The Smoke Eater For Fri., March 6, 2020
Warren's troll problem, cyber shenanigans, and a week in Afghanistan.
Good afternoon, this is The Smoke Eater for Friday, March 6, 2020, and it's a dirty job.
Quick Hit
* Elizabeth Warren gets real with Rachel Maddow * Bernie's olive branch to the former Soviet Union * A peak into the Trump campaign's cyber shenanigans * The humanitarian crisis you'd rather ignore * The U.S. broke Afghanistan, the U.S. should pay for Afghanistan *
NOTE: This is another one of those Fridays where I try to catch up on some of the stuff I haven't had time to talk about. Just remember that the The Smoker Eater is mobile friendly, ad-free and supported by super awesome readers. If you want to be super awesome, tip me on Ko-Fi, or subscribe to my Patreon!
Some Rather Useless 2020 Stuff
Sen. Elizabeth Warren sat down with Rachel Maddow for an rather heartfelt exit interview. Warren boasted about murdering Mike Bloomberg's presidential ambitions; criticized the administration's response to COVID-19, said campaigns should be held responsible for their genuinely shitty internet troll brigades, and expressed regret for having to explain to little girls that it would take a little longer for a woman to get into the White House.
The New York Times has a story about Bernie Sanders' effort as Mayor of Burlington to establish a Soviet sister in the 1980s, and how the Kremlin plotted to use him, and other well-intentioned politicos, as propaganda tools. The story isn't as bad as it seems, and the Sanders campaign maintains it pursued the relationship during the perestroika and glasnost reforms championed by then-Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, but it's unlikely to win him any favors in Florida.
Facebook has taken down deceptive ads bought by a group closely aligned with the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee that redirected users to a dubious survey and money beg on a "Certified Website" of the Trump campaign. As first reported by Popular Information, the ads contained language that attempted to convince users they were taking an "official 2020 Congressional District Census." Facebook initially brushed off criticisms by saying the ads didn't violate its policies. The brewing shitstorm boiled over when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commented, "Facebook has something that is an official document of Donald Trump as saying, ‘Fill this out, this is a census form’ — it is not. It is an absolute lie, a lie that is consistent with the misrepresentation policy of Facebook." A few hours later, Facebook doubled-back and said that after "further review" it found the ads misrepresent "the dates, locations, times and methods for census participation."
Andrew Marantz has a huge profile of Trump's campaign manager, Brad Parscale, in the New Yorker where Parscale brags about turning the RNC "into one of the largest data-gathering operations in United States history" that sucks up millions of dollars and personal information from anyone interested in the Trump campaign.
Bad Guys Doing Bad Things
North Korea is trying to create it's own cryptocurrency to circumvent international sanctions, Vice reports. In recent years the DPRK has used a various forms of cyber crime to accrue cryptocurrency, and effectively launder that into physical currency. Nerds say that the move to create a state-backed cryptocurrency would give the state more control over how and where it's money is being spent. This has already been attempted by countries like Iran, Venezuela and Russia with varying degrees of success.
Russia and Turkey have agreed to a cease-fire in Northwestern Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayipp Erdogan had called for Russia to step aside and stop backing Syrian President Bashar al Assad following the death of 55 Turkish soldiers last week. Regular air and artillery strikes have created a humanitarian disaster, and things are likely to get worse after the US and NATO declined to back Turkey's invasion of Syria. In the hope of forcing the EU's hand, Turkey is now telling refugees to go to Europe. Refugees have begun flocking to Greece only to find out the country's new center-right government wants nothing to do with them. Much of this very complicated situation can be traced backed to the Trump administration's decision to abandon support for Syria's Kurdish rebel fighters last year. Today multiple news outlets are reporting people on the ground feel the cease-fire is only a temporary solution to a growing problem that the US and EU would rather ignore.
The International Criminal Court has given the greenlight for an investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the Afghan government, and the U.S. Nerds think the investigation is unlikely to carry much weight as the U.S. does not recognize the authority of the I.C.C, and made outwardly hostile gestures towards its investigators under the Trump administration.
One More Thing...
It's a good thing the front pages are dominated by COVID-19 and 2020 because someone might notice the administration's so-called peace deal with the Taliban is falling apart. Cracks in the agreement began to show before the ink was even dry: The Afghans are refusing preconditions with the Taliban, the Taliban is violating core principles of the agreement, and the Trump administration is left defending shredded paper to foreign policy pros who've all but said, "I told you so."
The agreement was only signed on Saturday, but by Sunday talking heads and politicos were dumping on it. By Monday, the Taliban was saying it would resume attacks on Afghan security forces, and the Pentagon was trying to cast doubt on an attack on civilians that left three dead and 11 wounded. The Taliban denied responsibility and said it could have been the result of "enmities among different tribes," raising further questions about other militant groups in the region.
On Tuesday, Trump said he had a "very good" phone call with Taliban political leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and said there would be "no violence." Trump being the first president to hold a direct phone call with a militant group responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, allies, and an untold number of civilians would be news in and of itself, but he also suggested that this wasn't his first call with Taliban leaders.
Take a moment to imagine the political fallout if Barack Obama had personally held multiple conversations with the leader of a terrorist group, boasted about "meeting personally with Taliban leaders in the not-too-distant future," and thanked them for "killing terrorists."
By Wednesday, the spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan, Col. Sonny Leggett, was tweeting the US had conducted a "defensive" airstrike against Taliban fighters who were "actively attacking" Afghan security forces. Legget went on to say that on the day of Trump's call with Taliban leaders, the Taliban had "conducted 43 attacks on #ANDSF checkpoints in #Helmand," adding the Taliban, "appear intent on squandering this [opportunity] and ignoring the will of the people for #peace. #Showyourcommitment"
The air strikes, the first in 11 days, came after a "reduction in violence" agreement between the US and the Taliban that preceded Saturday's peace deal. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley downplayed the attacks during a congressional hearing, saying, "There is no attacks on 34 provincial capitals, there is no attacks in Kabul, there’s no high profile attacks, there’s no suicide bombers, there’s no vehicle borne suicide, no attack against the US forces, no attack against coalition." Milley clarified that, "Yes, there were significant numbers of attacks, small attacks. They were all beaten back."
Defense Secretary Mark Esper similarly told Congress that the Taliban wasn't attacking US and coalition forces, but that, "They’ve got their range of hard-liners and soft-liners and so they’re wrestling with that too, I think."
On Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo emerged from the seventh floor of Foggy Bottom and told reporters that the US "expected" the "upsurge in violence." "In no uncertain terms," Pompeo said, "violence must be reduced immediately for the peace process to move forward.” Pompeo noted that the airstrikes were intended as a message to the Taliban to follow through on their commitment to the agreement.
The three-and-a-half-page agreement the US signed with the Taliban was conducted without the participation of the Afghan government (the same one the US has propped up for 18 years). It stipulates that all 13,000 U.S. forces ( including "non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel") will leave the country within 14 months, release Taliban members from sanctions, and the Afghans have to begin releasing up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners. In exchange, the Taliban has to play nice with the Afghan government, stop blowing stuff up, stop helping other terrorists blow stuff up, and pinky swear they'll never again play war with other violent religious extremists groups in the region.
The Taliban and the Afghan government are supposed to start what's been called intra-Afghan negotiations next week. The agreement says the Afghans have to bring the Taliban into the Afghan national government. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has refused to release any prisoners before the negotiations, telling reporters on Sunday, "It was requested, it can be included in the negotiation and it can be a part of the agenda of the negotiation, but it can’t be a precondition." Ghani argues the prisoners are his only leverage, and that his government only agreed to negotiate with the Taliban.
Late this morning Trump told a press gaggle that the Taliban could again seize power in Afghanistan. Trump said it was "not supposed to happen that way but it possibly will," adding that he didn't know if the Afghan government could protect itself. "I don't know," Trump said. "I can't answer that question. We'll see what happens."
It's still too early to say the agreement or negotiations failed, but the prospects are grim. In October, Vox explained the Taliban viewed Trump's original plan -- that would have been signed at Camp David around September 11 -- as "America's surrender." Benjamin Wittes points out that both Trump's campaign pledge to end "endless wars" lines up with the Taliban's goal lines up with the Taliban's goal of seeing all U.S. forces leave Afghanistan. Madiha Afzal warns that a sudden and complete withdraw erases major victories in women's rights, opens the door for religious killings and vigilantism, and gives extremist groups the international legitimacy they've desired. It also sends a signal to other violent extremist groups that eventually Americans will get bored and go home.
Ordinary Afghans recall the last time the US swooped in with military aid and lofty promises during the Soviet invasion of the 1980s. The US promptly left after the Soviets were defeated; Congress shrugged off building a few schools and roads. Left with nothing but rubble, the Taliban rose up and seized power, and a decade later, the U.S. was back in Afghanistan fighting some of the same mujihadeen Ronald Reagan once hailed as freedom fighters. So we went back to Afghanistan, kicked out the Taliban, installed a new government in Kabul, and hung up signs that said, "No Jihadis Allowed."
Both the Bush and Obama administrations failed at conducting peace talks for a multitude of reasons, the least of which being the idiotic notion that the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists. Carter Malkasian argues in Foreign Affairs that Bush administration missed its window for diplomacy the moment it started the war in Iraq. Early in the Obama administration, the late Richard Holbrooke attempted to negotiate with the Taliban, but he was overruled by trigger happy folks who assumed the counter-terrorism surge that worked in Iraq could be copy and pasted into Afghanistan. The rise of ISIS further complicated budding peace efforts, but when the Trump administration came to power, ISIS was already on the ropes thanks to the Obama administration's unorthodox coalition of anti-ISIS forces. Instead of using new lines of communication to create a dialogue with extremist groups, Trump sent another surge to Afghanistan.
Malkasian writes that the failures in Afghanistan might have been obvious to anyone who's studied history, but the ignorance from multiple administrations (and the subsequent cover-ups) led directly to the blind arrogance the current administration has used as an excuse to bail out of America's longest war for nothing more than political expediency. The result has created strange bedfellows between former national security advisors Susan Rice and John Bolton who think it's insulting enough to the families of the dead, and paves the way for future conflict.
Though a number of the problems over the last 18 years are partially the result of corruption in the Afghan government, this constant pattern of fight'em and fuck'em ignores the reason why Afghans are so skeptical of foreigners. By once again abandoning a heavily armed and shattered country, the Trump administration is giving the Taliban big, red hats that say, "Make Afghanistan Great Again."
OK, now here's a warm and fuzzy critter video: IT'S PRINCE MICHAEL!
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