Category Archives: Entities

France’s far right is wary of Trump, but head-over-heels for Putin

Christopher Dickey reports: Marine Le Pen, 48, who could very possibly be the next president of France, speaks positively but with a certain reserve about U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump. It’s the kind of hesitation one hears when someone talks about a potential ally or partner who might, just might, be crazy. Because Trump does give that impression in Europe and, whatever one might say about her, Le Pen does not.

So, for all the general approbation she’s expressed about Trump’s election, and all the nice things Trump counselor Stephen Bannon has said about her Front National party, and especially about her comely young niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (“Europe’s New Rock Star of the Right,” as Breitbart headlined), according to Marine Le Pen, “nobody” in her party “has had relations … with Mr. Bannon or any other member of the provisional administration of Donald Trump.”

In fact, the mention of her niece and Bannon seemed to set Marine Le Pen off her stride. There are some figures in the Front National, she said, who have longstanding ties to a few Republican leaders, but not exactly to Trump. “Me, I… I …” she said, hesitating and calculating, “I think that these relations will deepen when I will have been elected president.”

So Trump, Bannon, and her niece seem to be points of some confusion for Marine Le Pen. But in an hour-long conference with the Anglo-American Press Association here which ignored almost entirely the likely opponents she will face in the French presidential elections next April, there were two figures she spoke about with perfect clarity: Hillary Clinton, who seems to represent everything she hates; and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who appears to be able to do no wrong. Indeed, she often seemed to be reciting Kremlin talking points. [Continue reading…]

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Intel report says U.S. identifies go-betweens who gave emails to WikiLeaks

CNN reports: US intelligence has identified the go-betweens the Russians used to provide stolen emails to WikiLeaks, according to US officials familiar with the classified intelligence report that was presented to President Barack Obama on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., a veteran of four presidential administrations and one of the nation’s leading intelligence experts, resigned Thursday from President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team because of growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.

Woolsey’s resignation as a Trump senior adviser comes amid frustrations over the incoming administration’s national security plans and Trump’s public comments undermining the intelligence community. [Continue reading…]

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In Turkey, U.S. hand is seen in nearly every crisis

The New York Times reports: Turkish officials accused the United States of abetting a failed coup last summer. When the Russian ambassador to Turkey was assassinated last month, the Turkish press said the United States was behind the attack.

And once again, after a gunman walked into an Istanbul nightclub early on New Year’s Day and killed dozens, the pro-government news media pointed a finger at the United States.

“America Chief Suspect,” one headline blared after the attack. On Twitter, a Turkish lawmaker, referring to the name of the nightclub, wrote: “Whoever the triggerman is, Reina attack is an act of CIA. Period.”

Turkey has been confronted with a cascade of crises that seem to have only accelerated as the Syrian civil war has spilled across the border. But the events have not pushed Turkey closer to its NATO allies. Conversely, they have drifted further apart as the nation lashes out at Washington and moves closer to Moscow, working with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, to secure a cease-fire in Syria.

One story in the Turkish press, based on a routine travel warning issued by the American Embassy in Turkey, was that the United States had advance knowledge of the nightclub attack, which the Islamic State later claimed responsibility for. Another suggested that stun grenades used by the gunman had come from stocks held by the American military. Still another claimed the assault was a plot by the United States to sow divisions in Turkey between the secular and the religious.

Rather than bringing the United States and Turkey together in the common fight against terrorism, the nightclub attack, even with the gunman still on the run, appears to have only accelerated Turkey’s shift away from the West, at a time when its democracy is eroding amid a growing crackdown on civil society. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. intercepts capture senior Russian officials celebrating Trump win

The Washington Post reports: Senior officials in the Russian government celebrated Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as a geopolitical win for Moscow, according to U.S. officials who said that American intelligence agencies intercepted communications in the aftermath of the election in which Russian officials congratulated themselves on the outcome.

The ebullient reaction among high-ranking Russian officials — including some who U.S. officials believe had knowledge of the country’s cyber campaign to interfere in the U.S. election — contributed to the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow’s efforts were aimed at least in part at helping Trump win the White House.

Other key pieces of information gathered by U.S. spy agencies include the identification of “actors” involved in delivering stolen Democratic emails to the WikiLeaks website, and disparities in the levels of effort Russian intelligence entities devoted to penetrating and exploiting sensitive information stored on Democratic and Republican campaign networks.

Those and other data points are at the heart of an unprecedented intelligence report being circulated in Washington this week that details the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and catalogues other cyber operations by Moscow against U.S. election systems over the past nine years. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s debts are widely held on Wall Street, creating new potential conflicts

The Wall Street Journal reports: The debts of President-elect Donald Trump and his businesses are scattered across Wall Street banks, mutual funds and other financial institutions, broadening the tangle of interests that pose potential conflicts for the incoming president’s administration.

Hundreds of millions of dollars of debt attached to Mr. Trump’s properties, some of them backed by Mr. Trump’s personal guarantee, were packaged into securities and sold to investors over the past five years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of legal and property documents.

Mr. Trump has previously disclosed that his businesses owe at least $315 million to 10 companies. According to the Journal’s analysis, Trump businesses’ debts are held by more than 150 institutions. They bought the debt after it was sliced up and repackaged into bonds — a process known as securitization, which has been used for more than $1 billion of debt connected to Mr. Trump’s companies.

As a result, a broader array of financial institutions now are in a potentially powerful position over the incoming president. If the Trump businesses were to default on their debts, the giant financial institutions that serve as so-called special servicers of these loan pools would have the power to foreclose on some of Mr. Trump’s marquee properties or seek the tens of millions of dollars that Mr. Trump personally guaranteed on the loans.

“The problem with any of this debt is if something goes wrong, and if there is a situation where the president is suddenly personally beholden or vulnerable to threats from the lenders,” said Trevor Potter, who served as a general counsel to the presidential campaigns of Republicans George H.W. Bush and John McCain. [Continue reading…]

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Italy’s Five Star Movement part of growing club of Putin sympathisers in West

The Guardian reports: Ten years ago, in the wake of the murder of the leading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a popular comedian-turned-blogger in Italy named Beppe Grillo urged tens of thousands of his readers to go out and buy Putin’s Russia, her searing exposé of corruption under the leadership of Vladimir Putin.

“Russia is a democracy based on the export of gas and oil. If they didn’t export that, they would go back to being the good old dictatorship of once upon a time,” Grillo wrote in a mournful 2006 post about the journalist’s murder.

But today, Grillo’s position on Russia has radically changed. He is now part of a growing club of Kremlin sympathisers in the west – an important shift given that the comedian has become one of the most powerful political leaders in Italy and his Five Star Movement (M5S), the anti-establishment party he created in 2009, is a top contender to win the next Italian election.

Some of Grillo’s lieutenants in the Five Star Movement are vocal supporters of Putin’s policies, including in Syria, where the party’s top spokesman on foreign policy, Manlio Di Stefano, has praised the shelling of Aleppo as a “liberation” of the city. [Continue reading…]

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North Korea able to test intercontinental ballistic missile this year, say experts

The Guardian reports: North Korea is capable of fulfilling its New Year’s threat to start testing an intercontinental ballistic missile in 2017, bringing a long-brewing standoff with the US to the boil in the first year of a Trump administration, weapons experts have warned.

Those experts said the regime in Pyongyang was likely to encounter multiple test failures in developing a two- or three-stage missile capable of reaching the continental United States or Europe, and that it would probably take a few years for such a weapon to become operational. But the first test would trigger a foreign policy crisis in Washington and western capitals.

The looming crisis has sharpened into a battle of personal wills even before Donald Trump takes office on 20 January. On New Year’s Day, the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, declared the country had “entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of intercontinental ballistic missile [ICBM]”.

He further warned that his country would continue to build up its “capability for preemptive strike” as long as the US and its regional allies kept up their own nuclear threat and “stop their war games they stage at our doorstep”. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. obtained evidence after election that Russia leaked emails, say officials

Reuters reports: U.S. intelligence agencies obtained what they considered to be conclusive evidence after the November election that Russia provided hacked material from the Democratic National Committee to WikiLeaks through a third party, three U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

U.S. officials had concluded months earlier that Russian intelligence agencies had directed the hacking, but had been less certain that they could prove Russia also had controlled the release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The timing of the additional intelligence is important because U.S. President Barack Obama has faced criticism from his own party over why it took his administration months to respond to the cyber attack. U.S. Senate and House leaders, including prominent Republicans, have also called for an inquiry.

At the same time, President-elect Donald Trump has questioned the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia tried to help his candidacy and hurt Clinton’s. Russia has denied the hacking allegations.

A U.S. intelligence report on the hacking was scheduled to be presented to Obama on Thursday and to Trump on Friday, though its contents were still under discussion on Wednesday, officials said. [Continue reading…]

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The FBI never asked for access to hacked computer servers

BuzzFeed reports: The FBI did not examine the servers of the Democratic National Committee before issuing a report attributing the sweeping cyberintrusion to Russia-backed hackers, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Six months after the FBI first said it was investigating the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer network, the bureau has still not requested access to the hacked servers, a DNC spokesman said. No US government entity has run an independent forensic analysis on the system, one US intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

“The DNC had several meetings with representatives of the FBI’s Cyber Division and its Washington (DC) Field Office, the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, and U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and it responded to a variety of requests for cooperation, but the FBI never requested access to the DNC’s computer servers [italics his],” Eric Walker, the DNC’s deputy communications director, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

The FBI has instead relied on computer forensics from a third-party tech security company, CrowdStrike, which first determined in May of last year that the DNC’s servers had been infiltrated by Russia-linked hackers, the U.S. intelligence official told BuzzFeed News.

“CrowdStrike is pretty good. There’s no reason to believe that anything that they have concluded is not accurate,” the intelligence official said, adding they were confident Russia was behind the widespread hacks.

The FBI declined to comment.

“Beginning at the time the intrusion was discovered by the DNC, the DNC cooperated fully with the FBI and its investigation, providing access to all of the information uncovered by CrowdStrike — without any limits,” said Walker, whose emails were stolen and subsequently distributed throughout the cyberattack.

It’s unclear why the FBI didn’t request access to the DNC servers, and whether it’s common practice when the bureau investigates the cyberattacks against private entities by state actors, like when the Sony Corporation was hacked by North Korea in 2014.

BuzzFeed News spoke to three cybersecurity companies who have worked on major breaches in the last 15 months, who said that it was “par for the course” for the FBI to do their own forensic research into the hacks. [Continue reading…]

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Vladimir Putin’s newest export: terrorists

The Daily Beast reports: With the establishment of ISIS’s “caliphate,” veterans of the Caucasus or Central Asia insurgencies have found a new port of call, and ISIS has even gone so far as to declare a wilayat, or province, on Russian Federation territory, more out of bluster than anything approaching the medieval reality it has been able to impose on now-dwindling areas of Syria and Iraq.

According to Jacob Zenn, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, “not including al-Qaeda and also not including Uighurs, if you’re looking at Russian-speaking jihadists, you’re looking at mostly Uzbeks.” And very few of them actually come from Uzbekistan but are rather cultivated as migrant laborers inside Russia. “They get picked up by a jamaat,” he said, referring to the Arabic word for an Islamic council, “with professional ISIS recruiters in Russia who get money for each guy they send to ISIS in Syria. The route is through Turkey. There hasn’t been much done about it.”

The reason for that, Zenn says, is that either Russia has willfully turned a blind eye to the exodus or because the FSB can’t keep track of everyone leaving, particularly from networks in Siberia or the Russian regions away from Moscow.

One of the fiercest battalions in ISIS is actually called the Uzbek Battalion; members from it were reported to have fought in Fallujah and kept the city from falling earlier to pro-Iraqi-government forces last year.

“A large number of the Uzbeks in Syria are actually Kyrgyz citizens. Their motivation is the Kyrgyz nationalist movement in Kyrgyzistan.”

Almost all Tajiks join ISIS as opposed to other Islamist or jihadist factions in Syria, according to Zenn.

As for Russians, the total number fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq is impossible to know for sure, as official or semiofficial sources have given varying figures at varying points of time.

Ilya Rogachev, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department on New Challenges and Threats, put the total at “more than 3,200” in November 2016. A year earlier, the FSB estimated that it was closer to 2,900. FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov said in December 2015, that of the 214 jihadists who had repatriated to Russia, “They have all been placed under tight control in law-enforcement agencies: 80 have been tried, 41 more are under arrest.”

Meanwhile, Chechen intelligence, according to the New Yorker, claims that as many as 3,000 to 4,000 Chechens alone have joined ISIS, that is, not counting Russian citizens from other parts of the country.

Indeed, some believe that Chechen republic leader Ramzan Kadyrov, himself a former Islamist insurgent turned Russian state hireling, saw the rise of ISIS as a convenient opportunity to solve his own domestic terrorism problem by exporting it to the Middle East — an allegation that has already been leveled with increasing evidence against Russia’s security services, writ large.

Elena Milashina, a reporter for Russia’s investigative opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, concluded in 2015, based on field research in Dagestan, that “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria in the lead-up to the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, when the Kremlin feared a terror atrocity would scandalize the international sporting competition it spent so many millions of rubles hosting. “In our village there is a person, a negotiator,” Akhyad Abdullaev, the head of a Dagestani village, told Milashina. “He, together with the FSB, brought several leaders out of the underground and sent them off abroad on jihad.”

The FSB’s so-called “green corridor” for transiting these violent fighters, as The Daily Beast reported, included helping them to obtain passports and other necessaries to migrate to Turkey and/or Georgia, and then ultimately to Syria. The belief was that they’d either be killed on a foreign battlefield and thus become one less headache for law enforcement to worry about, or they’d be picked up upon their return home. One unnamed FSB officer confirmed this policy to the International Crisis Group: “We opened borders, helped them all out and closed the border behind them by criminalizing this type of fighting. If they want to return now, we are waiting for them at the borders.”

A year later, in May 2016, Reuters also, “identified five other Russian radicals who, relatives and local officials say, also left Russia with direct or indirect help from the authorities and ended up in Syria.”

Many Russian-speaking jihadists have gone on to positions of great prominence in the organization. [Continue reading…]

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When Donald Trump tweets, it is news to Sean Spicer

The Wall Street Journal reports: Donald Trump’s incoming White House press secretary said Wednesday the president-elect would continue his prolific use of Twitter when in office, adding that even he and other communication advisers aren’t consulted before a tweet is sent out.

“I do not know, I do not get a memo [about the tweets],” Sean Spicer said in a discussion at a University of Chicago Institute of Politics event with former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama adviser David Axelrod. “He drives the train on this.”

Still, Mr. Spicer fought back against the notion that Mr. Trump’s tweets — often peppered with expressive language, some sent in the middle of the night, and on topics as wide-ranging as relations with China, violence in Chicago and performers at his inauguration — would make the role of press secretary more difficult or complicated. [Continue reading…]

CNN reports: China has slammed US President-elect Donald Trump over his use of Twitter to conduct international diplomacy in a commentary published by the country’s official news agency Xinhua.

Trump has earned a reputation for making unpredictable statements on Twitter that often depart from long-standing US policies and he’s made several controversial comments about China.

“The obsession with ‘Twitter diplomacy’ is undesirable,” said the bylined commentary, which only appeared on the agency’s Chinese website. Xinhua is the biggest and most influential of China’s state-run media.

“It is a commonly accepted that diplomacy is not a child’s game — and even less is it business dealing. As former United States Secretary of State [Madeleine] Albright said, Twitter should not be a tool for foreign policy,” the commentary, which was published this week, said. [Continue reading…]

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What do intelligence agencies mean when they express a ‘high confidence level’ in an intelligence finding?

In an interview with former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell, Suzanne Kelly asks: With the understanding that sources and methods need to be kept secret in order for an intelligence organization to be able to effectively do its job, can you give a sense of how rigorous a source is vetted by an intelligence agency? It’s not like they are taking the first thing they hear and calling it intelligence, right? Can you give us an idea of how rigorously information is checked before it is presented to the President?

Morell: The analytic process itself is fact-based. It’s rigorous from the perspective of the analyst who is doing the work, and it is, as you know, reviewed by a large number of people, including other analysts in the agency in which you’re working, other analysts in other intelligence community agencies, as well as your superiors. In the case of a significant judgment like the one we’re talking about, it goes to the very top of the intelligence community. So I’m sure that (Director of National Intelligence) Jim Clapper, (CIA Director) John Brennan, and the other leaders of the Intelligence Community have paid very close attention and have looked very closely at the judgments and how they were arrived at and asked a lot of questions, sent people back to the drawing board to look at this or look at that, so that’s point number one.

Point number two is, since the Iraq war, the Intelligence Community has put a huge amount of focus on stating their level of confidence in a judgment that they make. It turns out that the real mistake in the Iraq war was not the judgment that they came to, but the fact that if they had really thought about it, the analysts would have only said that they only had low confidence in that judgment that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. That would have been a completely different message, right?

That was a mistake, so the lesson learned from Iraq was to really focus on your level of confidence in the judgment you’re making. ‘Not only do I think its going to rain tomorrow, but I have high confidence in that,’ or ‘It’s going to rain tomorrow but you guys have to know that I only have low confidence in that.’ That has become a big focus. What really caught my attention in the leaks that came out about the CIA’s judgment about what Putin was trying to achieve in his interference in the election is that the analysts applied ‘high confidence’ to that judgment. What that says to me, because we don’t attach high confidence levels to just any judgment, very few judgments actually have a high confidence level, so to get that, you have to have more than one source of data. I think we’re looking at multiple sources of data here, and you have to have something that is stronger than just a circumstantial case. I think you have to have some direct evidence, so I think we have some direct evidence.

The stuff that’s being talked about publicly, is all stuff that doesn’t really damage sources and methods, and that’s stuff that seems to be circumstantial, right? How do you know what Russian intentions are simply from the fact that they hacked the DNC, right? It’s the stuff that takes you directly to the top and directly to Putin’s intentions that probably have very sensitive sources and methods involved, and that’s why you’re not hearing anything about them.

So when the CIA says it has high confidence that they not only interfered in the election, but they did with the intent of helping Trump and hurting Clinton, I’d put very high stock in that for the two reasons we just talked about. [Continue reading…]

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Julian Assange’s non-denial denial on Russian interference in the U.S. election

On Saturday, Donald Trump said he knew “things that other people don’t know” about the hacking, and that the information would be revealed “on Tuesday or Wednesday.”

It’s widely believed that the “revelation” Trump was alluding to would come from Julian Assange in an interview the Wikileaks founder did with Sean Hannity that aired on Fox News last night.

During that interview, Hannity pressed Assange on the question of Russian involvement in the hacking:

Assange: There is one person in the world and I think it’s actually only one, who knows exactly what is going on with our publications and that’s me.

Hannity: Can you say to the American people, unequivocally, that you did not get this information about the DNC, John Podesta’s emails — can you tell the American people 1,000% you did not get it from Russia [Assange interjects “yes”] or anybody associated with Russia?

Assange: We can say, have said repeatedly over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not [a] state party.

Assange chooses his words very carefully and for him to provide an unequivocal denial of Russian involvement he had no need to rephrase Hannity’s question. He could have simply responded that his source neither is nor was associated with Russia.

It has always been reasonable to assume that Russia would provide Wikileaks with plausible deniability by using an intermediary who was not overtly a state party or having easily identifiable ties to the Russian government and yet Assange declined to say that his source is/was not associated with Russia. The source might not be a “state party” (however Assange defines that expression) and yet, even now, Assange has not ruled out a Russian association.

Some day Assange may find himself on trial and be pressed on questions about what he did or did not know about his sources. As categorical as he might want statements he makes now to sound, he also most likely wants to leave himself wiggle room so that in the future he can still claim, “I didn’t know.” His concern then (and now) being to avoid being accused of knowingly trying to subvert an election by serving as an agent of a foreign power.

As for his professed dedication to truth-telling, it’s noteworthy that in the course of the interview, Assange repeatedly distorts the hacking narrative provided by the U.S. government by saying the Russia has been accused of hacking voting machines — an accusation that on the few occasions it has been made has swiftly been denied by government officials. In this, as he has often done so in the past, Assange shows that prizes the value not only of information but also disinformation.

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Trump alleges delay in his briefing on ‘so-called’ Russian hacking; U.S. official says there wasn’t one

The Washington Post reports: A U.S. official disputed that there had been any delay in delivering the briefing that Trump requested on Russia, saying that high-level U.S. intelligence officials are scheduled to meet with the president-elect in New York on Friday.

The official said that Trump did receive a regular intelligence briefing on Tuesday, and raised the possibility of confusion on the part of his transition team or schedulers.

“It’s possible that his team has some scheduling disconnect” and that “whatever he received today didn’t meet his expectations,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence matters. But, the official said, the fuller briefing on Russia’s alleged election hacking was never scheduled to occur Tuesday, and that plans for a fuller Friday briefing have been in place for several days.

The officials expected to take part in that session include Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr., CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and the head of the National Security Agency, Adm. Mike Rogers. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: In Mr. Trump’s Twitter post Tuesday evening, he used quotation marks in such a way that suggests he doesn’t accept the intelligence community’s conclusions.

“The ‘Intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case,” he wrote. “Very strange!”

Shortly after Mr. Trump issued his tweet, Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, responded on Twitter and said, “really wish we saw more [president-elect] respect for our intelligence professionals.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s North Korea red line could come back to haunt him

Reuters reports: In three words of a tweet this week, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump vowed North Korea would never test an intercontinental ballistic missile.

“It won’t happen!” Trump wrote after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said on Sunday his nuclear-capable country was close to testing an ICBM of a kind that could someday hit the United States.

Preventing such a test is far easier said than done, and Trump gave no indication of how he might roll back North Korea’s weapons programs after he takes office on Jan. 20, something successive U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have failed to do.

Former U.S. officials and other experts said the United States essentially had two options when it came to trying to curb North Korea’s fast-expanding nuclear and missile programs – negotiate or take military action.

Neither path offers certain success and the military option is fraught with huge dangers, especially for Japan and South Korea, U.S. allies in close proximity to North Korea. [Continue reading…]

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Republican senators introduce bill to move U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem

The Guardian reports: Three Republican senators have introduced legislation to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s official capital and move the US embassy there from Tel Aviv, a plan backed by Donald Trump but likely to ignite fierce protests.

After being sworn into the 115th Congress in Washington, Ted Cruz of Texas, Dean Heller of Nevada and Marco Rubio of Florida unveiled the Jerusalem Embassy and Recognition Act.

Similar moves by Republican majorities over the past two decades have come to nought, but this time they have a sympathetic president-elect in Trump. He has repeatedly pledged to relocate the embassy to Jerusalem and nominated a US ambassador who shares that view.

Critics warn that the move could unleash a wave of violence and further rattle the Israel-Palestine peace process and the future of a two-state solution. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s new favorite jihadis: the Taliban

The Daily Beast reports: More than 15 years into America’s war in Afghanistan, the Russian government is openly advocating on behalf of the Taliban.

Last week, Moscow hosted Chinese and Pakistani emissaries to discuss the war. Tellingly, no Afghan officials were invited. However, the trio of nations urged the world to be “flexible” in dealing with the Taliban, which remains the Afghan government’s most dangerous foe. Russia even argued that the Taliban is a necessary bulwark in the war against the so-called Islamic State.

For its part, the American military sees Moscow’s embrace of the Taliban as yet another move intended to undermine NATO, which fights the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the Islamic State every day.

After Moscow’s conference, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova spoke with reporters and noted that “the three countries expressed particular concern about the rising activity in the country of extremist groups, including the Afghan branch of IS [the Islamic State, or ISIS].”

According to Reuters, Zakharova added that China, Pakistan, and Russia agreed upon a “flexible approach to remove certain [Taliban] figures from [United Nations] sanctions lists as part of efforts to foster a peaceful dialogue between Kabul and the Taliban movement.”

The Taliban, which refers to itself as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, quickly praised the “Moscow tripartite” in a statement posted online on Dec. 29. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli settlements grew on Obama’s watch. They may be poised for a boom on Trump’s

The Washington Post reports: Through eight years of escalating criticism from the world’s most powerful leader, Israeli construction in these sacred, militarily occupied hills never stopped.

Thousands of homes were built. Miles of roadway. Restaurants. Shopping malls. A university.

Here in Shiloh, a tourist center went up, with a welcome video in which the biblical figure Joshua commands the Jewish people to settle the land promised to them by God.

Israeli settlements may be illegal in the eyes of the U.N. Security Council and a major obstacle to Middle East peace in the view of the Obama administration.

But every day they become a more entrenched reality on land that Palestinians say should rightfully belong to them. As the parched beige hilltops fill with red-tiled homes, decades of international efforts to achieve a two-state solution are unraveling.

And global condemnations notwithstanding, the trend is poised to accelerate.

Already, Israel has a right-wing government that boasts it is more supportive of settlement construction than any in the country’s short history. Within weeks, it will also have as an ally a U.S. president, Donald Trump, who has signaled he could make an extraordinary break with decades of U.S. policy and end American objections to the settlements. [Continue reading…]

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