Attention to the Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports: The U.S. lost its 20-year campaign to transform Afghanistan. Many contractors won big. Those who benefited from the outpouring of government money range from major weapons manufacturers to entrepreneurs. A California businessman running a bar in Kyrgyzstan started a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue. A young Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline. Two Army National…

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Kori Schake writes: Western intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is contemplating an invasion of Ukraine, perhaps involving some 175,000 troops. Vladimir Putin’s government has already moved more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, including into Belarus. Russian officials have been making outrageously paranoid and false accusations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, recently blamed NATO for the return of the “nightmare scenario of military confrontation.” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the United States is smuggling “tanks…

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James Bruno writes: Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Guns of August made such a deep impression on President John F. Kennedy that he asked his cabinet members, National Security Council staff, and all Army officers to read it. And when the world faced Armageddon over the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the book’s lessons informed the commander in chief’s decision-making. Insisting that “we are not going to bungle into war,” Kennedy turned aside the hawkish recommendations of the military…

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New Lines reports: “If you’d have come here to tell me that my son is still alive, you would have made me the happiest mom in the world.” Svetlana Antipova opens the gate to allow us into her yard in the village of Shyryajeve. It is a pitch-black Saturday evening, a little over an hour’s drive outside Odessa, Ukraine. The stillness is interrupted only by dogs barking in the neighbors’ yards, altered to the arrival of strangers. Evgeny Antipov, Svetlana’s…

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The New York Times reports: Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed. In early 2017 in Iraq, an American…

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The New York Times reports: A single top secret American strike cell launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles against the Islamic State in Syria, but in the process of hammering a vicious enemy, the shadowy force sidestepped safeguards and repeatedly killed civilians, according to multiple current and former military and intelligence officials. The unit was called Talon Anvil, and it worked in three shifts around the clock between 2014 and 2019, pinpointing targets for the United States’ formidable…

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Steve Coll and Adam Entous write: Biden welcomed Ghani and his top aides to the Oval Office on the afternoon of June 25th. “We’re not walking away,” Biden told Ghani. He pulled from his shirt pocket a schedule card on which he’d written the number of American lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq since 9/11, and showed it to Ghani. “I appreciate the American sacrifices,” Ghani said. Then he explained, “Our goal for the next six months is to stabilize…

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Asser Khattab writes: When the war broke out in 2011 and many of us quickly grew accustomed to its horrors, programming my days around the possibility of rockets or mortar shells falling around me became increasingly ordinary, like picking clothes appropriate for the weather. And when I had to escape, it was just another thing that I had to do. The night before I left, I went to the bar, raised a glass to the good old days with the…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: Undercover Taliban agents—often clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and sporting sunglasses—spent years infiltrating Afghan government ministries, universities, businesses and aid organizations. Then, as U.S. forces were completing their withdrawal in August, these operatives stepped out of the shadows in Kabul and other big cities across Afghanistan, surprising their neighbors and colleagues. Pulling their weapons from hiding, they helped the Taliban rapidly seize control from the inside. The pivotal role played by these clandestine cells is becoming…

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CNN reports: The Biden administration is weighing sending military advisers and new equipment including weaponry to Ukraine as Russia builds up forces near the border and US officials prepare allies for the possibility of another Russian invasion, multiple sources familiar with the deliberations tell CNN. The discussions about the proposed lethal aid package are happening as Ukraine has begun to warn publicly that an invasion could happen as soon as January. The package could include new Javelin anti-tank and anti-armor…

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The New York Times reports: American intelligence officials are warning allies that there is a short window of time to prevent Russia from taking military action in Ukraine, pushing European countries to work with the United States to develop a package of economic and military measures to deter Moscow, according to American and European officials. Russia has not yet decided what it intends to do with the troops it has amassed near Ukraine, American officials said, but the buildup is…

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