, and they are not thought all to be related.

Jouvenal’s detention was confirmed by his family and friends to CNN.

“Peter Jouvenal’s friends are deeply concerned for his safety following his detention by the authorities in Afghanistan in early December. A British/German dual-national, Peter has been travelling to Afghanistan for more than forty years, as freelance cameraman, businessman and investor,” his family said in a statement. “He is a Muslim, knows Afghanistan better than most foreigners, is married to an Afghan (they have three daughters), and speaks both main languages. He is being held without charge, and with no freedom to contact his family or lawyers.”
The family also said that they believed his detention could have been an error and noted that he has health complications which make his detention more dangerous.

“Peter’s family and friends believe that he may have been detained in error, as he was in Afghanistan to discuss investments in Afghanistan’s mining industry as well as conducting family business. Before his arrest, he was working openly and had frequent meetings with senior Taliban officials. We urgently request that the Afghan authorities release Peter,” the family said. “He suffers from high blood pressure and needs medication. There is a high threat of COVID infection in the Afghan prison system.

Escalation by the Taliban

The detentions come at a delicate time for the Biden administration which faces a major foreign policy crisis in Ukraine. President Joe Biden withdrew all US troops from Afghanistan six months ago, which paved the way for the Taliban to take over the country.
The detentions also mark a sharp escalation of Taliban actions against Westerners living in Afghanistan and come at a delicate moment in US-Taliban relations. Since the group swept back into power as the US military withdrew last August, it has been seeking recognition as Afghanistan’s legitimate government.

Emily Horne, a spokesperson for the US National Security Council, called the detentions “unacceptable” and said the US has been contact with the Taliban as it urges the group to release the Westerners.

“It’s completely unacceptable for the Taliban to hold hostage human beings, and completely antithetical to their purported aspiration to be viewed as a legitimate actor on the world stage. Through direct and indirect communications with the Taliban, we have urged the release of any and all individuals who are unjustly being held by the Taliban and their proxies. Due to privacy, safety, and operational concerns, we have no further comment at this time,” Horne said.

Seven of the men were arrested in Kabul in December in separate incidents, and they have been detained for the past two months, the sources told CNN.

The Taliban have not publicly said that they are holding the men, although they did allow a senior Qatari official to visit some of the detainees in Kabul in mid-January. The Qatari official saw no signs of obvious mistreatment of the men, the sources told CNN.

The Taliban and Qatari government did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A senior British official also visited some of the men in prison this month, two sources told CNN. The detainees are not all being held together, sources tell CNN.
The UK government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Conditions in Afghan jails are spartan, especially during the cold Kabul winters, and the spread of Covid-19 in the country is worrying the families of the detained men.
From 2002, Jouvenal was the proprietor of the Gandamack Lodge hotel in Kabul, which was the key hotel used by journalists who were covering the Afghan War, until it was closed in 2014.
Jouvenal also filmed the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997 for CNN.

During the war against the Soviets, at great personal risk, Jouvenal traveled into Afghanistan more than 70 times to film the conflict for a variety of Western news organizations, one of the few Western journalists to do so.

The last time that the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan, before 9/11, Jouvenal maintained a house in Kabul, and over the years he has repeatedly met with Taliban leaders.
Senior US and British officials have been working together to attempt to resolve the matter.

Qatari officials who are in frequent contact with the Taliban — as the protecting power of the US in the country — have discussed the issue with Taliban officials. For the last five weeks CNN has withheld reporting about the western prisoners held by the Taliban as diplomatic efforts by American, British and Qatari officials have continued to try and secure their release due to sensitivities around those efforts which have not been successful.

The Westerners are being held by the Intelligence Directorate of the Taliban in Kabul, according to sources familiar with the cases. The intelligence service is directed by Abdul Haq Wasiq, who was held at the Guantanamo prison camp for 12 years until he was released in 2014 in a prisoner swap for US soldier Bowe Bergdahl, who was being held by the Taliban.
Negotiating with the Taliban presents a huge challenge.

As the US military and diplomats completed their withdrawal from Kabul in August, they worked alongside the Taliban to facilitate the chaotic evacuation of foreigners and Afghans from the country. Since the withdrawal, there have been regular communications between US officials and the Taliban, but the trajectory of the relationship remains unclear.

As of earlier this year, there were about 80 Americans who wanted to leave Afghanistan but could not because evacuation flights have not been leaving the country regularly. Last month a flight chartered by the US government left Kabul, which marked the first evacuation departure since November, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The Taliban Haqqani network also continues to hold US contractor Mark Frerichs, who was kidnapped two years ago while he was doing construction work in Afghanistan before the Taliban had seized the entire country in August.

No foreign country has recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and so the Taliban crave any contacts with Western officials in which they are treated as the de facto government.

The US has made it clear that the Taliban must change their ways before being given any formal recognition.

The US gave $308 million of humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan in January, to assist the Afghan people who are facing a growing humanitarian crisis.

And Biden signed an executive order Friday allowing $7 billion in frozen assets from Afghanistan’s central bank to be distributed for humanitarian assistance in the country and to victims of the September 11 terror attacks, senior administration officials confirmed.

The funds, held in the US, were frozen following the collapse of the central government in Kabul in August. Half the remaining assets — $3.5 billion — will go toward providing relief inside the country, where fears of mass starvation have taken hold in the months since the Taliban took over.

The Taliban wants this assistance to continue because millions of Afghans face the prospect of starvation this winter. But the Taliban also want other forms of support from the global community.
The diplomatic efforts to free the westerners are complicated by the fact there are different factions within the Taliban. They are: the Haqqani Network which is the strongest faction militarily; the “Doha Taliban” which is the most pragmatic group; and the “Kandahar Taliban,” named after the region in southern Afghanistan where the Taliban originated in the early 1990s.

These factions frequently disagree on policy matters, according to senior Qatari officials who facilitated the talks in Doha between the United States and the Taliban that resulted in all American troops being pulled out of Afghanistan in August.

More than half of the members of the Taliban cabinet who were appointed in September are the subject of UN sanctions, according to Edmund Fitton-Brown, who coordinates the monitoring of Taliban sanctions at the UN.

The Taliban’s acting interior minister is Sirajuddin Haqqani. His job is the equivalent of running the United States Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. Last year the United Nations reported that Haqqani “is a member of the wider Al-Qaida leadership.” Haqqani is also on the FBI’s most-wanted list, which has a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest, while the US State Department has a $10 million reward.

This story and headline have been updated with additional information, including Andrew North’s release.
CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh contributed reporting.

An abrupt about-face for Biden on using the military, CNN.com

Updated 0202 GMT (1002 HKT) February 4, 2022

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.”

(CNN)This week, President Joe Biden made two decisions that belied his reputation as a dove. He approved the deployment of 3,000 US troops to Eastern Europe as a result of the growing numbers of Russian forces that are arrayed near Ukraine. And he authorized the special forces raid Wednesday that killed ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

It seemed like quite an about-face for the President. Over the past decade, Biden has been far more cautious about deploying troops or using force. Biden pulled all US troops out of Afghanistan in August, which triggered the departure of thousands of allied NATO soldiers and American contractors, precipitating the takeover of the country by the Taliban.

Biden also oversaw the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq in December 2011, when he was vice president. After ISIS had seized much of Iraq in 2014, then-President Barack Obama subsequently ordered thousands of American troops back into the country.

Biden also opposed the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011 because of the risks of carrying out a ground raid in Pakistan during which US forces might be captured or killed.

Yet, a little over a decade later, Biden seems to be in a different place when it comes to the use of force.
It’s worth considering Obama’s decision to carry out the bin Laden operation and compare it to Biden’s decision to authorize the raid that killed the ISIS leader.

Both of these operations had a good deal in common. They were risky ground operations carried out by US Special Operations Forces to avoid large-scale civilian casualties that likely would have resulted from simply bombing the compound in which bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan or bombing the building in Syria where the ISIS leader was holed up.

In the end, the bin Laden operation was a success because SEAL Team Six, which carried out the raid, repeatedly rehearsed the operation, while Obama’s national security team spent many months carefully planning for every eventuality, including if one of the helicopters on the raid crashed. A helicopter did crash during the raid on bin Laden’s compound, but it didn’t halt the operation.

Similarly, with Wednesday’s raid that killed the ISIS leader, US forces repeatedly rehearsed the operation, and the planning went on for many months.

And while a helicopter on the raid in Syria targeting the leader of ISIS developed a mechanical problem and had to be destroyed, the operation was a success from the standpoint of eliminating the ISIS leader, who blew himself up along with members of his family.

The operations against bin Laden and al-Qurayshi both resulted in civilian casualties; the wife of one of bin Laden’s bodyguards was killed, while a still undetermined number of civilians died during the raid against the ISIS leader.
Do ‘decapitation’ strikes work?

A larger question is whether this week’s raid will make a lasting difference. Decapitation strikes that kill the leaders of terrorist or insurgent groups do have some effect, but generally less than many assume.

After the death of their leader, jihadist groups typically soon name another leader and move on. Look at the Taliban today: Their leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was killed in a US airstrike in Pakistan in 2016, which was described as an “important milestone” by Obama, who had ordered the operation. Yet, now the Taliban control all of Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda’s core in Pakistan and Afghanistan never really recovered after bin Laden’s death, although it had already been greatly weakened in the years after the 9/11 attacks because of CIA drone strikes and the arrests of key leaders. The current leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has not been able to resuscitate the core of al Qaeda.
Where such strikes can have real continuing utility is when US forces have the opportunity to perform what they term SSE, Sensitive Site Exploitation.

During the bin Laden raid, SEALs picked up computers, thumb drives and documents, amounting to some 470,000 files.
This led to a much better understanding of how bin Laden was attempting to control al Qaeda and its affiliates around the world and it also led to other strikes against leaders of al Qaeda which further damaged the group.
During Wednesday’s operation, US forces were on the ground in Syria for two hours, according to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby.

Kirby said it was “common practice” that the US military would pick up anything they could find during a raid, and it would defy common sense that US forces didn’t search the house in which the ISIS leader was hiding for any computers, thumb drives, cell phones and documents that might be useful in the fight against ISIS going forward.

However, more than two decades after 9/11, jihadist groups such as ISIS and al Qaeda and their affiliates around the world continue to remain somewhat capable in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Killing one man doesn’t, of course, kill the ideology of militant jihadism, which will always find some takers, especially in failing or failed states in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Biden no doubt knows about the limits of Special Operations raids, but he chose to launch one this time. This shift to a more muscular foreign policy stance may end up paying dividends at a time when Biden’s popularity is flagging.

The threat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poses to Covid-19 vaccination efforts, CNN.com

The threat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poses to Covid-19 vaccination efforts

Opinion 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. He is the senior editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief and author of the new book “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The opinions expressed here are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.”

(CNN)For many years, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been a leader of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States. And, for much of that time, he has been seen as an outlier. Even before the pandemic, several of his family members — including Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland and former US Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II — had taken him to task for spreading “dangerous misinformation” about vaccines.

Now Kennedy is one of the leaders of a movement that is encouraging Americans to risk their own health and even that of others, since those who are vaccinated can help reduce the risk of severe disease and help to limit the scope of the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Kennedy, by virtue of his family name and the anti-vaxxer organization he leads — the innocuously named Children’s Health Defense Fund — as well as his high profile on social media, is now one of the largest sources of vaccine disinformation in the United States.

On Friday, a CDC report noted, “During October-November, unvaccinated persons had 13.9 and 53.2 times the risks for infection and COVID-19-associated death, respectively, compared with fully vaccinated persons who received booster doses.” In other words, a person could be more than 50 times more likely to die of Covid-19 if not vaccinated and boosted.

Notably, the vaccines against Covid-19 are also extremely safe. More than half a billion doses of these vaccines have been administered in the US, yet reports of serious adverse reactions or deaths attributable to the vaccinations are quite rare, according to the CDC.

Meanwhile, more than 860,000 Americans have died of Covid-19 since the pandemic began. But the US is so flooded with vaccine misinformation — and it’s only complicating further vaccination efforts. As of December 2021, 15% of American adults 18 and older remained unvaccinated, having not received even a first shot, according to the US Census Bureau — a figure that amounts to tens of millions of unvaccinated Americans.

Kennedy has contributed to this sorry state of affairs as one of the leading sources of vaccine misinformation in the US, according to a recent study released by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit nongovernmental organization seeking to address digital hate and misinformation.

On Sunday, Kennedy addressed a crowd of anti-vaxxers at a Washington, DC, rally convened, in part, by his Children’s Health Defense Fund. He claimed that the Biden administration’s policies on vaccines were worse than the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews, saying, “Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did.”

One of Kennedy’s majors may have been history at Harvard, but it seems to have had little effect on his actual understanding of the subject.

The Biden administration’s legitimate public health push for vaccine mandates to save an untold number of American lives is quite the opposite of the Nazis hunting down and killing 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. The use of safe vaccines by more than 200 million Americans is not a perversion of science as practiced by the Nazis, but a legitimate and approved use of medical science. And that’s to say nothing of his reference to Anne Frank, who ultimately perished in Bergen-Belsen, a Nazi concentration camp.

Though Kennedy’s invocation of the Nazis in the context of Covid-19 vaccine mandates is bonkers, it is not uncommon among anti-vaxxers. At Sunday’s rally, CNN reported on a number of anti-vaxxers carrying signs about Nazism — including “Make the Nuremberg Code great again!” The code, which explained the context in which medical experiments were permissible on human beings, was established during the prosecution of Nazis who experimented on Jews in the Holocaust.

And, in November, Fox Nation commentator Lara Logan compared Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to Biden, to Dr. Josef Mengele, who infamously performed experiments on children and others prisoners held at Auschwitz concentration camp. Logan has since disappeared from the airwaves.

Kennedy, who has degrees from Harvard University, the London School of Economics and the University of Virginia School of Law, has had notable success in his career as an environmental lawyer who helped spearhead efforts to clean up the Hudson River. And all of his education and professional success makes his crusade against vaccines even more puzzling.

Yet, today, approximately two years into the worst global pandemic in a century, Kennedy is no longer a small-time anti-vaxxer, but one of the leaders of a movement that is imperiling the lives of many Americans.

How Aafia Siddiqui became an icon for terrorists, 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 new book is “The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

(CNN)The hostage-taker at the synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, Saturday was believed by US law enforcement to be motivated by the imprisonment of Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani who is serving an 86-year sentence at a prison in Fort Worth. She was arrested by US forces in Afghanistan almost a decade and half ago, yet her arrest continues to reverberate today.

To most Americans Siddiqui is an obscure figure, but among Islamist terrorists the mother of three is an icon.

After ISIS kidnapped American journalist James Foley in Syria in 2012 the terrorists sent an email to Foley’s family in August 2014 demanding the release of Siddiqui.

In 2009, US soldier Bowe Bergdahl was taken hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan. One of the key Taliban demands for Bergdhal’s release was Siddiqui being freed from US custody.

Siddiqui, a slight Pakistani in her mid-thirties, was arrested in eastern Afghanistan in July 2008. US officials said she was carrying documents about the manufacture of “dirty bombs,” which are radiological weapons. They said she was also carrying notes about attacks against New York City landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge.

Siddiqui, who lived in the United States between 1991 and 2002, graduated from top US universities with a degree in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD in neuroscience from Brandeis.

After Siddiqui was arrested in Ghazni, Afghanistan, she was interrogated on July 18, 2008 by US soldiers and FBI officials. During that interrogation Siddiqui found an unattended rifle and fired it at a US officer and other members of the interview team. She also attacked an FBI agent and a US army officer as they tried to disarm her. She was subsequently charged with attempted murder.

In her native Pakistan, Siddiqui is lionized by some as a victim of the “war on terrorism.” Thousands took to the streets in protest when she was convicted of the attempted murder of the US army officer in 2010.

Now, once again, Siddiqui’s imprisonment in Texas is being used as a rationale for terrorism against Americans, this time in the United States itself.

American troops may have all departed Afghanistan in August, but America’s long war there continues to reverberate today.