RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/dont-believe-tired-myths-ending-18-year-war-afghanistan/

Zalmay Khalilzad, the Trump administration’s chief negotiator with the Taliban, has endured a lot of pressure in the last week. Former U.S. ambassadors, Fox News pundits, and think tank analysts alike have denounced his draft agreement in full without knowing what is in the final document.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s advisers have already expressed that the terms of the accord “need serious debate and revision.” Words such as “surrender,” “defeat,” and “abandonment” are being tossed in the air as if the United States has an obligation to serve as the Afghan government’s defenders in perpetuity.

Khalilzad and his boss, President Trump, will feel even more heat as additional details become available to the public. Trump’s cancellation on September 7 of a direct meeting between himself, the Taliban, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is a blinking red light that the president is increasingly experiencing second-thoughts about the entire process. So it is as good a time as any to reexamine the usual myths that will resurface in editorials and television segments over the ensuing weeks as opponents try to tank any agreement that could conclude U.S. involvement in this 18-year war.

Myth 1: The U.S. Is Signing Its Own Defeat

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274857/lets-not-make-deal-taliban-bruce-thornton

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 began a needed reassessment of our ossified foreign policy doctrines. Trump has rejected in part the shibboleths of “multilateralism,” “transnational institutions,” “democracy promotion,” and “diplomatic engagement” as the most important elements of foreign relations. He’s returned the focus to America’s national interests and security, and to America’s military strength as the guarantor of both. Allies now are valued insofar as they complement our interests, and honor reciprocal obligations. Matching action to words, he’s withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords and the multinational agreement with Iran on limiting its program to develop nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, and scolded NATO allies over their meager spending on defense.

These moves have all been a welcome corrective to the Obama-era globalist prejudices and received ideas that reduced the U.S. to just one of many international players, one “mindful of its own imperfections,” as Obama put it, and morally obligated to cede sovereignty to supranational institutions and multinational treaties. The subsequent howling of the decrepit internationalist establishment about Trump’s “disrespecting” allies and violating the “rules-based, liberal international order” is the sound of feckless, moribund institutional oxen being gored.

Yet it is testimony to the staying power of such globalist institutions that even Trump seemingly ascribes to some of their dogma. Foremost is the idea that diplomatic negotiation, what Trump would call “the art of the deal,” can resolve differences and settle conflicts without a credible threat of overwhelming force to punish violations of the agreement. Hence the ongoing negotiations with the Taliban, the jihadist movement that nurtured al Qaeda in the years before 9/11, and continues to shelter and support other jihadist outfits like ISIS bent on attacking our interests and security.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/05/why-is-trump-surrendering-to-the-taliban/

President Trump may be the author of The Art of the Deal, but how can someone who knows so well that the Obama-Kerry agreement with terrorist Iran was a bad deal, and who understood the importance of annihilating ISIS (and who then did so) at the same time think the terrorist Taliban in Afghanistan will be restrained by a piece of paper backed up by no credible U.S. military pressure?

The administration has enlisted the diplomatic prowess of an admittedly impressive personage in Afghan-American former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (and, before that, to Afghanistan and to Iraq) Zalmay Khalizad, who held numerous foreign policy posts under Reagan and both Bushes.

But has there ever been a more impressive diplomat than Henry Kissinger? Yet the deal he negotiated with North Vietnam in 1973, for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize, was followed two years later by the Communist North’s conquest of South Vietnam. As the disaster materialized, South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu justifiably declared: “the United States did not keep its word … The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom.”

The Vietnam Syndrome must stop. There is simply no way to negotiate successfully with an anti-democratic aggressor without military force hanging close over that aggressor’s head. And yet President Trump has already announced that U.S. troops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has been making territorial gains for years, will soon be reduced by more than a third, from 14,000 to 8,600. A deal would reportedly mean the withdrawal of most U.S. forces by November 2020.

It will soon be 18 years that our military has been in Afghanistan. Let’s scan the early history. “In late 2001, the CIA led a campaign to topple the Taliban with the support of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s foe inside Afghanistan,” the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Riedel wrote in 2009, noting that, “the results were spectacular and came quickly. By early 2002 the Taliban were routed, al-Qaida was on the run and the two were retreating into Pakistan.”

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

LAF soldiers on a foot patrol along the Blue Line in the vicinity of Meiss el Jabel.

American security assistance generally is predicated on the principle that a smaller or poorer country that has U.S. equipment and training will be better able to defend common interests than one that doesn’t. Sometimes it works that way. But sometimes it puts the U.S. in bed with people who want our weapons and training but do not share our bottom line — their enemy is not ours; their rules of engagement are not ours; their government, in fact, is not a friend of ours, but maybe if we reward it thoroughly enough it won’t actively oppose our interests.

In that latter category is Lebanon.

As Hezbollah announced it is preparing to attack Israel, we must consider the role of the United States in arming and training the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the national army of Lebanon that technically is an arm of the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut.

Lebanon is not a functional country and there are those — the Assad family in Syria, for example — who don’t think it should be a country at all. Syria didn’t recognize the independence of Lebanon until 2008, after a 29-year occupation that ended in 2005. By law, power is shared among religious and ethnic groups — 19 in the current parliament.

Hezbollah, created, armed and run by Iran as a Shiite supremacist military force, has both the majority in the political cabinet in Beirut and a separate, private army complete with precision missiles and rule-making authority in the southern part of the country. Lebanon has little economy, but Hezbollah runs rackets — mostly arms and drugs, mostly in South America — and kills people in Europe, and Jews and Israelis around the world.

Hezbollah kills Americans, too. Until 2001, it had killed more Americans than any other terror organization — including 241 American service members in 1983 in their barracks in Beirut, the greatest loss of American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rouhani-is-not-at-trumps-level/

French president Emmanuel Macron made news by inviting Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif to the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Biarritz last weekend. Macron wants to renew European leadership on the global stage — as well as his standing at home — by jump-starting diplomacy between the United States and Iran. At a press conference yesterday, Macron said he’d given President Trump prior notice. “He was informed at each minute about the solution — the situation, sorry,” Macron said. “And the idea for me was, in case of structural move and — important move and important solutions — perhaps to have meeting between ministers, not at President Trump’s level, because President Trump’s level is President Rouhani.”

Pardonnez-moi, monsieur le président. Rouhani is not “Trump’s level.” Rouhani is prime minister of Iran. He plays an important role in Iranian politics. He is the public face of the regime. But he is neither head of state nor, in actuality, head of government.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14731/america-can-stop-china-from-dominating-artificial

The People’s Republic of China, nonetheless, is already an AI powerhouse, and for America to maintain its edge—and to prevent U.S. tech from being used for exceedingly disturbing purposes —Washington should force U.S. companies to end cooperative AI projects in China.

The West should be seriously concerned: whoever wins at AI will both dominate the global economy and field the most destructive conventional military force.

Unfortunately, American companies are helping China’s leaders in what many call—correctly—crimes against humanity. For instance, AI researchers from Microsoft, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Michigan State University gave keynote speeches at the Chinese Conference on Biometric Recognition in Xinjiang in August of last year on facial recognition, a social-control technology.

Some of Google’s research is in China. The company has three AI operations there: the Google AI China Center in Beijing, established in 2017, and partnerships with China’s two premier educational institutions, Peking University and Tsinghua University….If the labs remain open, the net flow of AI learning will be out of the U.S. into China.

Moreover, Chinese researchers, if they could not work for American companies in China, would not, as Vox suggests, necessarily find employment in their homeland. Some of those seeking research slots would follow other Chinese to the United States, and that would exacerbate one of Beijing’s big AI vulnerabilities. “China’s Path to AI Domination Has a Problem: Brain Drain,” is the title of an August 7 article posted by the MIT Technology Review. The U.S. can make that crucial problem even more severe.

China, writes Amy Webb in Inc., has been “building a global artificial intelligence empire, and seeding the tech ecosystem of the future.” It has been particularly successful, Webb, the founder of the Future Today Institute, believes. “China is poised to become its undisputed global leader, and that will affect every business,” she notes.