Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: The Taliban have been encroaching on key cities around Afghanistan for months, threatening to drive the country to its breaking point and push the Biden administration into a no-win situation just as the United States’ longest war is supposed to be coming to an end. Around the northern city of Kunduz, despite the winter’s fierce cold, the Taliban have taken outposts and military bases, using small armed drones to terrorize Afghan troops. In neighboring Pul-i-Khumri,…

Read More Read More

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Biden administration has imposed a temporary freeze on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as it reviews billions of dollars in weapons transactions approved by former President Donald Trump, according to U.S. officials. The review, the officials said, includes the sale of precision-guided munitions to Riyadh, as well as top-line F-35 fighters to Abu Dhabi, a deal that Washington approved as part of the Abraham Accords, in which the…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: In Kabul’s uncertain present, fear and dread intertwine in a vise. Fear has become a way of life. “When you’re in the car you feel fear, when you are walking you feel fear, and when you are in the shop you feel fear,” said Shamsullah Amini, a 22-year-old shopkeeper, while watching over his vats of dried grains and beans in the Taimani neighborhood. “If there was any security at all, we wouldn’t all be thinking…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: A massive security operation is underway in Washington ahead of President-elect Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, two weeks after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol. As images of National Guard troops circulate online, some in the United States have compared the capital to a war zone. The commentary has drawn pushback from people who have lived or worked in areas actually beset by conflict, who say such remarks are misleading and trivializes the reality of war. “It’s…

Read More Read More

The Associated Press reports: The United States flew strategic bombers over the Persian Gulf on Wednesday for the second time this month, a show of force meant to deter Iran from attacking American or allied targets in the Middle East. One senior U.S. military officer said the flight by two Air Force B-52 bombers was in response to signals that Iran may be planning attacks against U.S. allied targets in neighboring Iraq or elsewhere in the region in coming days,…

Read More Read More

Anand Gopal writes: For four months in 2017, an American-led coalition in Syria dropped some ten thousand bombs on Raqqa, the densely populated capital of the Islamic State. Nearly eighty per cent of the city, which has a population of three hundred thousand, was destroyed. I visited shortly after ISIS relinquished control, and found the scale of the devastation difficult to comprehend: the skeletal silhouettes of collapsed apartment buildings, the charred schools, the gaping craters. Clotheslines were webbed between stray…

Read More Read More

Barbara Slavin writes: When Israel engineered the assassinations of a half-dozen Iranian nuclear scientists from 2010 to 2012, supporters of these killings argued that they would help slow a nuclear program at a time when multilateral diplomacy was showing little progress. The killing on Friday of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, comes in a very different context. Iran is again producing a large amount of uranium, but it is not close to the level needed to produce a nuclear…

Read More Read More

Mark Perry writes: You’d have to be a fool not to listen to Bob Gates. The former head of the CIA, retired defense secretary and tough, outspoken, nose-to-the-grindstone amateur historian, is viewed as a sage observer of all-things-Washington. His judgments are regularly quoted, celebrated, admired and repeated. That’s important just now, as President-elect Joe Biden mounts his transition to the Oval Office, a room he’s regularly frequented, but never inhabited. Is Biden prepared? Bob Gates doesn’t think so: Biden, Gates…

Read More Read More

Trita Parsi writes: Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a key Iranian nuclear official, has been assassinated in Tehran. While it’s unclear as of this writing who is responsible, Israel has assassinated numerous Iranian nuclear scientists in the past, but had, until now, been unable to get to the highly protected Fakhrizadeh. Some Iranian reports claim it was a suicide attack, which would reduce the likelihood of Israeli operatives carrying out the attack, but the bullet holes in Fakhrizadeh’s car cast doubt on that….

Read More Read More

Dexter Filkins writes: In 2018, as American officials in Kabul were sitting down to negotiate with the Taliban, a bleak joke circulated in the U.S. Embassy that at any moment the talks could be derailed by “the Tweet of Damocles”—a unilateral decision by President Trump to withdraw all American soldiers from the country without any deal at all. Now, in the waning days of his term, Trump may attempt to impose such a withdrawal, if not by tweet then by…

Read More Read More

CBS News reports: President Trump’s reelection bid received a vote of support Friday from an entity most in his party would reject: the Taliban. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told CBS News in a phone interview, “We hope he will win the election and wind up U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.” The militant group expressed some concern about Mr. Trump’s bout with the coronavirus. “When we heard about Trump being COVID-19 positive, we got worried for his health, but seems he…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: Washington has made preparations to withdraw diplomats from Iraq after warning Baghdad it could shut its embassy, two Iraqi officials and two Western diplomats said, a step Iraqis fear could turn their country into a battle zone. Any move by the United States to reduce its diplomatic presence in a country where it has up to 5,000 troops would be widely seen in the region as an escalation of its confrontation with Iran, which Washington blames for missile…

Read More Read More

Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes: [Editor’s note: In April, the Syrian writer and Al-Jumhuriya co-founder Yassin al-Haj Saleh was invited to join the advisory council of the Progressive International, a new movement seeking to “unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces” around the world, involving well-known figures such as Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, and Yanis Varoufakis. The below letter was to be al-Haj Saleh’s inaugural contribution to the movement’s media arm, Wire; envisaged as a platform “for the world’s progressive forces, translating…

Read More Read More