Why we need a coronavirus commission, CNN.com

Americans are going to demand to know why US wasn’t prepared for this pandemic
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 2:39 PM ET, Thu March 19, 2020
T
“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN)We won’t know for many weeks, and maybe many months, the full impact Covid-19 will have on the health of Americans — how many will be hospitalized and how many will die. We do know that it already has dealt a devastating blow to the US economy. Before too long, many Americans are going to demand to know why the United States failed to adequately prepare for one of the most significant crises since World War II; a crisis that was both foreseeable and foreseen. The United States will need to create a commission to investigate that question, if only to make sure the nation is prepared for the next pandemic.

The United States has often turned to investigative commissions to examine why a crisis happened and how the government might better respond in the future. Following the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration quickly investigated what had happened. Within seven weeks of the attack the Roberts Commission, which was appointed by FDR, issued its first report, one of multiple official inquiries into Pearl Harbor that were convened as World War II raged on.

By contrast, the George W. Bush administration initially thwarted a special commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks. Following intense public pressure from the victims’ families the Bush administration reluctantly acceded to an investigative commission more than a year after the attacks.

Sure, there will likely be push back from the Trump administration about the need for a coronavirus commission, but such an investigation is vital to understand how we might better prepare for the next pandemic or a possible bioterrorism attack, since they have some commonalities.
Here are some questions such a commission might try to answer:

— Why was it that the United States had tested such a small number of people for the coronavirus so many weeks into the crisis? In the weeks since Covid-19 first appeared in the United States, the CDC has, as of Tuesday, together with other public health laboratories, carried out some 32,000 tests. Meanwhile, South Korea has tested more than a quarter million people — more than 7.5 times more than the United States. What did South Korea, a nation whose total population is only about 15% that of the United States, get right about its tests that America did not? A smart early decision by the Trump administration came at the end of January, which was to bar non-US citizens who had recently visited China from entering the United States and also to quarantine Americans who had visited China’s Hubei province, the epicenter of the virus. But why didn’t the administration use the weeks of additional time that this bought the American public to do anything substantially to prepare for the crisis by, for instance, speeding up the availability of tests?

— Why didn’t the government step in to make sure we had enough medical-grade masks for what promised to be vastly increased hospital occupancy? According to The New York Times on March 9, “The federal government’s Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies includes 12 million medical-grade N95 masks and 30 million surgical masks — only about one percent of the 3.5 billion that the Department of Health and Human Services estimates would be needed over the course of a year if the outbreak reaches pandemic levels” — which, of course, it already has. Knowing that hospitals run on limited inventory, the federal government should have anticipated that supplies would run short.

— Why might we face inadequate numbers of ventilators for the patients who might become critically ill? Following a tabletop exercise, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security warned in 2018 that in the event of a severe pandemic there would be a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of ventilators in the United States. This warning seems to have been largely ignored.

— Why did the Trump administration eliminate the National Security Council’s pandemic unit in May 2018 and what effect might that have had on the lethargic response to the crisis?

— Why did President Trump repeatedly mislead the public about the scale of the threat? Trump said February 26 there were only 15 coronavirus cases in the United States and that the number would soon be close to zero. And as recently as Sunday, Trump made the nonsensical claim that “we have tremendous control” of the virus. Trump’s other absurd claim earlier this month that “anybody who wants a test can get a test” was about as accurate as his assessment that his handling of the crisis is rated “a 10.”

— Why did other senior Trump administration officials also mislead the American public? On March 6, the counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, told reporters the virus was “being contained.” That same day, Larry Kudlow, the top economic adviser to the President, advised that Americans “should stay at work.” Luckily, many Americans ignored that advice and with scant guidance from their own government proactively started telecommuting last week.

— What role did right-wing media play in downplaying the crisis and how did that affect sentiments among many Republicans that the coronavirus was being hyped? Last week, Fox Business anchor Trish Regan told viewers that Democrats were creating “mass hysteria to encourage a market sell-off … to demonize and destroy the President.” Regan’s show is now no longer on the air, but night after night, Sean Hannity, the most-watched anchor on cable news,

downplayed the virus, for instance saying February 27, “Tonight, I can report the sky is absolutely falling. We’re all doomed. The end is near. The apocalypse is imminent, and you’re going to all die, all of you in the next 48 hours and it’s all President Trump’s fault. Or at least that’s what the media mob and the Democratic extreme radical socialist party would like you to think.” This past weekend, close Trump ally, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) encouraged healthy viewers watching Fox Business to go to their local bar. All this was particularly irresponsible since the Fox audience skews elderly and therefore includes many people particularly vulnerable to Covid-19.

— Why was there so little federal leadership about how best to contain the virus until very recently? Those decisions were left in large part to individual states, leading to a patchwork of uncoordinated measures across the nation. Democratic Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker ordered that all bars and restaurants should close beginning Monday for two weeks. Republican Gov. Mike DeWine rightly delayed the Democratic primary voting on Tuesday in Ohio. Meanwhile, as of Monday, many of the some 2 million federal employees kept working in their workplaces at the same time that the CDC said it was recommending against gatherings of more than 50 people for the next two months, a recommendation that quickly became avoiding gatherings of more than 10 people.

— One of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission was the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), which in its 2017 Worldwide Threat Assessment warned: “A novel or reemerging microbe that is easily transmissible between humans and is highly pathogenic remains a major threat because such an organism has the potential to spread rapidly and kill millions. … The World Bank has estimated that a severe global influenza pandemic could cost the equivalent of 4.8 percent of global GDP, or more than $3 trillion, during the course of an outbreak.” In its 2019 threat assessment ODNI warned, that “the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources…” Why were these warnings not acted upon effectively?

The 9/11 Commission provides an excellent model of how to create a successful coronavirus commission. Lee Hamilton, a former longtime Democratic congressman from Indiana, and Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, led the commission. They both had many decades of public service between them so they really understood how the government works and they were known for their probity, smarts and fairness.

Kean and Hamilton oversaw a bipartisan group of knowledgeable commissioners and staff who held a series of public hearings that ultimately produced an authoritative report about how 9/11 happened, which also became a bestselling book.

The 9/11 Commission also made important recommendations about how the government should be reconfigured to protect the United States from another catastrophic terrorist attack, including the establishment of the National Counterterrorism Center to integrate intelligence from all the multiple US intelligence agencies to better “connect the dots.”

The Commission also recommended the creation of a Director of National Intelligence to oversee the more than one dozen US intelligence agencies. Both of these recommendations were implemented and they have generally worked well and have helped to keep Americans safe.

A coronavirus commission could be led by widely respected politicians from both parties who are steeped in national security issues such as Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina and Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island — or by former government officials with deep expertise in national security such as Richard Danzig, the former secretary of the Navy under President Barack Obama and Fran Townsend, George W. Bush’s homeland security adviser.

Such a commission would help to ensure that we don’t bungle the response when the next pandemic, inevitably, comes.

Trump is stepping up, CNN.com

Trump is stepping up
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 5:56 PM ET, Sat March 14, 2020
Trump: ‘I don’t take responsibility in lag of testing’

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN)President Donald Trump’s press conference in the White House Rose Garden Friday afternoon with key members of his coronavirus task force was a reassuring affair after his disastrous Oval Office address on Wednesday night. Trump offered some realistic policy prescriptions and, for the most part, showed a more somber and well-informed view of the potential threat the pandemic poses.

Let’s take some of the smart policy calls first: Trump declared a national emergency that he said would allow states and other localities to access up to $50 billion to help combat the spread of the virus.
The president and his task force also announced public-private partnerships with commercial laboratories to produce far more coronavirus tests, which will be made available at drive-in testing sites at Walgreens, Walmart and CVS. According to Dr. Deborah Birx, a task force member, these new tests could deliver results in 24 hours instead of several days. The plan to bring millions of new tests to the market sounded promising, although it wasn’t clear from the press conference exactly how soon it would be implemented.

This is all potentially very good news, as the track record for tests so far in the United States has been dismal. In the weeks since COVID-19 first appeared in the US, the CDC has, as of Friday, tested a grand total of 3,958 individuals, while other public health laboratories around the country tested 12,584 cases.
Meanwhile, South Korea has the capability to run about 15,000 diagnostic tests in a single day. It has tested about 230,000 people — around 15 times more than the US — even though its population is about 15% that of the US.

When Trump was asked about the lack of testing, he failed to show any accountability, blaming past administrations instead.
“I don’t take responsibility at all because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations and specifications from a different time,” he responded.

Trump and his task force also announced that visits to nursing homes would be suspended with exceptions including “end-of-life situations.” This is a sensible plan given the vulnerability of nursing home populations, as we have seen in Washington state.
Friday’s press conference also had some decidedly mixed messages: President Trump trumpeted the progress that had been made fighting the coronavirus and uttered some predictable odes to himself, saying, “We’re doing a great job.”

At the podium, Trump shook hands with two of the business leaders who spoke at the press conference — despite the CDC’s advice to avoid doing so. The president also said he would not self-isolate after coming in contact with a Brazilian official who visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend and later tested positive for the coronavirus. Trump said he would likely get tested “fairly soon” when pressed on the matter. (On Saturday, Trump confirmed he had been tested and would have the results in a day or two.) Regardless, the president did not seem to model the most responsible behavior.
When asked why the White House had closed its pandemic office in 2018, Trump passed the buck saying, “I don’t know anything about it.” This is either a fib since it’s been widely reported on, or a sign of the president’s ignorance.

Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence outdid his usual genuflections to the Dear Leader by peppering his remarks with asides like, “Mr. President, from early on you took decisive action.”

While these rhetorical flourishes are merely annoying, Pence also said that the “risk of serious illness remains low” to Americans. Well, it depends on your definition of “low”: An analysis of 44,000 coronavirus patients in China found that 14% had severe cases and 5% were critical. The fatality rate was 2.3%. Nearly 1 in 5 who had contracted the virus either became seriously ill or died.

And when Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump’s top infectious disease adviser, was asked to estimate the duration of the coronavirus crisis, his optimistic projection was eight or nine weeks. He explained that it was hard to estimate, with figures depending heavily on containment and mitigation efforts. Even Trump conceded, “The next eight weeks are critical.”

But President Trump also continued to downplay the severity of the pandemic. At one point, he said that there would be five million coronavirus tests available within a month, before going on to add, “I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”
Get our free weekly newsletter

That is likely another example of Trump’s wishful thinking about the crisis. In fact, on Wednesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a scientist herself and the kind of sober leader we need right now, publicly said that 60-70% of the German population would get the virus.

In short, Friday’s press conference was not the calamity of Trump’s Oval Office address two days earlier, but it still revealed a president who trusts his gut that this crisis will somehow blow over, even though as of now, there is scant evidence that is the case.

This article has been updated to reflect the latest news that President Trump has been tested for the coronavirus.

Trump’s coronavirus speech was a disaster, CNN.com

Trump’s coronavirus speech was a disaster

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

Updated 10:56 AM ET, Thu March 12, 2020

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.

(CNN)On Wednesday night, President Donald Trump delivered a speech from the Oval Office intended to reassure Americans during the greatest crisis of his presidency.

Perhaps Trump wanted to make a call to arms that rivaled when President George W. Bush stood on the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center days after 9/11 and said: “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon?” Within months the Bush administration had toppled the Taliban government that had harbored al Qaeda and also destroyed much of that terrorist group.

Instead, Trump missed the mark completely. His Wednesday speech underlined his key weaknesses: His failure to do any homework, his narcissism and his half-baked policy ideas.

Let’s start with the big idea in Trump’s speech: Temporarily stopping Europeans from traveling to the United States. It fits with the xenophobic nature of Trump’s statement: “This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history.”

But the reality is that this won’t solve any of the key issues presented by the crisis. As is obvious to the most casual of observers, there is now rampant community transmission of the coronavirus all over the US.

Banning travelers from Europe is a feel-good measure that will have scant effect on the virus’s transmission within our borders, which has been enabled by the most catastrophic failure of the Trump administration’s response to date: So far, relatively few Americans have been tested for the coronavirus.

The European travel ban is akin to Trump’s travel ban on a number of Muslim-majority countries to reduce terrorism. The ban didn’t do anything to reduce lethal jihadist terrorism in the US, which since 9/11 has been invariably carried out by US citizens or nationals of other countries that are not from travel ban countries, according to the research institution, New America.

Showing how muddled Trump’s policies are, in an absurd addendum to his Wednesday speech, Trump said the new European travel ban would not apply to citizens of the UK. Well, guess which country’s health minister just tested positive for the coronavirus? Britain’s health minister Nadine Dorries. The number of coronavirus cases in the UK exceeds 460 as of Thursday morning. (I’m not suggesting that we ban travel to the US by British citizens as result of this fact, rather pointing out the flaw in the President’s logic.)

At this point in his presidency, we kind of assume that Trump rarely does any homework, but as this virus began to proliferate, we had to assume — or hope — that his staff would do theirs. Given this travel ban solution to a problem that is already rampant within our nation, it seems they did not.

In his Oval Office speech Trumps repeated the canard that “The vast majority of Americans: The risk is very, very low,” a line that his enablers in the administration have repeatedly parroted.

Yes, the risk to the average American of actually dying from the coronavirus is indeed low. But given that Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump’s top infectious disease advisor, testified before a congressional committee on Wednesday that the coronavirus is ten times more lethal than the seasonal influenza virus, this is scant cause for celebration; some 34,000 Americans died from the influenza during the 2018-2019 flu season.

During his Oval Office speech, Trump took a victory lap, touting his administration’s ban on non-American citizens who had recently visited China from entering the United States. He asserted that, “The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hotspots.”

In fact, Italy took similar action as the US, suspending all flights from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, yet Italy still faces a massive health crisis with around 10,000 coronavirus cases, 600 deaths from the virus, and the country is now in a total lockdown.

In his speech, Trump also absurdly postured that, “We must put politics aside, stop the partisanship.” Clearly, he doesn’t remember calling the coronavirus scare the Democrats’ “new hoax.”

On Wednesday, Trump didn’t address any of the fundamental public health issues the US is now facing. He did not mention the lack of hospital beds for the seriously ill who, in coming weeks, will likely flood the hospitals, which are now already full of patients suffering from the effects of seasonal influenza.
Nor did Trump address the lack of substantial numbers of available ventilators in the US for seriously ill patients, nor the lack of a deep supply of protective equipment for health care workers.

We elect presidents and trust that they will be able to deal with a real crisis. So far, Trump has not risen to the occasion.

The disease expert who warned us, CNN.com

The disease expert who warned us

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN)Michael Osterholm, the infectious disease expert who has been warning for a decade and a half that the world will face a pandemic, says the US is ill-prepared to combat the coronavirus due to a shortage of equipment and supplies.

Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2005 that, “This is a critical point in our history. Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose.” He reiterated this point in his 2017 book, “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs.”

Osterholm discussed the coronavirus at a recent Washington, DC event at the New America think tank with Peter Bergen, CNN national security analyst and New America vice president.

He took issue with the idea that the flu is a more serious threat, saying the death toll from coronavirus could be much higher than that of a severe flu season. Osterholm said there’s very little vacant capacity in the health care system to fully deal with the effects of the coronavirus. And he pointed out that there’s a shortage of protective clothing for health care workers.

Osterholm also discussed the impact that widespread obesity might have on that fatality rate; the lack of much-needed ventilators and respirators at hospitals; the ubiquity of the virus and what that means for overseas travel, and he poured much cold water on the notion that this coronavirus might disappear as the weather warms. The discussion was edited for length and clarity.

BERGEN: Have there been any changes in the US since you warned three years ago of the failure to prepare for the next pandemic?

OSTERHOLM: We are worse off today than we were in 2017 because the health care system is stretched thinner now than ever. There is no excess capacity. And public health funding has been cut under this administration.

BERGEN: How deadly is the virus? What do you think the case fatality rate is? Is there an approximation?
OSTERHOLM: We know from the Chinese data that being a male, older and having underlying health conditions are risk factors for increased serious illness and deaths.

For older men in China, smoking is still very common — 60% of older males smoke.

Smoking likely played a big role in the increased risk of this demographic dying from coronavirus. We see the same trend with influenza in our own country.

Of note, only a small percentage of older women in China smoke, meaning they were much less at risk for serious disease.

We’re concerned about the occurrence of other risk factors for severe disease as this virus moves out into other parts of the world. For example, one of the risk factors for acute respiratory distress syndrome, or ARDS — the most severe of the outcomes of COVID-19 infection — is obesity. In parts of the world, including the US, where obesity is an epidemic problem, its likely we may see a different case fatality rate than we’re seeing in China; that is, US fatalities may be less gender-specific and the rate of fatalities could be even higher than it is in China due to higher obesity rates among people 45 years or older.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the case fatality rate in China to date is 3% to 4%. However, WHO has estimated it to be as low as 0.7% outside of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak.

In the US — and in other upper and middle-income countries — we may expect to see a case fatality rate equal to or higher to what we see in China.
BERGEN: So, if in a regular year in the US, the case fatality rate of influenza is 0.1%, you’re saying that COVID-19 will be higher?

OSTERHOLM: Twenty to 30 times higher. It could easily be that. We just don’t know yet and it could go down based on what we learn.

BERGEN: So, if the 0.1% case fatality rate of the flu kills tens of thousands in any given year in the US, what are the implications for the coronavirus?

OSTERHOLM: It’s obvious that this is a very serious challenge. I think that it was unfortunate that a number of public health professionals said early on when COVID-19 first emerged that annual influenza was a much more serious problem.

What they hadn’t understood was that they were only watching the opening scene of this particular “coronavirus winter,” as I call it. We can expect to see a large number of deaths moving forward — far surpassing any severe influenza season.

The Chinese data suggests that anywhere from 5% to 10% of COVID-19 cases will become severe illnesses. These cases require a tremendous amount of expert health care; that makes this disease even more of a challenge relative to influenza.

BERGEN: Are we equipped with the ICUs and the ventilators to deal with a large-scale group of people coming in with these kinds of symptoms?

OSTERHOLM: Absolutely not. Right now, today, in Minneapolis-St. Paul, every one of the beds that we use for extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a high-level machine that supports the heart and lungs and is critical for keeping people alive who have illness like COVID-19, are filled. This is in part because we are just coming off a moderate to severe flu season and that has really stretched our care capacity. On top of that, a number of hospitals throughout the country have only 5 to 10 days’ worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) available for health care workers. They don’t know when over-stretched PPE manufacturers will be able to deliver more.

BERGEN: What can be done?

OSTERHOLM: First of all, we have to utilize the health services we have in different ways, meaning we will need to stop elective surgeries. Anybody who is not severely ill with other conditions will not be hospitalized. We need to be preparing our pandemic plan and must be thinking through what we would do if we had a 20% to 30% jump in the number of hospitalizations.

Remember, in Wuhan we had a number of people who were desperately ill, needed hospital care and couldn’t get into a hospital. Many people were dying at home, not in the hospitals.

The next question is: how are we going to protect our health care workers? We need solutions that are not ideal but that may work. We need to open up wards where everyone in the ward is infected, rather than having one patient per room, meaning that health care workers must each put on and take off their PPE an average of 20 to 25 times a day. With multiple patients in a room, health care workers could potentially use the same protective equipment for much of a shift.

So, there are things we can do, but we still have a very high likelihood that we’re going to face major PPE shortages. We simply don’t have good answers for that right now. We’ll likely have to revert back to the use of more available surgical masks in contrast to N95 respirators, which are the preferred PPE to prevent the spread of the virus between patients and health care personnel. Surgical masks, we know are largely ineffective in preventing virus transmission. Thousands of health care workers in China have become infected, many of those early in the outbreak when it wasn’t completely understood just how infectious this virus is.
I believe that these cases are tied to the absence of adequate respiratory protection.

BERGEN: Are you saying that the N95 respirator is not available in any meaningful quantity?

OSTERHOLM: It’s not. No health care organization has gone out and stockpiled lots of personal protective equipment. They have always bought it on a just-in-time basis. So now we’re paying the price for that. (Editor’s note: The US just took action to make more N95 respirators available.)

When health care workers start dying or get severely ill and they go from being care providers to needing care — and hospitals are not able to handle patients because of a reduced number of health care workers — I think that’s when you run the risk of people losing confidence in its government and leaders.

One thing I worry desperately about is this virus in long-term care. The current experience in the Seattle metro area with the number of infected long-term care facilities shows how devastating COVID-19 can be in this setting. If you take out most of the long-term care workers with infection and you have sick patients, who takes care of them? This is going to be a huge challenge.

BERGEN: Last week the FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn promised that there would be 1 million coronavirus tests available by the end of the week — but that was an unattainable goal in such a short timeframe.

What do you make of that?

OSTERHOLM: We’re going to see most state health departments clearly having the capacity to test in all 50 States and at least 12 or 15 large city health departments in the near future.

But we didn’t have the kind of testing here in this country that much of the rest of the world has enjoyed for at least four to five weeks.
BERGEN: Why was that?

OSTERHOLM: In short, the CDC had a problem with Plan A, in other words making a coronavirus test available for the US. And nobody at CDC had a Plan B, C, or D. This was a real failure.

What I think frustrated health professionals is that we knew we likely had widespread transmission ongoing. Unfortunately, this lack of testing reinforced the fantasy that we somehow had stopped transmission of the virus from coming into this country. What I have said many times over the past six weeks is all we really did was fix three of the five screen doors in our submarine. In fact, we knew that we had cases coming into the States despite the fact that restrictions on flying to or from China and airport temperature screening may have slowed down the rate of new infections. Containment of this virus and preventing it from getting into the US was never possible, despite what some government leaders proclaimed.

Look at the situation in Seattle. There was a case that was detected in January when upon return from China an individual became ill. This person was put in isolation, but not before he had been in the community. Nonetheless our response to this case this largely considered a great success in terms of stopping ongoing transmission. As we now know, at least one of the patients who was tested in Seattle, another individual six weeks later, was infected with the same strain. It’s likely that original virus introduction into the Seattle area did occur with this January case, meaning that there had to be at least six or seven generations of transmission between the time that the individual first arrived in the United States from China back in January and this new case. So, we’ve had ongoing transmission in this country for weeks.

BERGEN: We’ve had other coronaviruses like SARS and MERS, which, although highly problematic, didn’t really kill very many people, relatively speaking. What’s the difference between this coronavirus and those coronaviruses?

OSTERHOLM: This is a very, very different coronavirus. Think of this as an influenza pandemic caused by a coronavirus and you’re thinking about this in the right way.

SARS had close to 10% case fatality rate. MERS has a case fatality rate of 25% to 35%. The COVID-19 virus has a case fatality rate that is somewhere between seasonal flu in a bad year, which is 0.1%, and the 1918 pandemic, which, of course, preferentially killed young adults with a case fatality rate of 2.5% to 3%. So this is clearly in that range of what would be considered a severe influenza pandemic if this were the influenza virus.

When we think about infectious disease transmission, we refer to the concept of RO (a term that indicates how contagious an infectious disease is) or how many people on average an individual transmits the virus to. And what we see with coronavirus is it’s probably about an RO of 2 to 2.5. It’s surely dynamic. If we consider regular influenza, it’s about 1.4. If you think about pandemic influenza, it tends to be about 1.8 people. So, this is quite different.

What’s different here is the fact that in the cases of SARS and MERS — and I was very involved with both outbreak investigations — patients were most infectious on day 5 or later, and it allowed us the opportunity to identify these patients early in their illness and get them into appropriate isolation. Here, virus transmission is occurring early in illness, likely even before symptoms show up. It is very similar to influenza.

BERGEN: How does this coronavirus pandemic unfold?

OSTERHOLM: Well this outbreak from our perspective has really unfolded on time, and what I mean by that is even in the second week of January, it was very clear that this was no longer going to be a MERS- or a SARS-like situation with transmission only later in the illness. It was much more dynamic. Clearly, it was acting very much like an influenza virus; we were not going to be able to control it. This is influenza-like transmission, and it’s going to continue for some time to come.
So, the fact that we went from 26 countries with cases of the virus 14 days ago to over 80 countries with cases now shouldn’t surprise us. An extraordinary amount of new transmission is occurring everyday all over the world.

In our country there is widespread transmission going on now. It’s just being missed, and as soon as we have testing, we’re going to see it.
Let me make one point really clear; which I think has not received sufficient discussion. We keep hearing that this is going to die out with the spring warmer weather in the Northern Hemisphere. SARS ended in 2003 in June, but it had nothing to do with the seasons at all. It took until June of 2003 to understand how to stop transmission and then carry out our prevention activities. This had nothing to do with the seasonality of SARS. I’ve investigated outbreaks of MERS on the Arabian Peninsula when it was 110 degrees.

The other thing that seems to support the conclusion that there will be seasonality with COVID-19 is the seasonal nature of influenza. In fact, while there is seasonal influenza in the two hemispheres, it occurs year-round in the tropics. And of the last 10 influenza pandemics, two started in the winter, three in the spring, two in the summer and three in the fall. We have no evidence from what we know about influenza to suggest that COVID-19 will subside with summer in the Northern Hemisphere.

So, is it going to be like the typical seasonal flu year where 8% to 15% of the population gets infected? We don’t know. It could be a lot more. One model from the Harvard School of Public Health, the model I find most reliable, estimates that, at minimum, 20% of the world’s population will get infected.

That’s why even when we talk about the case fatality rate, it’s important to remember that if there’s a disease that has a very high rate but only 100 people get it every year, that’s not nearly of the same public health significance as a disease that has a low case fatality rate of 1%, but a billion people get it.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: Is closing down schools or businesses for a period of time an effective measure to control the spread of the virus, and if so, what would be the optimal length of time for these to be closed?

OSTERHOLM: We need to start to normalize our response to this, and what I mean is that we have to be thoughtful, and we can’t just knee-jerk. Right now, we’ve all been struck by the relative absence of cases in kids in China — 2.1% of cases are 19 years of age or younger.

I’m all for closing schools if we show that kids are important transmitters of the virus, but school closings have tremendous negative impact on communities. And they often disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic status individuals. If parents have to stay home with their kids, then some don’t get paid. So, one of the things that we don’t want to do is react without data.

For businesses, this is one area where it’s a major challenge. We’ve got to keep the lights on. We’ve got to keep food coming, and we’ve got to keep really critical drugs coming. I hope we can keep businesses running as much as possible.

I think quarantining people coming back from high-risk countries today is largely unproductive. I say this knowing I’m probably not in the majority voice and this idea is surely not popular. Based on this approach, you could just as easily make the case that we should be quarantining or issuing a travel alert to King and Snohomish Counties (in Washington State) as we do for China, Iran, Korea and Italy. We’ve got a lot of virus transmission around the world right now. How many places can you cordon off before you finally say: “Oh well, you know, we’re all walled off here in the United States, and we’re just as bad.”

We need to start normalizing our COVID-19 response. Don’t prevent air travel; there’s just as many people likely in this country that are going to pose a risk as people coming back from abroad. That’s the kind of thinking we need to start having now.

I do have concern about that some people are highly reliant right now on the use of face mask (i.e. surgical mask) protection and think that’s going to reduce transmission. It is not. We are urging that all N95s respirators be used by health care workers or critical infrastructure workers only, not for the general public.
AUDIENCE QUESTION: I have travel plans to Indonesia and the Philippines in a few weeks, should I go?

OSTERHOLM: Assume this virus is everywhere. This is a global influenza pandemic caused by a coronavirus.

The President was not lying when he got up in front of the country and described the small number of cases we had confirmed. That was true, but did it reflect the reality of what was happening? Absolutely not. Many countries around the world may have some of the same problems of testing and may be unaware of the scope of the virus. So, I would just assume it’s everywhere.

Anybody who has ever been to Jakarta, Indonesia knows there are a lot of people there. You’re going to likely increase the chances of being exposed and getting infected with this increased number of contacts. What will you do if you need hospitalization? Do you want to be hospitalized in Indonesia?

Now, I would tell you, if you have a chance to go on a cruise ship right now, I’d bypass that one. Cruise ships have been notoriously a problem with respiratory-transmitted agents because of all the recirculated air that occurs in the inside cabins. I would have told you that well before the Diamond Princess happened.
If you do travel internationally, I don’t think that it’ll put you at a much higher risk than flying domestically in the US. But do you want to get hospitalized in Country X and do you know that you can get back into the United States without a 14-day quarantine? These are questions that make me hesitant to do international travel right now.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: There are a whole lot of people in this country who don’t have paid sick time, and I’m wondering what there is that we can do in the short term to encourage those people to actually not come to work if they are sick?

OSTERHOLM: Every workplace setting today should be discussing this right now with their employees. Tell them what we know about COVID-19. Tell them what we’re going to do when our first coworker is infected. The more information you can give to employees the more responsibly they will respond when the case numbers begin to climb. If remote working is possible, tell employees do it, but help them understand one critical prevention point: If you work remotely for 70% of the day but then you spend the night out at a restaurant or in large crowds, you’ve minimized all that you did during the day to protect yourself.
Get our free weekly newsletter

There are some who have said that this virus is only transmitted from the hand to the face and that’s simply not true. We have compelling data on influenza transmission, which this is just like the coronavirus in terms of ongoing transmission. And, frankly, hand washing may play some role in this, but not nearly as much as people think. It’s all about the air and the air you’re breathing

Coronavirus: What is it and how do we prepare for it? Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at Univ. of Minnesota, New America DC

Share
Tweet
Coronavirus: What is it and how do we prepare for it?
Event

Please note this is an online only event. To join the event via webcast, please click here.

Coronavirus, COVID-19, is rapidly spreading throughout the world and, as of this week, the outbreak has infected more than 80,000 people from 53 countries and growing. As cases spread and fears of a possible global pandemic continue to rise, how do we plan for the future?

Join the International Security Program via webcast as we welcome Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. From June 2018 through May 2019, Dr. Osterholm served as a Science Envoy for Health Security on behalf of the US Department of State.

He is the author of the 2017 book, Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, in which he not only details the most pressing infectious disease threats of our day but lays out a nine-point strategy on how to address them, with preventing a global flu pandemic at the top of the list.

In addition, Dr. Osterholm is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the Council of Foreign Relations. In June 2005 Dr. Osterholm was appointed to the newly established National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity. In July 2008, he was named to the University of Minnesota Academic Health Center’s Academy of Excellence in Health Research and in October 2008, he was appointed to the World Economic Forum Working Group on Pandemics.

Previously, Dr. Osterholm served for 24 years (1975-1999) in various roles at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), the last 15 as state epidemiologist and chief of the Acute Disease Epidemiology Section. While at the MDH, Dr. Osterholm and his team were leaders in the area of infectious disease epidemiology.

Speaker:

Michael T. Osterholm, @mtosterholm
Director, Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), University of Minnesota

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President Global Studies & Fellows, New America
When
Mar. 3, 2020
11:00 am – 11:55 am
Where
Webcast
This is an Online Event, – Link Below
RSVP

What Trump’s ‘peace’ agreement with Taliban really means, CNN.com

What Trump’s ‘peace’ agreement with Taliban really means
Peter Bergen

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and he has reported from Afghanistan for CNN for the past two and half decades. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN)The Trump administration is close to signing a “peace” agreement with the Taliban, but let’s not kid ourselves; this is really a withdrawal agreement in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election season. Such an agreement with the Taliban will allow Trump to point to a campaign promise kept: getting the United States out of its longest war.

As a confidence-building measure, since last Saturday the Taliban have agreed to implement a “reduction in violence” in Afghanistan that will help pave the way for the signing of the formal US-Taliban deal slated for February 29.
But there is a lot less to this reduction in violence than meets the eye, since the month of February in Afghanistan is typically a time of much-reduced fighting because of the brutal Afghan winter. The Taliban agreeing to reduce violence right now is akin to the residents of Chicago agreeing not to use their air conditioning this month.

According to The Military Times, there have only been a “handful” of attacks across Afghanistan during the past several days, which means that the formal signing agreement between the US and the Taliban will very likely go ahead as planned on Saturday.

The agreement stipulates that the US will draw down to 8,600 soldiers from the current 12,000 or so stationed in Afghanistan now.

Towards the end of his second term, former President Barack Obama had seriously considered completely withdrawing all US troops from Afghanistan. After a discussion with his war cabinet about the risks that would entail, including the possibility of the Taliban taking over much of the country and hosting multiple jihadist terrorist groups, he changed his mind.

As he left office, Obama authorized 8,400 troops remain in Afghanistan. This is pretty much exactly the same position that the Trump administration now finds itself in today, more than three years later.

In the agreement scheduled to be signed Saturday, the Taliban for their part will have to guarantee that they will not host al-Qaeda or other jihadist groups on their territory. (The Taliban have actually been fighting the local affiliate of ISIS in Afghanistan.)

Next month the Taliban will also likely enter into direct talks with representatives of the Afghan government, which hitherto has been excluded from the US-Taliban negotiations, an odd position for an elected government to be in since it is the Afghan government and people who will have to live with whatever the final shape of some kind of peace deal with the Taliban might be.

If there are further reductions in violence the US-Taliban agreement entertains the notion that the US could withdraw all its forces, which has long been the key demand of the Taliban. The deputy leader of the Taliban writing in the New York Times last week said that this was the goal of the agreement.

The likelihood of going to a zero US military presence in Afghanistan, however, is actually low because if there are no American soldiers in the country, forces from other NATO countries will also withdraw. That would mean that international funding for the heavily aid-dependent Afghan state would simply dry up, which, according to US officials I have spoken to, even some in the Taliban leadership recognize would not be a good thing.

Also, there is agreement among Republicans and more moderate Democratic politicians about the need for some kind of persistent US counterterrorism and intelligence presence in Afghanistan to prevent recurrence of what happened on 9/11 when al-Qaeda hijackers trained in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan killed almost 3,000 Americans.

Without getting into any details, President Trump said Tuesday at a news conference in New Delhi that there would be some kind of persistent US presence in Afghanistan. Trump said, “We’ll always have intelligence; we’ll have other things there.”

And what if Trump loses the presidential election — what then for Afghanistan?

The Democratic party is split on what to do. On the left, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren want to get out totally, while moderate Democratic contenders such as Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg both want to retain some kind of counterterrorism presence there.

And that can only be achieved by leaving a number of US troops — in the low thousands — in Afghanistan.

For the moment Trump seems to understand that the only thing worse than staying in Afghanistan is leaving it completely. But he is also consistently inconsistent when it comes to foreign policy, and he could just as easily pull the plug entirely. After all, it was Trump in September — following an attack that killed a US serviceman in Afghanistan — who abruptly ended talks with the Taliban that were supposed to culminate in some kind of signing ceremony at Camp David.

Coronavirus crisis underlines eight of Trump’s failings as a leader, CNN.com

Coronavirus crisis underlines eight of Trump’s failings as a leader

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.

(CNN)Until now President Donald Trump has been lucky. During his first three years in office there was no major crisis on his watch of the type that has challenged every president in the half century before him.

There was nothing comparable to the Cuban missile crisis (John Kennedy); no Vietnam War (Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon); no hostage crisis in Iran (Jimmy Carter); no invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets (Carter and Ronald Reagan); no invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein (George H. W. Bush); no suicide bombings by al-Qaeda directed at two US embassies and an American warship (Bill Clinton); no 9/11 attacks (George W. Bush), and no global financial crisis (Barack Obama).
The nearest that Trump has come to a crisis is with Iran, which was largely self-created after he pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal two years ago and stoked tensions with that country.

Now comes the Covid-19 or novel coronavirus, a major crisis that combines elements of Hurricane Katrina—a natural event that could kill a substantial number of Americans– and also elements of the 2008 great recession, since the economic repercussions of the virus on supply chains as well as on consumer and business confidence are already very troubling.

Some presidents rise to the occasion when a crisis emerges. Kennedy deftly avoided a possible nuclear war with the Soviets during the Cuban missile crisis, while George H. W. Bush assembled a massive international coalition to expel Saddam from Kuwait. And George W. Bush quickly responded to the 9/11 attacks by toppling the Taliban government in Afghanistan and destroying much of al Qaeda. (Two years after 9/11 Bush also made the disastrous decision to invade Iraq). Obama adeptly navigated the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Other presidents have fared less well when confronted by a crisis. In 1980 Carter presided over the deeply flawed effort to free the American hostages held in Iran– the fiasco known as Desert One — and it contributed to his one-term presidency. Johnson was overwhelmed by the carnage of Vietnam and he had no plausible plan to exit the war and so he chose not to run for reelection in 1968.

In the early days, Trump hasn’t risen to the occasion of the coronavirus crisis. And there are reasons to worry about whether he can do so, as the crisis underlines eight of his key failings as a leader.

First, Trump doesn’t do any homework. As reported in my book, “Trump and his Generals,” in early 2017 Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, told Trump’s former national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, that Trump never studied an issue: “Trump is a guy who never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never bought a book. Never took a note. He basically comes in the night before the final exams after partying all night, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes what he’s got to memorize. Walks in at eight o’clock in the morning and gets whatever grade he needs. That’s the reason he doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like being lectured to.”

Related to Trump’s first failing is his second: He always believes he knows more than the experts about any given subject. During his presidential campaign, for instance, Trump said he knew more about fighting ISIS than the generals leading the fight, an absurd claim since Trump had avoided military service in Vietnam and his knowledge of ISIS and the Middle East was no deeper than the average newspaper reader.

Third, Trump trusts his own gut. This might work in a Manhattan real estate deal where Trump knows the players and the market, but going with your gut in a complex crisis when you don’t do homework or listen to experts is not likely to produce relevant knowledge or coherent policy.
On Wednesday at a White House press conference Trump claimed that the coronavirus was less lethal than influenza. CNN’s Sanjay Gupta corrected him. In fact, the coronavirus appears to be far deadlier than influenza.

Fourth, Trump has increasingly surrounded himself with a team of acolytes who will not challenge him. When he came into office Trump assembled a cabinet that included McMaster, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, former chief of staff John Kelly, former chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, all of whom would challenge Trump on issues such as staying in the Iran nuclear deal, the need to maintain good relations with NATO, the merits of free trade and the imperative to stop cozying up to Vladimir Putin.

They are all long gone now, and they have been replaced by yes-men such as Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe, who Trump just nominated to be his Director of National Intelligence even though Ratcliffe’s earlier nomination for the same job flamed out because of his scant qualifications for the gig and some untruthful enhancements he had made to his resume.

Ratcliffe’s main qualification for the job overseeing the 17 US intelligence agencies at a time when the Trump team faces its first real crisis seems to be his unswerving loyalty to the president.

His predecessor, Dan Coats, publicly testified last year that Iran was sticking to the terms of the nuclear deal, which deeply angered Trump. It’s hard to imagine Ratcliffe telling any truths in public that don’t fit Trump’s preconceptions.

Similarly, Trump picked Vice President Mike Pence to lead the coronavirus effort. Pence’s main qualification for the job appears to be his puppy-like adoration for the Great Leader. As has been widely noted, despite Trump’s claims at Wednesday’s press conference that Pence is some kind of public health guru, when Pence was governor of Indiana he opposed a scheme to hand out free, clean needles to drug addicts at a time that HIV was running rampant among drug users in his state. Two months went by and after praying, Pence finally relented and allowed the needles to be distributed, which dramatically slowed the spread of HIV.

Fifth, it’s hard for the public to believe a President who has made more than 16,000 false or misleading claims in his first three years in office, according to the Washington Post, at a time when the administration desperately needs the trust of the American public.

What happens if Trump needs to make some tough decisions about who exactly to quarantine? We have already seen the Italian government completely cordon off towns in the north of the country. And a major Italian city, Milan, has now slowed to an almost complete halt. Might Trump have to make similar hard calls? And will what he says about those calls be believed if he does?

Sixth, Trump always blames the messenger for news he doesn’t like, and he has been doing a lot of that when it comes to the coronavirus. In fact, organizations like CNN and the New York Times and many others have taken real risks to cover the outbreak of the virus in China and elsewhere and should be commended for doing what they are supposed to be doing: Gathering and disseminating knowledge that is in the public interest.

Seventh, Trump is the reverse of President Harry Truman. The buck never stops at Trump’s desk. If things are going well, he is always ready to take credit: Stock market up, it’s because of Trump; stock market down, it’s because of the media — and the Fed. If things go poorly it’s always someone else fault. Paging Mike Pence! Trump’s propensity to pass the buck was obvious the first week of his presidency when Trump approved a risky US Navy SEAL Team Six counterterrorism operation in Yemen. A SEAL operator was killed during the mission and the commander-in-chief quickly and publicly blamed his own generals for the loss.

Eighth, Trump almost always plays the divider-in-chief, not the uniter-in chief. Now is surely not the time for Trump and his top cabinet officials (such as acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney) and proxies (Donald Trump Jr.) to claim that the coronavirus is being hyped by crazed Democrats. This is arguably the most serious health crisis that the world has faced in many years and to pass it off as a partisan issue is crass at best.

Trump officials did make a good decision a month ago to ban non-US citizens who had recently visited China from entering the United States and they also imposed two-week quarantines on Americans who had visited Hubei province where the virus originated.

But Italy went even further, suspending all flights from China, yet the country still faces a significant health crisis with around 1,700 confirmed cases.
Trump should spend less time campaigning in places where he isn’t even on the ballot (South Carolina) and bone up on some briefing books, start listening to some experts, including those who challenge his preconceptions, and start acting like the president of all Americans.

Of course, the likelihood of any of this happening is like the likelihood that we will find a vaccine for the coronavirus “rapidly” as Trump claimed Wednesday, when in fact there is little chance that will happen. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that developing such a vaccine for a coronavirus will in fact likely take “about a year to a year and a half.”

By then Trump could be enjoying some quality retirement time at Mar-a-Lago because if he continues to treat this crisis in a cavalier manner, voters will likely not be forgiving.

Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos, ASU, Tempe, AZ

Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos

Book talk by Peter Bergen

Thursday, March 5th, 2020 | 6:00 p.m. | Memorial Union,
Pima room 230

ASU School of Politics and Global Studies

P.O. Box 873902, Tempe, AZ, 85287-3902, USA

What the New York Times didn’t tell readers about its Taliban op-ed is shocking, CNN.com

What the New York Times didn’t tell readers about its Taliban op-ed is shocking

By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst

“Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and he has reported for CNN from Afghanistan for the past two and half decades. His new book is “Trump and His Generals: The Cost of Chaos.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.”

(CNN)On Thursday, the New York Times published an op-ed by Sirajuddin Haqqani under the headline, “What We, the Taliban, Want.” In his op-ed, Haqqani wrote, “I am convinced that the killing and the maiming must stop.”

The Times described Haqqani as “the deputy leader of the Taliban.” But this bland descriptor doesn’t capture who Haqqani really is. According to the FBI, Haqqani is a “specially designated global terrorist.” The FBI is offering $5 million for information leading directly to his arrest.

The US State Department is also offering a reward of up to $10 million for information that brings Haqqani to justice. The only terrorist who has a higher reward is the current leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Will the Times be offering Zawahiri an op-ed spot next?

The FBI also notes that Haqqani “is wanted for questioning in connection with the January 2008 attack on a hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed six people, including an American citizen. He is believed to have coordinated and participated in cross-border attacks against United States and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Haqqani also allegedly was involved in the planning of the assassination attempt on Afghan President Hamid Karzai in 2008.”

Over the past decade or so, Haqqani’s men have also kidnapped multiple Americans, including — get this — a New York Times reporter.

Surely this information about Haqqani would have been useful information for the readers of the Times to know as they evaluated the veracity and claims of Haqqani’s op-ed. A New York Times spokesperson told me in a statement via email: “We know firsthand how dangerous and destructive the Taliban is. The Times is one of the only American news organizations to have maintained a full time team of reporters in Afghanistan since the start of the war nearly 20 years ago. We’ve also had multiple journalists kidnapped by the organization.

“But, our mission at Times Opinion is to tackle big ideas from a range of newsworthy viewpoints. We’ve actively solicited voices from all sides of the Afghanistan conflict, the government, the Taliban and from citizens. Sirajuddin Haqqani is the second in command of the Taliban at a time when its negotiators are hammering out an agreement with American officials in Doha that could result in American troops leaving Afghanistan. That makes his perspective relevant at this particular moment.”

Many Afghans were outraged that the Times had given Haqqani such a platform. An Afghan government spokesman, Sediq Sediqqi, told Reuters, “It is sad that the [New York Times] has given their platform to an individual who is on a designated terrorist list. He and his network are behind ruthless attacks against Afghans and foreigners.”

Saad Mohseni, who oversees the most-watched Afghan television network, Tolo TV, tweeted, “The NYT has decided to amplify and effectively promote the messages of the world’s most notorious terrorist (and Al Qaeda affiliate) — a man who has the blood of hundreds of thousands [on his hands]. An interview is one thing but to allow such a man to express himself unchallenged is a disgrace.”

Tolo TV is constantly threatened by the Taliban, and it suffered an attack in 2016 that killed seven Tolo employees.

Some US military personnel who have served in Afghanistan were also angered by the Times’s decision to give Haqqani a platform, as he leads the Haqqani Network, which is the most lethal of the groups under the Taliban umbrella.

Republican Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, a former US Special Forces officer with multiple tours in Afghanistan and the Middle East, emailed me to say, “The Haqqanis are serial human rights abusers, responsible for some of Afghanistan’s worst atrocities — including machine gunning and burning a girls’ school and hanging a young child for working with Americans during one of my tours there. For the NYT to willingly enable Haqqani propaganda is beyond the pale. Talk is cheap and much needs to be done to prove that the Haqqanis are serious about peace, much less honoring the rights of women and minorities.”

Dr. Melissa Skorka, who served as a strategic adviser to the US commander in Afghanistan and is writing a book about the Haqqanis at Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Centre emailed me to point out: “Sirajuddin might claim he wants peace, but he leads the vanguard of the Afghan Taliban, works hand-in-glove with al Qaeda, and uses systematic acts of terror to kill and maim innocent people.”

In his Times op-ed, Haqqani promised that the Taliban would respect women’s rights, including “the right to education” and “the right to work.” It’s hard to evaluate these promises since, when the Taliban were in power, they expunged both education for girls and jobs for women.
According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the United States will sign a peace deal with the Taliban on February 29 provided there is a week-long reduction in violence in Afghanistan that is slated to begin Saturday.

Such a reduction in violence, however, is not that significant, given the fact that traditionally Afghans don’t do much fighting at all during the middle of the bitterly cold Afghan winter.
The Trump administration seems to be hastening forward with “peace” negotiations with the Taliban that are really better described as “withdrawal” negotiations that seem suspiciously well timed to coincide with the American presidential election season.

In his piece for the Times, Haqqani says that an agreement with the Americans is coming “soon,” which will be followed by “the departure of all foreign troops.”
President Trump sees himself as elected to get out of America’s “endless wars.” But there is a big difference between fighting an endless war and instituting a persistent presence in Afghanistan to safeguard both American interests and those of the Afghan people.

Such a persistent presence should include a relatively small number of US Special Operation Forces to conduct counterterrorism missions; US Special Forces to advise and assist the Afghan military; American trainers for the Afghan Air Force, and intelligence operatives and analysts who would continue to ensure that Afghanistan doesn’t revert to being the “Harvard University of terrorism” as Trump referred to the country as recently as August.
Get our free weekly newsletter

Haqqani’s tepid assurances in the Times that the Taliban, going forward, will be just a normal bunch of Afghan politicians don’t mesh well with the FBI’s continued assessment that he is one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

The Dragons and the Snakes How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, David Kilcullen, New America DC

The Dragons and the Snakes
How the Rest Learned to Fight the West
EVENT

Just a few years ago, people spoke of the US as a hyperpower- a titan stalking the world stage with more relative power than any empire in history. Yet as early as 1993, newly-appointed CIA director James Woolsey pointed out that although Western powers had “slain a large dragon” by defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, they now faced a “bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” In his new book, The Dragons and the Snakes, the soldier-scholar and former fellow with New America and ASU’s Future of War project, David Kilcullen asks how, and what, opponents of the West have learned during the last quarter-century of conflict. Applying a combination of evolutionary theory and detailed field observation, he explains what happened to the “snakes”-non-state threats including terrorists and guerrillas-and the “dragons”-state-based competitors such as Russia and China. Kilcullen argues, state and non-state threats have increasingly come to resemble each other, with states adopting non-state techniques and non-state actors now able to access levels of precision and lethal weapon systems once only available to governments.

David Kilcullen is a professor of practice in global security at Arizona State University and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales. He heads the strategic research firm Cordillera Applications Group. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a counterinsurgency advisor during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, advising both Condoleezza Rice and David Petraeus. In recent years he has supported aid agencies, non-government organizations, and local communities in conflict and disaster-affected regions, and developed new ways to think about highly networked urban environments. Dr. Kilcullen was named one of the Foreign Policy Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and is the author of The Accidental Guerrilla, Out of the Mountains, and Blood Year in addition to The Dragons and the Snakes.

Participants:

David Kilcullen
Professor of Practice in Global Security, Arizona State University
Former ASU / New America Future of War Senior Fellow
Author, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America

When
Mar. 9, 2020
12:15 pm – 1:45 pm
Where
New America
740 15th St NW #900 Washington, D.C. 20005
RSVP
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005