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The Afghan Taliban has vehemently objected to the lest UN report, as it punches gaping holes into the Taliban's narrative that it does not shelter and support foreign terror groups. However, the presence of the TTP, Al Qaeda and a host of other terror groups in Afghanistan is undeniable.
The post Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda aiding Pakistani Taliban's insurgency first appeared on FDD's Long War Journal.

The international community fought the Taliban insurgency for twenty years with blood and money, investing trillions of dollars and losing thousands of soldiers. However, Afghanistan's Taliban swept to power in Kabul on August 15, 2021.




Eighteen months after, Afghanistan is …

In response to Hamas's brutal attack on Israel on October 7, the IDF invaded Gaza with a stated purpose of destroying the terror group. As such, the IDF is fighting what many have come to call a "war of counter-insurgency." Hamas has no "army" in any well accepted sense of the word. Rather, Hamas's military arm is reasonably well-organized (and well-funded) confederation of guerrilla fighters. The IDF's aim is to kill or otherwise incapacitate Hamas's fighters and, insofar as possible, leave civilians alone.But the IDF is not really fighting a war of counter-insurgency in Gaza. What it is fighting is best understood as a "war of occupation." The Israelis left Gaza in 2005, and now they are back as de facto occupiers. This characterization isn't to imply that the IDF will stay in Gaza in the long term. They may, they may not. It is rather an apt description of the challenging and dangerous military situation the IDF faces as it stands today. What is the difference between a war of counter-insurgency and a war of occupation, and is it useful for understanding the war in Gaza?In a war of counter-insurgency — at least as understood by politicians and theorists insisting that such a war is being fought — there are insurgents and civilians. The former are politically motivated, well-armed, and deadly. The civilians are simply "in the way." They are politically neutral if not exactly supportive of the troops sent to "help" them. In the understanding of the counter-insurgency experts, most civilians just want the war to end so they can get on with their lives. The West German operations against the Red Army Faction provide an example of a war of counter-insurgency, as does, perhaps, the American effort against al-Qaida and the Islamic State. In these cases, the insurgents were difficult to identify, but they did not generally enjoy the support of local population. This situation made military operations easier. In a war of occupation, however, there are insurgents and hostile civilians. The former are, as in a war of counter-insurgency, armed and deadly. But the latter — and this is the crucial difference — are decidedly unfriendly to the occupying forces. Whatever their political leanings, the occupied believe that the foreign troop should go home. The civilians may not be active combatants, but they are likely to give aid to the insurgents simply on nationalistic grounds. Thus understood, wars of occupation — often propagandistically called "wars of counter-insurgency" by occupying powers — have been common and deadly in modern times. One need only recall the British in Malaysia, the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Vietnam and Algeria, the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. In these cases, the insurgents were difficult to identify, but — and very significantly — much of the local population was decidedly hostile to occupying troops. This situation made military operations more difficult.The example of a war of occupation I know best is that of the Vietnam war, and it illustrates how difficult it is to fight — let alone win — such a war. From the beginning, the U.S. said it was fighting a war of counter-insurgency in South Vietnam, a "different kind of war" the Pentagon and successive presidential administrations called it. The U.S. did not invade North Vietnam and it said it did not invade the South Vietnam. But invade is what it did. The U.S. sent 2.6 million military personnel to South Vietnam over the course of the war; at the high point of operations, it had over half a million men there. The U.S., essentially, occupied much of South Vietnam.One of the places the U.S. occupied was Quang Ngai province on the northeast coast of South Vietnam. This, tellingly, is where the My Lai massacre occurred. U.S. ground troops in Quang Ngai hunted — and sometimes engaged — the Viet Cong, the "insurgents" of counter-insurgency theory. But they also encountered a population of South Vietnamese that was profoundly hostile to the Americans. The locals sniped at them, laid boobytraps and mines, aided the Viet Cong, and were generally involved in anti-American resistance.U.S. troops recognized the antagonism of the Vietnamese population in Quang Ngai, a population they were nominally defending. In the wake of the My Lai Massacre, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation to find out what had gone wrong with their counter-insurgency strategy. The investigators asked the perpetrators why they had killed civilians. The soldiers often responded by saying they did not know they were "civilians." The Vietnamese in Quang Ngai were, so the American troops claimed, all "VC sympathizers" and therefore dangerous. It's important to recognize that the American soldiers were not saying that it was (as the common trope goes) "difficult to tell combatants from civilians." They were saying that all the civilians were potentially threatening. In Gaza, the IDF finds itself in a situation like that of the American army in Quang Ngai province. The Israelis are there nominally on a counter-insurgency mission. But in fact, they have occupied Gaza. Hamas does not want them there, but neither do most Gazans who are suffering under the IDF onslaught. Is it too much to say that most Gazans hate the IDF? Perhaps not. Critics might well say that many Gazans hated the IDF before the Israeli invasion. Again, perhaps true. But the invasion and occupation certainly have not improved the situation. In a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy Survey and Research, 57% of Gazans said Hamas was "correct" to attack Israel on October 7. Nearly all of those surveyed — 97% — said the Israelis were committing "war crimes" in Gaza. This fact — a nearly uniformly hostile population — makes IDF military operations very difficult. The Israeli forces must fight Hamas, but they also must worry about hostile Palestinian civilians living under what the Palestinians see as IDF occupation. The dangers of conducting military operations in such a context are numerous, but the most significant — at least from the point of protecting civilians — is that the IDF will come to view the hostile residents of Gaza as "Hamas sympathizers" with tragic results.The perils of inherent in a war of occupation were vividly illustrated on December 15 when the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza City. According to the IDF, the Israeli troops "mistakenly identified three Israeli hostages as a threat" even though they were unarmed and were waving a white flag. The IDF went on to explain that the killings violated the Israeli rules of engagement. Of course they did, but that's to miss the point: from the perspective of the Israeli ground troops, all Gazans, no matter how innocent they appear, are perceived as a threat. This is particularly true of military-aged males, and all three of the murdered Israeli hostages were military-aged males. In modern times, wars of occupation have not ended well for the occupied or the occupiers. Typically, hostile civilians — what the occupying power sees as "sympathizers" — suffer tremendously and the occupying power leaves defeated. Such was the case in Algeria, Vietnam (twice), and Afghanistan (twice). The IDF knows this fact well, having fought, and lost, a war of occupation in southern Lebanon intermittently from 1982 to 2000. It remains to be seen if the Israelis have truly learned this lesson.

Jordan Cohen


Over the last 48 hours, national news outlets have begun reporting that Ukrainian militias used U.S.-made armored vehicles (albeit unconfirmed by the U.S. government) in an attack over the Russian border and that Ukraine's security services conducted a drone attack against the Kremlin earlier this month. It is important to note that despite Washington's support for Ukraine, the United States was not involved in either attack. This recent escalation – with U.S. weapons systems in one case – is disappointing but not surprising.
Since the start of the conflict, I have written eight different editorials addressing loose weapons in Ukraine. This weapons dispersion happens for a few reasons. First, there is a history of weapons dispersion in Ukraine. According to the 2021 Global Organized Crime Index, Ukraine has one of the largest illegally trafficked arms markets in Europe, especially when it comes to small arms and ammunition. About 300,000 small arms and light weapons were reported lost or stolen between 2013 and 2015. Of these, only slightly more than 13 percent are recovered, while the vast majority remains in circulation on the black market.
All of this was already a problem before the conflict. The invasion exacerbated these issues as the country was flooded with a sudden influx of millions of arms and ammunition and an increasing number of civilians received military training and weapons. As Rep. Sara Jacobs (D‑CA) noted at a 2022 Cato policy forum on the risk of weapons trafficking in Ukraine, the United States does not "have the capacity to do the end‐​use monitoring we were doing before" because monitoring changes when you begin to "arm an insurgency."
This sort of weapons dispersion is not surprising, nor are its effects. Loose U.S. weapons threaten to entangle the United States in a conflict with another nuclear power by unintentionally increasing escalation against Russia, while also risking further destabilization within Ukraine if a disagreement breaks out between different armed groups or in any post‐​conflict situation.
The world has seen weapons dispersion of U.S. arms cause similar damage twice over the last two years. First, in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have used U.S. weapons left behind to arm themselves and generate profits. Second, in Yemen, when U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia turned the United States into an unwitting participant in the conflict.
Nonetheless, while the damage done in Afghanistan and Yemen is severe, they pale in comparison to what could happen in Ukraine. Dispersion in Ukraine risks great power war and destabilization in Eastern Europe. Regrettably, there is little that the United States can do now to prevent this from continuing to happen.

The U.S. government is compromising democratic values for the sake of maintaining an expensive and ineffective drone base in the West African country of Niger — all while exploring new drone bases in three nearby coastal countries: Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin.The rationale for both the existing base and the aspirational ones is to constrain jihadist insurgencies. The problem is, there's no publicly available evidence that the base in Niger has done any good. In fact, regional trends — in terms of political violence, but also in terms of overall political instability — suggest that expeditionary counterterrorism does more harm than good.The U.S. military's Air Base 201 is situated outside Agadez, northern Niger, and was built in the late 2010s at a cost of some $110 million or more (and upwards of $30 million per year to operate and maintain). Operations began at the site in 2019, involving "intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance" (ISR) drone flights. The New York Times calls it "vital" but it has yet to demonstrate its worth to the public.During the 2010s, Niger was considered the most reliable Sahelian country in the eyes of Washington, Paris, Berlin, and others. Ruled by an elected civilian, Mahamadou Issoufou (in office 2011-2021), Niger had seemed to be entering a new chapter, leaving behind the coups and rebellions that still plagued neighboring Mali. As crises grew in virtually all of Niger's neighbors — especially in Libya, Mali, Nigeria, and soon Burkina Faso as well — Niger appeared to be more a victim of spillover violence than of its own homegrown insurgencies.By 2019, however, it should already have been clear that Niger was brittle — and that France's assertive counterterrorism operations in Mali were yielding only fleeting gains. In Niger, the 2016 election had been lopsided at best and farcical at worst, with Issoufou's main opponent, Hama Amadou, spending much of the campaign in detention on shaky charges connected to human trafficking. Niger was also beginning to produce its own militants — and its own spate of human rights abuses by the military. In Mali, France had killed many top jihadist leaders, but violence was only growing. If American airpower was meant to support the tracking of top targets, and if removing those targets did not fundamentally disrupt the insurgencies, then what good was all that surveillance capacity?Starting in 2020, coup after coup struck the countries of central Sahel. In Mali and soon after in Burkina Faso, coup-makers both channeled and stoked anti-French sentiment, eventually expelling French troops and other Western-backed security missions, such as the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali. French counterterrorism ran aground not just at the level of strategy, but also politically. The French failed to maintain the goodwill of populations who cared little if Abdelmalek Droukdel or Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi had been killed when that did nothing against the grassroots fighters, bandits, and ethnic militias that made ordinary people's lives hellish. Surveillance capacity, moreover, is even less effective when it comes to sorting out who is who at the level of ordinary fighters — just ask the French, who horrified Malians by striking a wedding party at the town of Bounti in January 2019, believing the targets were terrorists.Niger's government has been the most recent to fall to a coup, in July 2023. The combination of the coup and the U.S. military's assets triggered an awkward dance in Washington, as the administration sought — and continues to seek — an impossible balance. On the one hand, there is the imperative to uphold the plain meaning of legal restrictions on U.S. assistance to junta-run countries (a determination the U.S. finally reached in Niger's case in October). On the other hand, the administration seems to feel compelled to engage the junta with an eye to protecting the drone base. Administration officials have hinted to the junta that if it puts forward even a minimally credible transition plan, the administration will explore ways to restore military cooperation.The sunk costs of the Niger base appear to be one of the primary arguments in its favor, as well as the argument that the base is vital for counterterrorism success. Yet throwing good money after bad makes little sense, and the argument about counterterrorism is impossible to falsify, given classification practices — and even if all the data were out in the open, backers of unlimited counterterrorism budgets often make the equally unfalsifiable claim that things would be worse without those expenditures. Meanwhile, there is a circularity involved in the logic of the U.S. military presence in Niger as well. As the New York Times puts it, "The American military is still flying unarmed drone surveillance missions to protect its troops posted in Niamey and Agadez" — in other words, the drone base becomes its own justification.Meanwhile, the U.S. government appears to be simultaneously considering the possibility of maintaining the Niger base and the possibility of shifting resources elsewhere; namely, to Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Benin. The Wall Street Journal reports on "preliminary talks" about opening bases in those countries. The logic, in the Journal's own words, is as follows: "Drones would allow U.S. forces to conduct aerial surveillance of militant movements along the coast and provide over-the-shoulder tactical advice to local troops during combat operations."This logic should sound awfully familiar, as it was the same thinking that has now failed in Niger and beyond. None of the core problems have been solved: whether tracking and killing top leaders translates into wider gains; whether it is possible to distinguish insurgents from non-combatants at the level of rank-and-file fighters; and what the wider theory of change and success is.Nor has the fundamental political problem been solved or, it seems, even acknowledged: the reference to "over-the-shoulder tactical advice" is very telling. What might seem like a simple military matter is in fact a political one: again and again in the Sahel, it became evident that soldiers often dislike having someone else peering over their shoulder and telling them what to do. All that assistance and advice can also have unintended consequences, as occurred in Niger. It's not that establishing drone bases in coastal West African countries will inexorably lead to coups — but securitizing the relationship and militarizing those countries' response to insurgency will only hurt. Cote d'Ivoire has won some acclaim for its response to a nascent insurgency, for example, but more for its social programs than for its combat operations.And, finally, for U.S. forces, the temptation to do more than peer over the shoulder and whisper into the ear is always there. Best of all would be to wind down the base in Niger, avoid making the same mistakes elsewhere in the region, and keep the Sahel's juntas at arm's length.

In a December 8 story that seems to have received little attention in western press coverage of Israel's expanding military campaign in Gaza was this nugget of information: Israel's military expects combat operations to continue until the end of January, "followed by a three-to-nine-month lower grade insurgency." Reported by the Jerusalem Post, an English daily whose correspondents appear to have good ties to the Israel Defense Forces, this prediction likely rang alarm bells in the Biden administration. The White House is well aware of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's promise to do whatever it takes to "destroy" Hamas. But beyond doubting that this goal is feasible, US officials likely have concluded that Israel is not capable of pursuing its campaign in Gaza without killing many more Palestinian civilians, or is not ready to do so. With the threat of disease and starvation growing as Gazans flee to the south in a nearly hopeless search for safety, the prospect of a major crisis in US-Israel relations is growing. Thus while Israeli leaders applauded the White House's veto of last week's United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, they know that the Biden administration supports a wider political and diplomatic approach that Israel's current government—as Netanyahu has stated—totally rejects.On December 12, President Joe Biden showed clear dissatisfaction with the Israeli government and Netanyahu. In remarks to donors, Biden reportedly said that Israel is losing support around the world because of how it is conducting the Gaza war. He also reportedly said that Netanyahu "has to change" and that the Prime Minister rejects the two-state solution on which the president has staked his approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This gap between the US and Israeli positions on the Gaza crisis is partly a consequence of the contradictory signals that the White House sent Israel in the first weeks following Hamas's October 7 assault. In addition to Biden's "bear hug" of Netanyahu—a leader for whom he has little love—US officials, including the President, signaled a kind of muddled ambivalence when it came to pressing Israel to limit the ferocity of its bombing campaign.In addition to Biden's "bear hug" of Netanyahu—a leader for whom he has little love—US officials, including the President, signaled a kind of muddled ambivalence when it came to pressing Israel to limit the ferocity of its bombing campaign.Still, it seemed that the November 24-December 1 truce might open the door to a wider diplomatic initiative led by the United States and backed by its Arab allies. But the efforts of the White House to prevent the resumption of hostilities failed for many reasons, not least of which was Israel's determination to "finish the job." Fearing the worst, the White House secured a promise from Israel that it would take new measures to limit civilian casualties. Secretary of State Antony Blinken's December 7 statement, however, that "there does remain a gap between…the intent to protect civilians and the actual results that we're seeing on the ground" underscored the administration's unhappiness with Israel's ensuing assault on southern Gaza. And it pointed to a far bigger problem, namely the White House's failure so far to secure an Israeli approval of a postwar plan for Gaza that involves the Palestinian Authority. For Washington, Netanyahu's singular and relentless focus on military tactics represents a strategic nightmare.National Rage and Political EvasionThere are at least two related reasons why Netanyahu's government has steadfastly avoided any hint of an ultimate political strategy toward Gaza.First, there is the impact of the continuing hostage crisis on the Israeli public. The vivid testimonies coming from some of the 105 hostages who were freed during the humanitarian pause have filled Israel's media, magnifying the outrage generated by the October 7 atrocities. Shocking accounts of Hamas's use of sexual violence against women and men has steeled the resolve of Israelis to support the war. That it took some two months for UN agencies and other international groups to clearly condemn the reported assaults and to call for investigations has only reinforced Israelis' view that they should circle the wagons and defy international pressures for a ceasefire. With the furious public fixated on revenge, Israel's government has felt no pressure to articulate any agenda beyond destroying Hamas.Second, by creating a five-member war cabinet—including opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, a former general whose son was killed on December 7 in Gaza—Netanyahu has restricted decision-making to a small group that has only one game plan for which he, of course, is the chief spokesman. But while this arrangement may allow Netanyahu to survive another day or week, or perhaps months, it has not prevented ultra-hardline members of the larger cabinet to issue calls for expelling Palestinians from Gaza. The Prime Minister's spokesman has denied that Israel has any such intentions. But in light of the war cabinet's reluctance to address the "day after" question—not to mention the reality that some 1.8 million Gazans have fled their homes—Arab officials have expressed growing fears that Israel is pursuing a new Nakba. That Vice President Kamala Harris has warned that "under no circumstances" will the United States tolerate the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza suggests that the Biden administration shares these worries.Against the background of Israel's expanding operations in northern and southern Gaza, the administration has been trying to mobilize regional support for a plan to place postwar Gaza under the control of a "revitalized" Palestinian Authority.Indeed, against the background of Israel's expanding operations in northern and southern Gaza, the administration has been trying to mobilize regional support for a plan to place postwar Gaza under the control of a "revitalized" Palestinian Authority (PA) so that, in Blinken's words, "we can get on the path to a just, lasting and secure peace for Israelis and Palestinians." Seeing such an effort as a step toward some kind of Palestinian statehood (a goal that President Biden has repeatedly endorsed over the past six weeks), Netanyahu has categorically rejected any notion of putting Gaza under the PA's supervision. Yet his failure to clarify the ultimate goal of Israel's military campaign is feeding concerns in Israel that despite explicit reassurances of staunch US support for the military campaign—most recently telegraphed in the White House's decision to bypass Congress in resupplying Israel with 14,000 rounds of tank munitions—the United States and Israel are on a collision course.The Government Should "Stop Playing Politics" Concerns over such a clash have prompted calls from Israeli opinion leaders for Netanyahu's government to articulate a "day after" agenda. While as might be predicted, some of these calls have come from the left or center left, more conservative figures have chimed in. Writing in the Jerusalem Post on December 8, one such commentator, Yaakov Katz, reminded his readers that in addition to warnings from Harris and Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III cautioned Israel that by pursuing military operations killing thousands of civilians, Israel may drive Gazans into the hands of Hamas and thus courting "strategic defeat." According to Katz, such US statements demonstrate that "while the US has held off on calling for a comprehensive cease fire…there is no doubt in Jerusalem that such a call is growing closer"—and with it, a potential clash over the fundamental question of where Gaza will fit into a revived peace process. To avoid or at least minimize this clash, Katz argued that "Israel needs to put forward a plant for the 'day after' that "includes some sort of diplomatic engagement with the Palestinian Authority." At the same time, Katz contended that Americans need to undergo their own transformation by not creating unrealistic expectations about a two-state solution in the absence of "an Anwar Sadat-like leader on the Palestinian side."Katz apparently does not feel that Netanyahu can be trusted to prevent such a clash, as the Prime Minister is only "playing politics." But given the still-enormous gap between US and Israeli positions on the future of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank, it is difficult to imagine how the author's call for Israel to "coordinate with the US" on devising a common plan would amount to little more than an exercise in kicking the can down the road. This, of course, is what the author advocates. But it is far from clear that the Biden administration ultimately will be prepared to put a band aid on what is a deepening diplomatic wound between the United States and Israel.Despite or perhaps because of these clashing visions, it appears that Israel's war cabinet has concluded that it is time to begin fashioning some kind of diplomatic-political strategy. Commenting on the subject, one Israeli analyst noted that while Netanyahu recently has formed a committee to decide on strategies for postwar Gaza, "devising a feasible plan that can gain acceptance in this current government will be a significant challenge."For Israel, the United States, and the region, the other important "day after" could be on the morning following new elections and the subsequent formation of a new Israeli government. That is putting it mildly. Giving a committee the task of settling on strategies for Gaza after the war feels more like a bureaucratic evasion than a serious effort to come to grips with another fundamental strategic question at hand. It may well be that this Israeli government will not be able to seriously address this challenge. For Israel, the United States, and the region, the other important "day after" could be on the morning following new elections and the subsequent formation of a new Israeli government. But the lasting tremors of October 7 could produce a government that is as far right as the current one. Regardless of when this other day after happens, it is clear that the United States and Israel are at loggerheads.An Endless Insurgency?However real, the brewing conflict between the United States and Israel has been obscured by a basic contradiction in the Biden administration's approach to the Gaza conflict. On the one hand, it seems evident that the administration expects Israel to deal Hamas a decisive military blow that will make it possible, with the backing of Arab states and the international community, to pursue new efforts to broker Palestinian-Israeli peace. On the other hand, the calamitous effects of Israel's military campaign on Gaza's civilian population have created a diplomatic dilemma for the administration that it cannot tolerate much longer. Thus it is possible that sooner rather than later the White House will support a revised ceasefire plan at the United Nations.It is precisely this prospect that has impelled Israel to accelerate its military operations in the hope that it can dismantle Hamas's military and political infrastructure before US patience runs out. Yet, even if it achieves this goal, Israel may face a Hamas insurgency that could last months, if not years. It is hard to imagine how this expectation can be squared with any serious strategy for addressing the political future of Gaza. Moreover, as several analysts have argued, while Israeli leaders hope that Gazans will blame Hamas's leaders for the current catastrophe as much as if not more than they blame Israel, the continuing onslaught may spur many more young Gazans to join Hamas, thus spawning a guerilla campaign that could have Israeli soldiers fighting and dying in an endless battle. Such an outcome would represent a victory for Hamas or whatever group succeeds it, especially if it unfolds in the maelstrom of a wider regional war.While Israeli leaders hope that Gazans will blame Hamas's leaders for the current catastrophe as much as if not more than they blame Israel, the continuing onslaught may spur many more young Gazans to join Hamas.For the United States and its Arab allies, the possibility of this unwarranted scenario is as real as it is unacceptable. To avoid it, the Biden administration might try to fashion a diplomatic achievement, perhaps by brokering a breakthrough in Israeli-Saudi relations. It may be that the prospect of normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia will shake up Israel's traumatized polity in ways that open the door for the kind of solutions not currently on the horizon. But if there is going to be an Abraham Accords Round Two—one that is about real peacemaking rather than the joys of celebrating Chanukah in Dubai—President Biden will have to back an Israeli-Palestinian game plan that may cause unprecedented tensions in the US-Israeli strategic partnership.This article has been republished with permission from Arab Center Washington DC.

An iconic New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, has just been squired around the Middle East by the commander of Central Command, the U.S. military headquarters for operations in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and North Africa. Now, don't get me wrong, the military and American journalists have cultivated symbiotic relations since the Civil War. It's in the nature of things. The press needs access, and the military needs public and congressional support. Quality time shared by the top U.S.military officer for this volatile region and the top foreign affairs columnist for the nation's top broadsheet makes sense.Among their whistlestops were U.S. installations in Syria. About 900 American troops are there, distributed in penny packets among seven bases. Some of these protect oil fields that supply U.S.-backed Kurdish authorities; others are in the far northeast, where they assist Kurdish units, help secure and supply the cluster of camps that house ISIS prisoners and their families and continue to hunt ISIS fighters; and still others in the southeast, at a road junction where the Iraqi, Syrian and Jordanian borders meet. This base was set up to interdict Iranian-backed forces attempting to entrench themselves in Syria and transport supplies to Lebanon.In Friedman's recap of this visit, he explained that the importance of these U.S. deployments lay in the need to fight the terrorists over there so we would not have to fight them over here. Let's say, for the moment, that there are several other rationales for maintaining troops in Syria. Iran, for example, does seek to use Syria as a land corridor to Lebanon and the Israeli-Syrian border, from which it can carry the fight to its enemy. Iran is 1,200 kilometers from Israel, so if it wants to reach out and touch someone without using ballistic missiles, it needs to be on Israel's borders. Rendering this a bit more difficult than it might otherwise be makes a regional blow-up marginally less likely. Maintaining a garrison at the oil fields is meant to secure them from capture by either ISIS or the Assad regime, against which the U.S. maintains heavy sanctions. Reserving the oil for use by Kurds, both for sale and consumption, reflects a longstanding policy that favors Kurdish autonomy in Syria. This policy preference, which owes in part to a romanticized image of Kurds as daring fighters fending off terrorist hordes to spare the U.S. an onerous burden, also dictates the use of U.S. forces in northeast Syria as a tripwire deterrent against Turkish attempts to suppress Syrian Kurds. For many members of Congress, they seem to be something like T.E. Lawrence's Bedouin insurgents in World War I, or U.S.-backed Montagnard guerillas in the Vietnam War. For them, abandoning the Kurds to the tender mercies of Turkey, or compelling them to seek protection from the Assad government, would be immoral and shred America's reputation as a reliable ally. (See under: Munich.) Trump, marching to the beat of a different drum, pointed out that the Kurds "didn't help us in the second world war, they didn't help us with Normandy as an example… ." The U.S. role in helping local forces and NGOs manage the ISIS detention centers and refugee camps as well as the slow process of the repatriation of Iraqi detainees, is meant to contribute to Iraqi stability, in which the U.S. has a stake. The fact that these bases are magnets for attack by Iran-backed militias is arguably a factor that outweighs any of these other considerations.One can have this or that view on the validity of these rationales or the salience of these objectives for core U.S. strategic interests. If the Turks and their radical Arab militias rip into the Kurds to get at the PKK, as they have done twice already, U.S. strategic interest is unlikely to suffer very much. If ISIS fighters escape the camps in Syria, Iraqi forces with U.S. help could probably limit the threat to Iraqi stability. The U.S. installation at al-Tanf in the southeast can be bypassed by Iran-backed militias via an Assad-controlled base at al bu-Kamal, a bit northeast of al-Tanf, so the U.S. base there might have outlived its usefulness. Of course, on any given day there are about 30,000 U.S. military personnel in the region, as there have been for decades, so 900 isn't a particularly impressive number. It's a good example of limited interests served by a commensurately limited commitment. Whether to stay or go comes down to a narrow judgment call.But of all the factors to consider there is one that does not merit concern: the idea of fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. It's a vacuous meme trotted out to defend the controversial commitment and use of forward deployed forces and creation of distant security perimeters. If you were a Briton in September 1939 facing the German juggernaut, Friedman's old chestnut would have been pretty compelling. But since World War II, its specific gravity has dissipated. During the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson defended the U.S. commitment by asserting that the countries of southeast Asia were like a row of dominos; if south Vietnam were to fall, it would tip over all its neighbors until all of Asia was communist. The problem, he explained, was that "Everything that happens in this world affects us because pretty soon it gets on our doorstep." Anyone who was politically sentient at the time was bombarded by Friedman's repurposed, shopworn epigram. Yet, the dominos never fell following the U.S. pullout and the collapse of South Vietnam; in the fullness of time, we never had to fight them over here and the only stuff on our doorstep are Amazon boxes. President George W. Bush, in a major speech at the 89th Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in 2007, declared "Our strategy is this: we will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America." But the insurgency in Iraq was created by the 2003 U.S. invasion, which decapitated the regime and destroyed the capacity of the state to manage the country's affairs, while unleashing Shi'a power and Iranian influence. This ignited a brutal Sunni insurgency carried out, in part, by tens of thousands of soldiers the U.S. threw out of their barracks and left to fend for themselves in an anarchic and violent environment. The ideology and strategy of both Shi'a and Sunni insurgents had nothing to do with al-Qaida, let alone engaging SWAT teams in Dallas, or stealing our lawn furniture, as one of my former counterterrorism colleagues put it. Their concerns were local. Al-Qaida sought to attack the great power, the "far enemy," that underpinned the "near enemy," namely the conservative monarchy ruling Arabia. Al-Qaida in Iraq, ISIS, the Mahdi Army and Iran-backed militias fought a battle for power on their turf and against an occupying army, not an expeditionary war against the U.S. homeland. The mayhem, moreover, had nothing to do with 9/11. The fact that there was never another al-Qaida attack was not because the U.S. invaded Iraq; it was because of al-Qaida's inability to follow up on its spectacular success. And that was a function of the loss of its support network in the U.S., the decimation of its top tier, and the swift tightening of security at U.S. borders. Now we are told once again that U.S. troops have to be somewhere else to prevent fighters operating in that space from coming to the United States and waging war here. The designated enemy in this case is the Islamic State, an organization that has inspired or arranged successful attacks in Europe but not in the U.S. It would be foolish to assume that no one in the organization dreams of murdering Americans in their beds. But they lack the capacity to do so and, more importantly, have urgent local goals that soak up resources, planning and organizational capacity, and face serious local constraints. There is a legitimate debate about the presence of U.S. forces in Syria. But it should be premised on the value of the real things at stake and the cost of protecting those stakes. It should not be distorted by old canards intended to inflate threats to the American homeland.

Twenty years ago this week, the United States government placed Haiti's elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, on a plane sent from Guantanamo Bay and headed for the Central African Republic with a false flight plan. The flight consummated a coup d'état that ended a decade of hard-won democratic progress. It also began two decades of dismantling of democracy by U.S.-backed Haitian regimes. Haiti is "celebrating" the coup anniversary without a single elected official in office and no elections in sight, while most Haitians face catastrophic humanitarian conditions.The U.S. government officially denies a coup took place and claims it did not force Aristide to flee. But the February 29, 2004 coup d'état successfully removed a regional leader who resisted complying with U.S. prescriptions. The following 20 years of supporting governments opposed to Aristide — most of them unelected or elected in flawed elections— have prevented the emergence of other non-compliant Haitian leaders. But as the United States faces its own election this year that President Biden calls an existential threat to our democracy, and struggles with the arrival of Haitians fleeing the horrific conditions that our policies helped generate, it is time to reconsider this approach.The United States actually restored Aristide before it toppled him. In 1994, President Clinton launched Operation Restore Democracy to return Aristide from his exile caused by a 1991 military coup. Aristide left office at the end of his term in 1996, in the first-ever transfer of power from one elected Haitian president to another. He returned to the presidential palace in Haiti's second democratic transfer of presidential power, in 2001.But U.S. leaders did not like the direction Haiti's restored democracy took. They particularly resented President Aristide challenging the United States by trying to raise the minimum wage for workers sewing Americans' clothes, defying "small government" dogma by increasing government investment in education and healthcare, speaking out against the unjust international order, and demanding $21 billion from France as restitution of the "independence debt" that France extorted in 1825.These policies were immensely popular in the areas of Haiti that lay outside the U.S. Embassy compound. In 2000, Haitians voted overwhelmingly for Aristide and his Lavalas party. But the United States used a minor controversy over alleged technical election irregularities as a pretext to impose a development assistance embargo that brought Haiti's economy and its government to its knees. An insurgency led by former soldiers attacked the weakened government from across the border in the Dominican Republic, setting the stage for the U.S. to force Aristide into exile.Haiti has never recovered the level of democracy it had before Aristide's departure. The past 20 years have seen just a single transfer of power from one elected president to another, in 2011. For over half that time, Haiti's parliament has been unable to hold votes, because the failure to run elections left it with too few members. For a quarter of that time there has been no elected president in office.Haiti's last elections were in 2016, and parliament has not held votes since 2019. There has been no president since July 2021, when then-President Jovenel Moise, who had stayed in office five months past the end of his term, was assassinated. Haiti is led by a de facto prime minister, Ariel Henry, who was chosen not by Haitians but by the Core Group, a group of mostly majority-white countries led by the United States. Henry's reign is unconstitutional and faces widespread Haitian opposition. But with the United States propping him up, Henry has been able to serve a longer term than any prime minister in at least 40 years.That persistent support has both seriously weakened promising civil society mobilization toward a broad-based democratic transitional government and removed any incentive for Henry to make meaningful compromise towards fair elections that he and his party cannot win. The U.S. responded to Henry's intransigence by leading the creation of the foreign armed intervention he requested that Haitians say will only further entrench Henry's rule.Meanwhile Haitians face intolerable conditions. Gangs control much of the country, including an estimated 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The economy has had both zero growth and inflation over 15% for three years straight. Children face unprecedented levels of wasting hunger. To spare themselves and their families from this nightmare, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have made the desperate voyage out of Haiti, often arriving at the U.S. border.President Biden's concerns about U.S. democracy should inform his approach to Haiti. His defense of democracy as "America's sacred cause" is weakened when his own administration persistently maintains an illegal Haitian government in power precisely because it will obey the dictates of U.S. presidents over the priorities of Haitian voters. If President Biden is serious about democracy, he would allow Haitian voters the opportunity to choose their leaders.

Over the last few days, there has been a flurry of news reports confirming that U.S. policy regarding Gaza is firmly based on revitalizing the Palestinian Authority (PA). This policy is part of the standard Great Power diplomatic toolkit aimed at empowering a supposed Third Force as a way out of a political and military nightmare. Alas, the record shows that Third Force policies are most often chimeras, not solutions, and that the choice boils down to cutting a deal with the group that is beyond the pale, or else accepting war for the indefinite future.One of the first Third Force policies took place just over a century ago, when the UK, fighting an insurgency in Ireland, looked for a political grouping that would be intermediate between the now-discredited system of direct rule and the demonized Sinn Fein. For several years, Lloyd George pursued a will o' the wisp Gladstoneism, creating and backing a Southern Irish Parliament; but in the end, was forced to abandon this idea and invite Sinn Fein's own Eamon de Valera himself to London to negotiate what became the Free State.Fast forward to Algeria, when French President Charles De Gaulle, having been returned to power by the threat of military revolt and having initially called for FLN rebels to surrender honorably, called for his version of a Third Force: an Algeria "governed by Algerians but in close union with France." This alternative to both the status quo and the "horrifying misery" of secession was, a year-and-a-half later, discarded in favor of negotiations with the FLN and independence.One can tell a similar story for other Great Powers fighting counterinsurgencies, such as the Russians in Afghanistan (or, at least in terms of local military dominance, the Dutch in Indonesia or the Nationalist government in South Africa); but the point is that when the United States chases after a Third Force, as it did in Cuba in 1958 (neither Batista nor Castro) and in Iran in 1978 (neither the Shah nor Khomeini), it is following an oft-trodden path. That path is a dead end, and for a very simple reason: the lengthy fighting (or, in the case of Iran, repression) that leads policy makers to hunt around for a Third Force also makes it impossible for any such Force to have more than a fraction of the legitimacy of the foe that the Great Power, or its client, has been combating.Of course, policy makers may decide, for any number of reasons, that they prefer to continue fighting than to work out a political arrangement with their enemies. In this regard, waving the standard of a Third Force may be less a sign of naivete and more a way to try and distract audiences from the decision to continue fighting. Such a decision is often accompanied by invocation of the enemy's moral repugnancy; for example, its use of terrorism and its maximalist political program. The fact that those making these arguments may themselves have a history of both negotiating and coordinating with the repugnant enemy does not make the moral condemnation or the search for a Third Force any the less heartfelt. But it does, however, present a way out — if the will is there.A good case in point is U.S. and Israeli policy with regard to the PLO after the latter was expelled from Lebanon. One might have imagined that, after Yassir Arafat and company had decamped to Tunisia, the Third Force — in this case, King Hussein's Jordan — would have been at the center of attempts to find a Palestinian policy. But those attempts ended, predictably, in a dead end; and the Israelis turned to the PLO, negotiating with the group that their own legislation had until then prohibited them from contacting. Of course, the Oslo Accords failed — a point I will return to below — but the issue here is that both the U.S. and Israel made progress precisely because they jettisoned the Third Force fantasy, and de-anathematized the PLO. Indeed, the boycott of the PLO was always shot through with holes, with face being saved by dint of conversations that took place through third parties. Nonetheless, as a political gesture, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's move was symbolically important, not only convulsing Israel but costing him his life, an outcome which could easily have happened to De Gaulle as well.The point is simple: peace is made between enemies, not friends. Negotiations can occur without any implication that one side trusts the other, or considers it morally legitimate, or that future arrangements can never be scrapped (as seems to have happened between Hamas and Israel, and Hamas and the U.S., on multiple occasions over the past decade). Negotiations in this sense are not a reward for good behavior, but a response to vile actions and bad faith.For in the end, the only alternative is to keep fighting, with the goal of a Hamas-free Gaza administered by a revitalized PA receding like Gatsby's green light. The Israelis can fight for weeks, months, or even years more, with the U.S. continuing to provide them cover; they can kill or capture or exile every member of Hamas; and it will not make the PA any stronger or better able to administer Gaza. It is time for those who pride themselves on their sense of realism to face facts and drop the Third Force.

U.S. forces launched a third strike against Iran-linked groups on Sunday, the latest in an increasingly destructive series of exchanges that have cast a new light on the continued U.S. troop presence in the Middle East. American aircraft struck a weapons storage facility and command-and-control center used by Iran-backed groups in Syria, according to officials. "Within the last two hours, the U.S. has taken precision defensive strikes against two sites in Syria," an official told ABC News. The two structures were located near the eastern Syrian cities of Mayadin and Abu Kamal, according to statements issued on Sunday by the Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command (CENTOM). "The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel, and he directed today's action to make clear that the United States will defend itself, its personnel, and its interests," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a statement. Up to seven "Iranian proxy fighters" were killed at one of the two locations struck by U.S. warplanes, according to Jennifer Griffin, chief national security correspondent for Fox News, citing a senior defense official. This is the third such strike since October 26, reflecting a continued effort by the U.S. to retaliate against Iran-linked groups that the White House says are responsible for a spate of ongoing rocket and drone attacks against U.S. military personnel in Iraq and Syria. The U.S. sent forces including two carrier strike groups headlined by the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier and USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, squadrons consisting of F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft and A-10 close-air-support (CAS), and the USS Bataan Amphibious Ready Group to the region following the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and subsequent outbreak of war in Gaza. High-ranking officers including a Marine three-star general were reportedly sent to help advise Israeli leadership as it proceeds with its campaign and another 2,000 U.S. personnel were ordered to prepare to deploy last month. Iranian leaders have unsurprisingly taken a strong policy stance in favor of Hamas, though the full extent of their foreknowledge of and support for the October 7 attack remains unclear. Reports citing U.S. intelligence findings suggest that senior Iranian officials were surprised by the attack, undermining or at least heavily complicating claims of direct Iranian involvement. Nevertheless, Tehran has been accused of mobilizing its robust network of regional proxies to launch scores of attacks against American personnel and infrastructure. U.S. assets have been attacked at least 52 times by Iran-linked groups since October 17, according to officials. A total of fifty-six service members have been injured according to numbers provided by the Pentagon, with over two dozen suffering traumatic brain injuries. Washington has responded to these attacks with a mix of warnings by top officials, which have gone wholly unheeded, and retaliatory strikes. The Sunday strikes came shortly on the heels of airstrikes conducted by two F-15 fighter jets against Iran-linked facilities in Syria earlier last week. These two latest rounds of U.S. strikes come just two weeks after a similar spate of operations targeting facilities in eastern Syria that officials say were "used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and affiliated groups." The strikes on October 26, which the Pentagon said were not related to "the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas," were partly intended to deter Iran from coordinating further attacks on U.S. personnel. Yet attacks on American troops have not only continued but intensified in recent weeks, with Iran-backed militants reportedly assaulting U.S. bases with drones carrying even larger payloads.Growing risks to American service members and concerns that these continued exchanges could trigger a direct military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran have spurred new perspectives on the costs and benefits of the continued military presence in the Middle East. The 2,500 and 900 troops in Iraq and Syria, respectively, are ostensibly there to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State, but the rationale behind this presence has come under scrutiny. "If a U.S. ground presence in Iraq and Syria were absolutely necessary to achieve a core U.S. security interest, then perhaps these risks would be tolerable. But this is hardly the case," Defense Priorities (DEFP) fellow Daniel DePetris wrote in a release on November 9. "ISIS lost its territorial caliphate more than four years ago and is now relegated to a low-grade, rural insurgency that local actors can contain. The U.S. military presence is not only unnecessary, but also a dangerous tripwire for a wider war." The continued deployments put service members at constant risk, especially in the context of heightened regional tensions stemming from the Israel-Hamas war, and serve neither clear nor achievable policy aims, argued Justin Logan, the Cato Institute's director of defense and foreign policy studies."Attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria will no doubt continue—the solution is to remove U.S. forces which remain as targets only because they're within range of these local militias," said a DEFP explainer published earlier this month, suggesting that U.S. troops in stationed within striking distance of local militants be redeployed to better-defended positions in the Middle-East. American troops have reportedly been attacked a staggering four times within less than a day of Sunday's airstrike, sending the clearest signal yet that retaliatory strikes have not had their intended deterring effect. As the Gaza crisis roils on, the dangers confronting U.S. troops — and, with them, calls to reconsider the tools and goals of American power projection in the Middle East—will likely intensify.

The Biden administration's Ukraine policy, though it lacks a coherent strategy, is at least centered on an explicit guiding principle: Russia must not be allowed to win in Ukraine. This sentiment is widely shared by U.S. allies across the Atlantic. "I have a clear strategic objective," said French President Emmanuel Macron in a recent interview. "Russia cannot win in Ukraine." But, even in this consensus position, there is a major fly in the ointment: there has not been enough serious consideration of what a Russian victory in Ukraine would look like. The discussion has, instead, centered on alarmist predictions that obfuscate more than they reveal about Russian intentions and capabilities. "Who can pretend that Russia will stop there? What security will there be for the other neighboring countries, Moldova, Romania, Poland, Lithuania and the others?" said Macron, echoing the unfounded narrative that Russia's ultimate goal is to attack NATO states. While it is true that Russia's victory in this war broadly contradicts U.S. interests, a closer look at Moscow's possible endgame scenarios in Ukraine reveals that total victory — even if it were possible — is not in Russia's interests and is probably no longer expected or desired by the Russian leadership.Moscow, according to Western officials, can win this war simply by defeating Ukraine's Armed Forces (AFU) on the battlefield. At first blush, it seems like a reasonable enough interpretation of a belligerent state's wartime objectives, but this simplistic framing of the conflict quickly falls apart upon further examination. What would really happen if the AFU's lines collapsed — a prospect that, though not yet imminent, appears increasingly less distant by the day — and Russian forces found themselves in a position to steamroll Ukraine? Even if Ukrainian forces are conclusively routed on the frontlines, besieging such Ukrainian strongholds as Kharkiv and Zaporizhia — let alone Kyiv and Odessa — will prove immensely taxing. Months of drawn-out fighting over the much less significant cities of Mariupol and Bakhmut offer a small, yet nonetheless harrowing preview of what these sieges would entail. Occupying all of Ukraine would be prohibitively expensive for Russia even in the short term, let alone for a prolonged or indefinite period. The West would likely do its best to dial up these costs by funding and coordinating partisan activities all across Ukraine, but especially in the country's western half. There is, after all, ample historical precedent for such activity in the form of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which resisted Soviet authorities for up to five years following the end of World War II. Prior to Russia's invasion, commentators urged Western leaders to turn this conflict into "Putin's Afghanistan," with Ukrainian partisans playing the role of 1980s mujahideen fighters. These suggestions were tabled because the Ukrainian government did not, in fact, collapse in the fateful weeks following the invasion, but it remains the case that any Russian attempt to control all of Ukraine would likely precipitate a prolonged insurgency campaign and incur terrible costs as a result. Ukraine's collapse likewise amplifies the risks of a direct clash between Russia and the West. The establishment of a de facto boundary between eastern Poland and Russian-occupied western Ukraine would create a dangerous flashpoint that, in the absence of meaningful deconfliction channels, could erupt in a shooting war on NATO's eastern flank. Nor would such a war necessarily be inadvertent on the part of the West; a total Ukrainian collapse would likely spark calls among the Baltic states and at least several major European powers for direct Western intervention on the ground, whether in the form of a NATO expeditionary force or a coalition of the willing drawn up from individual NATO members. Macron has openly and repeatedly stated that the West should not rule out an intervention along these lines; though his proposal was soundly rejected by the U.S. and Germany, it can be expected that political pressure to "do something" to stop Russia will build in Europe and the United States if Kyiv's defeat becomes imminent. The Kremlin is well aware that it cannot unilaterally achieve its wartime goals no matter how well it does on the battlefield. Indeed, its goals extend well beyond Ukraine, though not quite in the way that Macron and the Biden administration believe. There is no evidence that Moscow has any intention of launching wars of conquest against Poland, the Baltics, or other NATO states, but it is certainly seeking to extract a host of strategic concessions from the U.S. and its allies in areas including prohibitions against eastward NATO expansion and limitations on force deployments along NATO's eastern flank.The war that Russia is waging in Ukraine is thus a proxy for the Kremlin's larger coercive strategy against the West, though it is not at all clear that conquering Ukraine will bring Moscow any closer to getting its desired concessions. The AFU's collapse would certainly induce a state of panic in Western capitals. Yet it is difficult to see how this panic can be translated into a concrete willingness by the Biden administration and other Western leaders to strike the kind of grand security bargain Moscow seeks. In fact, considering how politically invested current Western governments are in Ukraine's war effort, there is a chance that Ukrainian collapse could produce the opposite reaction and render Western leaders even less likely to enter into substantive talks with Moscow.Simply put, Russia has little to gain and much to lose by "winning" in Ukraine, if winning is defined as occupying the entire country. Instead, Russia's incentive is to use its growing advantages as a lever for negotiating with the West. The Kremlin, in light of these conditions, has previously hinted at establishing demilitarized buffer zones in Ukraine that are not under Russian control. Regardless of what happens on the battlefield in coming weeks and months, Moscow has started something it cannot unilaterally finish. This gives the U.S. tremendous inherent leverage in shaping the outlines of war termination — Washington and its allies should use it now to bring an end to this war on the best possible terms for the West as well as Ukraine.

Twenty-one years ago, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq in the erroneous belief that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction and was allied with al-Qaida, the terror group responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The U.S. created an occupation authority, but failed to restore order and helped spawn the insurgency that bedeviled it by dismissing the entire Iraqi military and the most experienced civil servants. Coalition troops fought a losing battle, regained their footing with the 2007 troop surge, and finally departed in 2011. U.S. troops returned in 2014 to fight the Islamic State and they remain there to this day, though ISIS was largely eliminated by 2019.In January 2020, Iraq's parliament voted on a nonbinding measure to remove the U.S. troops from Iraq, but the Americans remain at the request of the Iraqi government. However, in response to the parliament's 2020 vote, Iraq and the International Coalition changed the mission of the troops from a combat mission to one of advisory and training.Iraq's prime minister, Mohammed Shia' Al Sudani, will meet U.S. President Joe Biden on April 15, primarily to discuss the U.S. troop presence. Though the U.S.-Iraq Higher Military Commission is reviewing the troop presence issue, will the U.S. side stall fearing it may have to agree to a smaller presence and constrained operations? Possibly, so Sudani may want a public commitment from Biden to force the march to a constructive, timely decision.Aside from the troops issue, Sudani wants to strengthen Baghdad's ties with Washington, which he considers Iraq's top bilateral relationship, and to add an economic dimension to Iraq's ties with America.When Americans think of Iraq in economic terms it's all about the oil, but in November 2023 ExxonMobil, America's biggest oil company, exited Iraq with nothing to show for a decade-long effort. The departure will lower the expectation of other U.S. companies, but Sudani wants to revitalize economic ties, and he will be accompanied by many of the country's top businessmen.U.S.-Iraq trade has room for growth. In 2022, the U.S. exported $897 million in goods, the top product being automobiles. Iraq, in turn, exported $10.3 billion in goods, most of it crude oil.A key economic objective of Iraq is the $17 billion Development Road, an overland road and rail link from the Persian Gulf to Europe via Turkey, that will host free-trade zones along its length.Biden and Sudani should consider the shape of the future U.S.-Iraq relationship, which has to now been governed by military considerations, and has become the best example of The Meddler's Trap, "a situation of self-entanglement, whereby a leader inadvertently creates a problem through military intervention, feels they can solve it, and values solving the new problem more because of the initial intervention. …A military intervention causes a feeling of ownership of the foreign territory, triggering the endowment effect." Iraq is the only real democracy in the Arab world, and many young Iraqis want a separation of religion and state, something that should resonate with Americans and, Iraqis hope, cause the U.S. to deal with Iraq as Iraq, not a platform for operations against Syria and Iran, or to support Washington's Kurdish clients.Washington damaged itself in Iraq by killing Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in January 2020. Baghdad had moved the PMF, once a militia, into the government in 2016 (no doubt with American encouragement), so the killing of Muhandis, then a government official, increased popular support the PMF.What are some clouds on the horizon for the U.S. and Iraq?Corruption. Pervasive corruption in Iraq has slowed economic development and subjected Iraqi citizens to ineffective governance. The 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index by Transparency International ranked Iraq 154 of 180, a slight improvement from 2022 when it ranked 157 of 180.Iraq was previously described by TI as: "Among the worst countries on corruption and governance indicators, with corruption risks exacerbated by lack of experience in the public administration, weak capacity to absorb the influx of aid money, sectarian issues and lack of political will for anti-corruption efforts."Sudani has not ignored corruption, calling it one of the country's greatest challenges and "no less serious than the threat of terrorism."Elizabeth Tsurkov. Tsurkov is a Russian-Israeli academic who was kidnapped in 2023 by Kata'ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-influenced Iraqi militia. Tsurkov, a doctoral student at Princeton University in the U.S., entered Iraq with her Russian passport and did not disclose that she was an Israeli citizen and Israeli Defense Forces veteran. (A 2022 Iraqi law criminalized any relations with Israel.)Tsurkov's family wants the Biden administration to designate Iraq a state sponsor of terrorism for failing to secure her release. Sudani's office announced an investigation into the matter and the issue may arise when Sudani meets Biden, though the best outcome for Iraq and the U.S. is a Russia-brokered deal between Israel and Iran.If Biden designates Iraq a state sponsor of terrorism that will irreparably damage the relationship and open the door for China.China. The U.S. is Iraq's top relationship, but not its only relationship. China will respond to the ostracism of Baghdad by extending invitations to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, the latter of which can fund infrastructure projects through the New Development Bank. PetroChina replaced ExxonMobil in West Qurna 1, one of Iraq's biggest oil fields, and is ideally positioned for further expansion. And Iraq was the "leading beneficiary" of China's Belt and Road Initiative investment in 2021.Sudani has said Iraq should not be a cockpit of conflict for the U.S, and Iran, but when Iran is concerned it, in Washington, is always 1979. Though Sudani has many challenges to face, Biden has more: he must reorient his government away from its colonial mentality in West Asia, recognize that Baghdad must reach a modus vivendi with Tehran that may not be to Washington's pleasure, and not smooth the way for Beijing's greater penetration of West Asia.

An American government delegation recently traveled to Niger to, according to the State Department, "continue ongoing discussions since August with leaders of the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland (CNSP) regarding Niger's return to a democratic path and the future of our security and development partnership."The CNSP is the junta that took power in Niger in July 2023, in a coup that extended a trend of military takeovers in the Sahel. For the U.S., the Nigerien coup was the most consequential of these putsches, given longstanding and intensive security cooperation, including the presence of a major U.S. drone base in the northern city of Agadez.The visit went poorly. Initially scheduled for March 12-13, the delegation extended its stay by one day in hopes of meeting military head of state General Abdourahamane Tiani, but was denied. Then, on March 16, the CNSP announced that it was rejecting the military cooperation agreements between Niger and the U.S. The junta has suggested that in the absence of what it considers a viable and legal status of forces agreement (referring to a 2013 document that the junta now rejects), American civilian and military personnel are no longer welcome in Niger. The Pentagon and the wider U.S. government are working through the implications of that statement while attempting to convince the Nigerien authorities to let U.S. personnel stay.Diplomatically, the U.S. side appears to have stumbled in several ways. The CNSP's spokesman criticized the U.S. for its "unilateral" announcement of the delegation's arrival date and composition and said that the Nigerien authorities received the delegation out of simple courtesy and hospitality. It's also possible that the Americans inadvertently insulted their hosts by sending what the U.S. regarded as a "high-level" team but what the Nigeriens may have seen as insufficiently senior. The delegation was headed by Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and AFRICOM Commander General Michael Langley and included other senior officials such as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander.This episode has been a flashback to my yearlong fellowship in the State Department in 2013-2014. During that time, one thing that shocked and dismayed me is that the assistant secretary of state — as a position — was implicitly considered within the State Department as a position equivalent in rank to an African head of state.Within State (and I assume within Defense and within AFRICOM), senior officials are treated with extraordinary deference and sometimes fear by their own subordinates. But there is no reason why an African leader should see things that way. To be lectured at by an American official whose rank is far junior to one's own is an experience that many African officials tolerate, but it cannot be pleasant. For the Sahel's newly minted juntas, who emphasize a particular brand of sovereignty and who have not been shy about antagonizing Paris, it is not a stretch to rebuke Americans over perceived (and, I would argue, actual) arrogance.The delegation met Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine along with senior members of Niger's junta, such as Generals Salifou Mody and Mohamed Toumba. But I suspect one reason the delegation could not see Tiani is because they misread how seriously the Nigeriens want to be taken.Substantively, the conversation also seems to have gone badly. According to some reports, the American officials seem to have been criticizing Niger's turn towards Russia and to a lesser extent Iran. The junta also appears to have tired of criticism over the generals' handling of the "transition" back to civilian rule — criticism that is well deserved, since no serious transition appears to be underway, but that is nevertheless unwelcome.The episode underscores both the misguidedness of America's pre-coup policies towards Niger and the incoherence of current policymaking. In terms of pre-coup policies, Niger was a darling of American counterterrorism in Africa. Looking the other way over civilian overreach (particularly under President Mahamadou Issoufou from 2011-2021) and military abuses was long justified in the name of the "partnership."But one thing for American policymakers to reflect on is why the supposed closeness of the two militaries — including longstanding relationships at the senior level — has not translated into any substantial American influence over the junta. If huge investments in training and infrastructure can evaporate with a change in political fortunes, and if those investments cannot be proven to have flattened the curve of the Sahelian insurgency in the first place, then what are they worth?In terms of current policymaking, American officials don't seem to know what they want — an ambivalence that was easily detectable during the months of foot-dragging over invoking U.S. law that calls for suspensions of security assistance to coup-afflicted countries. The U.S. has sometimes appeared to view the Nigerien junta more favorably (or be more desperate to curry its favor) than the juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso, again due to the massive U.S. investments and sunk costs in Niger. Yet the U.S. also appears to lecture Niger over democracy, Russia, and more. Perhaps the delegation calculated that the might, prestige, and resources of the U.S. would continue to impress the Nigeriens— they calculated wrong, and so achieved neither of the two contradictory pulls in U.S. policy, advancing neither democracy nor security cooperation.I was not in the room, obviously, but it also strikes me that AFRICOM's preferred rhetorical frames may play very badly on the ground in the Sahel now. In their annual posture statements, successive AFRICOM commanders depict Africa as a place where outsiders (al-Qaida, the Islamic State, Russia, China, etc.) cause havoc, to be opposed by a stalwart coalition of the U.S. and its "partners." This is a view of Africa that offers little room for Africans to exist other than as victims of some outside force or as junior partners to the U.S., junior partners within their own story. That might play well to Congress — but it did not go over well in Niamey, and it would be received even less warmly in Bamako or Ouagadougou. The juntas could also easily read how negatively they are depicted by AFRICOM; while AFRICOM's criticisms of the juntas are largely fair (I shared many of them), U.S. officials cannot expect to dismiss the juntas as malevolent and incompetent but then go to make asks of them.Going forward, one thing to watch for advocates of restraint is whether and how easily the U.S. can pivot out of Niger. It may turn out that the drone base there, billed as essential to the fight against Sahelian jihadism, is not so essential after all. The critical question to ask will not be whether things get worse — security has steadily degraded since approximately 2015 in many parts of the central Sahel — but whether there is any proof that the presence or absence of vast American military expenditures makes any discernable difference.The U.S. may yet salvage something in Niger, but if it exits, that will not necessarily be a tragedy for Nigeriens or Americans. And sadly, U.S. policy incoherence and diplomatic missteps may have squandered, for the medium term, whatever opportunity had existed to place meaningful pressure on the junta over democracy and human rights.

A brutal attack by militants "mercilessly slaughtering" civilians in their homes occurred simultaneously with attacks against military targets of an occupying power. These attacks resulted in an overwhelming military retaliation that killed so many people, one soldier wrote, "they had to be buried with bulldozers." While this sounds like coverage of October 7 and the current Gaza War, these are descriptions of the 1955 "Philippeville massacre" in Algeria. That event marked a major turning point in the Algerian War of Independence against 125 years of French occupation. It led to seven more years of brutality that killed 300,000 to one million Algerians and threatened a civil war in France. It also sowed seeds for future violence in Algeria and around the world. Americans should reflect on the history of the French experience in Algeria in the context of the current Gaza War and the longer history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The United States has played a major role in this conflict, one which people across the Middle East clearly recognize and resent, even if most Americans do not. It is important to recognize the bigger picture and historical context in which events occur. Confusing specific actions, such as the Philippeville massacre or Hamas's 7 October attacks with the overall goals of an insurgency risks mistaking means for ends, resulting in a fundamental misunderstanding of the overall situation. Prior to the Philippeville massacre, Algerian nationalists struggled for over a century against French rule. Emir Abd al-Qadir resisted French occupation for over a decade in the 1830s, and other major revolts occurred in the 1860s-70s. Moderate Algerians called for reforms, a constitution, and amelioration of social and economic concerns. Unanswered petitions escalated to demands for autonomy, peaceful demands for independence, and eventually support for new armed resistance. Yet the French refused to seriously consider addressing these longer-term political grievances, viewing resistance solely from a military perspective. Some fixated on FLN (National Liberation Front) terror tactics, with one French leader exhorting, "Let us swear before these coffins to do everything…to revenge those who have been taken away from us." Another French military official viewed the Algerian revolt as part of a larger "march of Communism." Other French perspectives claimed: "We have not come here to defend colonialism. We are the defenders of liberty and of a new order." Others, including much of the French public and settlers in Algeria, staunchly defended French colonialism and viewed Algeria as an indissoluble part of France, refusing to entertain Algerian desires for independence. Hamas's ultimate "end," like that of the FLN, is not the violence of October 7 itself, but the establishment of an independent state. Like the Algerians, Palestinians have long advocated for Palestinian statehood, the just resolution of the conflict, protection of human rights, opposition to settlements and settler violence, restructuring of Palestinian institutions, modification of U.S. policies, access to services and resources, and redress of inequality and discrimination. When the Arab Center surveyed Arab public opinion about reasons motivating Hamas's attack, they found widespread understanding of the historical context and nationalist aims: While 35% of respondents stated that the most important reason was the continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, 24% stated that it was Israel's targeting of Al-Aqsa Mosque, 8% said it was the ongoing siege on the Gaza Strip, and 6% attributed it to the continuation of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories.Most Western observers' attention on Hamas focuses on its intent to destroy Israel, as outlined in Hamas's founding charter. This focus ignores its 2008 offer of a truce based on acceptance of the 1967 borders and implicit recognition of Israel. It ignores Hamas's publication of a new "manifesto" in 2017 which announced it would accept the 1967 borders and details of any deal, including the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, approved by referendum of the Palestinian people, upon implementation of that deal. It also ignores the potential to negotiate any alternative resolution than that espoused by the rhetoric of key Hamas leaders. This also assumes that Hamas's original and maximalist position is the only option for an acceptable resolution among Palestinians. This assumption ignores historical precedent for negotiated settlements, including missed opportunities for negotiated peace in Algeria. A second lesson from the French experience in Algeria is also a warning: excessive French violence against Algerians, including explicit orders to implement "collective responsibility," ultimately increased support for armed resistance. One French administrator observed: "To send in tank units, to destroy villages…it is using a sledgehammer to kill fleas. And what is much more serious, it is to encourage the young – and sometimes the less young – to go into the maquis." An Algerian leader similarly noted: "The French ratissages operations were 'our best recruiting agent.'" A later FLN statement declared "to colonialism's policy of collective repression we must reply with collective reprisals against the Europeans, military and civil, who are all united behind the crimes committed upon our people. For them, no pity, no quarter!"This also convinced moderate Algerians to support hardline resistance, reducing avenues and interlocutors for political compromise. "My role, today, is to stand aside for the chiefs of the armed resistance," declared one moderate leader. "The methods that I have upheld for the last fifteen years — co-operation, discussion, persuasion — have shown themselves to be ineffective".Another devastating French policy that achieved some short-term military success but ultimately proved counterproductive was forced displacement, which was aimed at "isolating communities from the FLN and thus denying it refuge and supplies." This forced over one million civilians from their homes, into spaces where they were "crammed together in unbroken wretchedness" and where "children [died] from hunger" and cold. Other brutal practices included mass detentions, widespread torture, and abuse of detainees. While French officials argued that these methods achieved short-term military success, historian Alistair Horne argues that they were ultimately self-defeating: "[Colonel] Massu won the Battle of Algiers; but that meant losing the war." The shocking death toll, displacement, disproportionate destruction, allegations of collective punishment, and inhumane treatment and possible torture of detainees in Gaza offer chilling parallels between current Israeli military operations and the French in Algeria. Like the Algerians, displaced Palestinians in Gaza currently face starvation and receive woefully insufficient humanitarian assistance and medical care. These reports are important for investigating allegations of violations of international law, which are examined elsewhere, but they are also generating global outrage similar to the international condemnation of French actions in Algeria. Likewise, these actions are counterproductive as they increase support for armed Palestinian resistance, as indicated in an Arab Barometer survey.The French ultimately accepted Algerian independence in 1962, five years after the French "victory" in the Battle of Algiers, seven years after the Philippeville massacre, 18 years after Algerian demands for federal autonomy, and 132 years after Algerian nationalists first used armed resistance against French occupation. Nonetheless, violence continued because of seeds sown during the war, shaping authoritarian rule in Algeria, the 1990s Algerian civil war, and connections to global terrorism. The current Gaza War mirrors the French experience of repeated resistance, as demonstrated by armed groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, which emerged largely as a result of Israel's occupation of south Lebanon after its 1982 war against the PLO in that country. This demonstrates that even if Hamas is militarily defeated, if Palestinian political demands and underlying grievances are not addressed, another armed resistance group will emerge. Americans must learn from these lessons by understanding the full context of the current war in Gaza and recognize the ultimately self-defeating impact of Israel's pursuit of an overwhelmingly brutal military "total victory," facilitated by unconditional U.S. support.

Federal prosecutors unveiled charges against Sen. Bob Menendez (D–N.J.) on Friday that read like a combination of James Bond and The Sopranos. The indictment accuses Menendez of accepting bribes for a variety of favors, from helping local businessmen stay out of jail to green-lighting arms deals with the Egyptian military. Prosecutors allege that Menendez's wife Nadine Arslanian was paid, in the classic Sopranos style, through a no-show job at an Egyptian meat company. The FBI found hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and gold at Arslanian's suburban home.The senator and his co-defendants pleaded not guilty during a Wednesday court hearing. He claimed at a Monday press conference that the indictment was a "limited set of facts framed by the prosecution to be as salacious as possible." While Menendez has stepped down from his post as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he vowed on Monday to stay in the Senate "on behalf of the 9 million people who call New Jersey home." However, a growing chorus of Democrats — including both national and New Jersey officials — has demanded that Menendez step down from his seat in light of the charges.The combination of local wheeling-and-dealing with international intrigue is nothing new in New Jersey politics. While the state is often known for its weird ambient smells, Mafia families, and party beaches, New Jersey also hosts some of New York City's wealthiest suburbs. Many well-organized diasporas have roots there, and many powerful foreigners park their money there. The career of a New Jersey politician is often intertwined with foreign policy.FBI agents raided Arslanian's home in Englewood Cliffs, 15 minutes away from the exclusive country club where Nikki Haley spoke to pro-Israel donors last week. The nearby town of Englewood had previously been the center of an international incident in 2009, when Libyan ruler Muammar Qadhafi was preparing to address the United Nations. The Libyan foreign ministry owns a mansion in Englewood for its UN ambassador, and sudden construction led to rumors Qadhafi was staying there.Qadhafi's next-door neighbor would have been Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a prominent pro-Israel activist with ties to settlers in the Palestinian territories. The rabbi waged a high-profile campaign to ward off Qadhafi, using his column in the Jerusalem Post to complain about the construction workers' treatment of his trees. Shmuley threatened to sue the Libyan foreign ministry so that "Libyan money will go toward peaceful projects like planting trees rather than blowing up planes," and offered to host Qadhafi himself if Libya recognized Israel.The Libyan delegation ended up renting property in suburban New York from Donald Trump, who took the money and kicked them out. Qadhafi was so enraged by his treatment that he scattered unsecured nuclear materials across a Libyan airfield. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lives close to the Trump property, had to talk Qadhafi down. All politics is local politics, as they say.Menendez started his political career within the Cuban community of Hudson County, the region of New Jersey just across from midtown Manhattan. The large Cuban diaspora there, traumatized by Fidel Castro's revolution, turned to militant anticommunist politics. The Weehawken Duelling Grounds, where Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in 1804, now features a statue of Cuban national poet José Martí and a monument to Assault Brigade 2506, a force sent by the CIA to overthrow Castro during the Bay of Pigs incident in 1961.

The monument to the fallen from the CIA's Assault Brigade 2506, which fought against Fidel Castro's government at the Bay of Pigs. Photo: Matthew PettiDuring the Monday press conference, Menendez implied that he was also one of the many fleeing Communism. He called himself the "son of Cuban refugees," and said that the cash found by the FBI was "from my personal savings account, which I have kept for emergencies, and because of the history of my family facing confiscation in Cuba." But Menendez was born in New Jersey years before Castro's revolution, to a family of working-class immigrants who had left Cuba under the previous, capitalist dictatorship. Menendez's Senate office did not respond to a question about what confiscation his family faced.Menendez was surrounded by the politics of the anticommunist emigres nonetheless. In the 1970s, when Menendez was on the Union City school board, several rival Cuban-American guerrilla groups held rallies and ran extortion rackets. Union City brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo were convicted of killing Chilean leftist politician Orlando Letelier with a car bomb in Washington; their convictions were overturned on appeal. Menendez himself helped raise money for the legal defense fund of Eduardo Arocena, a Union City guerrilla leader convicted of murdering a Cuban diplomat in New York and organizing other bomb attacks, in the 1980s.Since branching out into statewide politics, Menendez cultivated ties with other diaspora groups. He's member of the Friends of the Irish National Caucus and the Armenian Caucus, and has touted Arslanian's Lebanese-Armenian roots. The senator is sure to show up at Hindu holiday festivals, and once condemned Time Magazine for making fun of Hindu believers in New Jersey. Rabbi Shmuley, himself a Republican, praised Menendez for being a non-Jewish friend of Israel. A local Greek diaspora newspaper simply described Menendez as "our guy."

Aerial photo of Englewood Cliffs just across the river from New York City. Photo: Matthew PettiThese diaspora ties have sometimes landed Menendez in legal trouble. The senator was indicted in 2015 for a scheme that involved Dominican-American doctor Salomon Melgen's attempts to score a contract in the Dominican Republic. (Menendez escaped jail time after a mistrial was declared in 2018, and successfully pressured the Trump administration to grant Melgen clemency.) Friday's indictment similarly involved immigrant businesspeople in Menendez's social circles.Two of the alleged bribe-givers were Lebanese-American real estate developer Fred Daibes and Egyptian-American meat merchant Wael Hana, whom Arslanian was friends with in the past. Like many things in New Jersey politics, the alleged favors to his associates mixed the local and the global. Menendez allegedly tried to protect Daibes and another local businessman, José Uribe, from fraud charges. He also allegedly tried to help Hana maintain his monopoly on halal meat exports to Egypt — a monopoly that caught the attention of Egyptian media in 2019.The most explosive accusations involve Menendez's contacts with Egyptian military and intelligence officers that he met through Hana. Menendez allegedly passed on sensitive data about U.S. Embassy staff and ghost-wrote a letter on behalf of an Egyptian general asking for military aid. Prosecutors also claimed that the Egyptians bribed Menendez to make sure American arms sales to Egypt went through smoothly.Menendez allegedly asked Arslanian to tell Hana that he had approved the sale of 10,000 tank ammunition rounds and 46,000 target practice rounds to Egypt, for use against the Sinai insurgency. Arslanian forwarded the senator's text message to Hana, who forwarded it to an Egyptian army officer, who responded only with a 👍 emoji, according to the indictment.The indictment also includes a photo of Menendez and Arslanian at the house of an unnamed "senior Egyptian intelligence official," whom researcher Amy Hawthorne identified as Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas Kamel. Menendez, on his return from Egypt, allegedly googled "how much is one kilo of gold worth." Hana also allegedly helped pay off the mortgage on Arslanian's Englewood Cliffs home. He returned to the United States and was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City on Tuesday.On Friday, news reporters showed up in Englewood Cliffs, looking for the Mercedes-Benz convertible that Menendez had allegedly bought with Uribe's bribe money. One reporter seemed surprised to see that Arslanian's house — the place where so much cash and gold were hidden — was an average-sized suburban bungalow. But looks are deceiving. Englewood Cliffs is an expensive area, and Arslanian's house is worth about $1.1 million.New Jersey, in a nutshell: global power hidden in plain sight.A version of this article first appeared on the author's Substack page, "Matthew's Notebook."