Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived. The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin and the Islamic State controlled it. The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground and everything went dark….

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Politico reports: At least three European allies are waiting for the U.S. State Department to approve their requests to send U.S.-made weapons to Ukraine, as fears grow of a multi-front invasion by Russian forces and the Biden administration prepares to ship a new batch of weapons to Kyiv. Baltic NATO allies Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are looking to transfer American-made lethal weapons such as anti-armor and ground-to-air missiles to Ukraine, according to officials from those countries and people familiar with…

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NBC News reports: The White House believes Russia could launch an invasion of Ukraine at any moment, press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday, warning that an “extremely dangerous situation” is building along the Ukrainian border. “We believe we’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack on Ukraine. I would say that’s more stark than we have been,” Psaki said during her daily press briefing. The assessment comes as Secretary of State Antony Blinken travels…

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Alyona Getmanchuk writes: It’s a shame that Ukraine was largely absent from talks last week among American, European and Russian diplomats. Especially since it is our future that is at stake — and Kyiv’s asks might come as a surprise. Our country is not brimming with hope about a Western savior or a NATO rescue in the face of a Russian invasion. What we want from our Western partners that share our desire for us to be a true democracy…

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CNN reports: The US has information that indicates Russia has prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation in eastern Ukraine, a US official told CNN on Friday, in an attempt to create a pretext for an invasion. The official said the US has evidence that the operatives are trained in urban warfare and in using explosives to carry out acts of sabotage against Russia’s own proxy forces. Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said the Defense Department has…

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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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