Category Archives: Donald Trump

Trump envisions a parade showing off American military might

 

The New York Times reports: President Trump said on Monday that he was looking into staging a display of American military might in a Fourth of July parade down Pennsylvania Avenue.

In remarks during a meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations, Mr. Trump said he got the idea after watching the Bastille Day parade in Paris with Mr. Macron in July. During the parade, he could be seen gesticulating and whispering to Mr. Macron at the elaborate display of tanks, soldiers on horseback and military jets flying overhead.

“I came back and one of my early calls were, I think we are going to have to start looking at that ourselves,” the president told Mr. Macron. “We are actually thinking about Fourth of July, Pennsylvania Avenue, having a really great parade to show our military strength.”

Mr. Trump has seemed taken by the idea of a military parade since the early days of his presidency.

His inaugural committee reportedly explored, but rejected, the idea of highlighting military equipment in his inaugural parade. In an interview in January, just days before he took his oath of office, he told a Washington Post reporter that “we’re going to show the people as we build up our military, we’re going to display our military. That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Months later, in an interview with The New York Times in the Oval Office, the president called the Bastille Day event “one of the most beautiful parades I have ever seen” and said that “we should do one day down Pennsylvania Ave.”

“I’ve always thought of that,” he said. “I’ve thought of it long before.”

But the president’s comments on Monday suggested that he has moved beyond musing about the idea of a display of America’s military power. In lengthy comments, he said that his administration had already begun planning for the event, perhaps as early as next year. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. government wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Manafort before and after the election

CNN reports: US investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN, an extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.

The government snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.

Some of the intelligence collected includes communications that sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation. Two of these sources, however, cautioned that the evidence is not conclusive.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which is leading the investigation into Russia’s involvement in the election, has been provided details of these communications.

A secret order authorized by the court that handles the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) began after Manafort became the subject of an FBI investigation that began in 2014. It centered on work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine’s former ruling party, the sources told CNN.

The surveillance was discontinued at some point last year for lack of evidence, according to one of the sources.

The FBI then restarted the surveillance after obtaining a new FISA warrant that extended at least into early this year.

Sources say the second warrant was part of the FBI’s efforts to investigate ties between Trump campaign associates and suspected Russian operatives. Such warrants require the approval of top Justice Department and FBI officials, and the FBI must provide the court with information showing suspicion that the subject of the warrant may be acting as an agent of a foreign power. [Continue reading…]

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With a picked lock and a threatened indictment of Manafort, Mueller’s inquiry sets an aggressive tone

The New York Times reports: Paul J. Manafort was in bed early one morning in July when federal agents bearing a search warrant picked the lock on his front door and raided his Virginia home. They took binders stuffed with documents and copied his computer files, looking for evidence that Mr. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, set up secret offshore bank accounts. They even photographed the expensive suits in his closet.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, then followed the house search with a warning: His prosecutors told Mr. Manafort they planned to indict him, said two people close to the investigation.

The moves against Mr. Manafort are just a glimpse of the aggressive tactics used by Mr. Mueller and his team of prosecutors in the four months since taking over the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s attempts to disrupt last year’s election, according to lawyers, witnesses and American officials who have described the approach. Dispensing with the plodding pace typical of many white-collar investigations, Mr. Mueller’s team has used what some describe as shock-and-awe tactics to intimidate witnesses and potential targets of the inquiry.

Mr. Mueller has obtained a flurry of subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify before a grand jury, lawyers and witnesses say, sometimes before his prosecutors have taken the customary first step of interviewing them. One witness was called before the grand jury less than a month after his name surfaced in news accounts. The special counsel even took the unusual step of obtaining a subpoena for one of Mr. Manafort’s former lawyers, claiming an exception to the rule that shields attorney-client discussions from scrutiny.

“They are setting a tone. It’s important early on to strike terror in the hearts of people in Washington, or else you will be rolled,” said Solomon L. Wisenberg, who was deputy independent counsel in the investigation that led to the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in 1999. “You want people saying to themselves, ‘Man, I had better tell these guys the truth.’”

A spokesman for Mr. Mueller declined to comment. Lawyers and a spokesman for Mr. Manafort also declined to comment.

Few people can upend Washington like a federal prosecutor rooting around a presidential administration, and Mr. Mueller, a former F.B.I. director, is known to dislike meandering investigations that languish for years. At the same time, he appears to be taking a broad view of his mandate: examining not just the Russian disruption campaign and whether any of Mr. Trump’s associates assisted in the effort, but also any financial entanglements with Russians going back several years. He is also investigating whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice when he fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director. [Continue reading…]

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Overly discounting the chances of war against North Korea

Susan B Glasser writes: Back in July, President Donald Trump was already escalating his rhetoric against North Korea as it became clear the rogue state was on the brink of a major breakthrough in its nuclear program, development of a ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States. Still, he insisted, “I don’t draw red lines,” and wouldn’t be sucked into doing so.

But that was before North Korea conducted its largest nuclear weapon test ever and sent missiles flying directly over Japan. And before Trump threatened “fire and fury” and declared a North Korean bomb capable of reaching the United States “unacceptable.” And before Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, warned on Friday that, all talk to the contrary, “there is a military option.”

All of which means that, whether he calls it one or not, Trump now has a red line—a move that a number of U.S. national security hands I’ve spoken with recently consider to be a serious and even “self-inflicted” escalation of what has become a genuine crisis with North Korea. In fact, Trump’s bluster may be more genuine than his reputation for bombast over action suggests: Two Republican veterans of previous administrations told me that McMaster has repeated those public warnings about a serious consideration of military options in private sessions at which they were present.

“The point that the Trump administration seems to be making is that if North Korea achieves an ICBM capability, that is a missile that can reliably reach the United States with a nuclear weapon, that changes everything. Well, it doesn’t. It never has,” says retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the former director of U.S. national intelligence, in a new interview for The Global POLITICO. “This hyping of the nuclear missile, which is merely one form of delivering a weapon, being able to reach the United States is a self-inflicted policy disadvantage which this administration has placed on itself.” [Continue reading…]

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California leads resistance against Trump

Politico reports: Ripping into Donald Trump in the final hours of this year’s legislative session, California lawmakers passed measures urging Congress to censure the president, bucking his immigration policies and seeking to force him to release his tax returns. They also formally called on Trump “to publicly apologize to all Americans for his racist and bigoted behavior.”

If there was any question about the location of the nerve center of the anti-Trump resistance, it was settled with a defiant fusillade of legislation Friday and Saturday memorializing California’s antipathy toward the president.

The end-of-session rush of bills served as a reminder of the limitations of the president’s recent diplomacy with Democrats in Washington — and of an unrelenting effort to keep pressure on the president from afar.

“The issue of resistance is beyond the symbolism,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León said after the session officially closed. “There’s real lives at stake … and I think that a lot of other municipalities, as well as other states, are looking towards California … to be the leader of this resistance.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S. warns that time is running out for peaceful solution with North Korea

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration escalated its rhetoric against North Korea on Sunday, warning that time is running out for a peaceful solution between Kim Jong Un’s regime and the United States and its allies.

Administration officials said the risk from North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is rising, and they underscored that President Trump will confront the looming crisis at the U.N. General Assembly this week. Trump, who spoke by phone with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Saturday, referred to Kim on Twitter as “Rocket Man” and asserted that “long gas lines” are forming in the North because of recent U.N. sanctions on oil imports.

Though Trump’s top aides emphasized that the administration is examining all diplomatic measures to rein in Pyongyang, they made clear that military options remain on the table.

“If North Korea keeps on with this reckless behavior, if the United States has to defend itself or defend its allies in any way, North Korea will be destroyed,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “None of us want that. None of us want war. But we also have to look at the fact that you are dealing with someone [in Kim] who is being reckless, irresponsible and is continuing to give threats not only to the United States, but to all of its allies. So something is going to have to be done.” [Continue reading…]

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Trump and Netanyahu ready united assault against Iran nuclear deal

The Guardian reports: Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu will meet in New York on Monday, at the start of a week in which they intend to launch a concerted assault at the United Nations against the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

The US and Israeli leaders are expected to use their speeches to the UN general assembly on Tuesday to highlight the threat to Middle East stability and security represented by Tehran.

While anxiety about Iran’s expansive role in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon is widely shared, Trump and Netanyahu’s antipathy to the multilateral deal agreed in Vienna two years ago binds them together, even as it sets them apart from the overwhelming majority of other world leaders attending the annual UN summit.

Western allies in Europe – most notably the UK, France and Germany, co-signatories of the 2015 deal – remain committed to the agreement and have signalled they are willing to disagree sharply and openly with Trump on the issue.

Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN who made herself the principal channel for the president’s critique of the deal, has been a lonely voice against it on the security council.

The stance taken by Netanyahu and Trump has also set them apart from their most senior national security advisers. [Continue reading…]

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Steakhouse leak reveals Trump lawyers clash over how much to cooperate with Russia inquiry

The New York Times reports: President Trump’s legal team is wrestling with how much to cooperate with the special counsel looking into Russian election interference, an internal debate that led to an angry confrontation last week between two White House lawyers and that could shape the course of the investigation.

At the heart of the clash is an issue that has challenged multiple presidents during high-stakes Washington investigations: how to handle the demands of investigators without surrendering the institutional prerogatives of the office of the presidency. Similar conflicts during the Watergate and Monica S. Lewinsky scandals resulted in court rulings that limited a president’s right to confidentiality.

The debate in Mr. Trump’s West Wing has pitted Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel, against Ty Cobb, a lawyer brought in to manage the response to the investigation. Mr. Cobb has argued for turning over as many of the emails and documents requested by the special counsel as possible in hopes of quickly ending the investigation — or at least its focus on Mr. Trump.

Mr. McGahn supports cooperation, but has expressed worry about setting a precedent that would weaken the White House long after Mr. Trump’s tenure is over. He is described as particularly concerned about whether the president will invoke executive or attorney-client privilege to limit how forthcoming Mr. McGahn could be if he himself is interviewed by the special counsel as requested.

The friction escalated in recent days after Mr. Cobb was overheard by a reporter for The New York Times discussing the dispute during a lunchtime conversation at a popular Washington steakhouse. Mr. Cobb was heard talking about a White House lawyer he deemed “a McGahn spy” and saying Mr. McGahn had “a couple documents locked in a safe” that he seemed to suggest he wanted access to. He also mentioned a colleague whom he blamed for “some of these earlier leaks,” and who he said “tried to push Jared out,” meaning Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who has been a previous source of dispute for the legal team. [Continue reading…]

Although the phrase leak generally refers to unauthorized intentional disclosures, sometimes leaks are closer to their physical counterpart: the effect of corrosion or defective workmanship – bad plumbing and incompetent plumbers.

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Interior Dept report recommends cuts or changes to seven national land monuments

The Wall Street Journal reports: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has recommended cutbacks or other changes to nearly half the geographic national monuments he recently reviewed at the request of President Donald Trump, according to a report sent to the White House and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The report recommends reducing the boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante preserves in Utah, and reopening hundreds of thousands of square miles of protected oceans in both the Pacific and Atlantic to commercial fishing—in actions numerous environmental groups would likely fight to block.

Those are the findings in a report the secretary sent to Mr. Trump in August. The details of the report weren’t released at the time.

Officials at the Interior Department referred requests for comment to the White House, which declined to comment.

“The Trump administration does not comment on leaked documents, especially internal drafts which are still under review by the president and relevant agencies,” White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said in a statement Sunday.

Besides Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, the list of land monuments recommended for downsizing or otherwise made less restrictive—including by allowing traditional activities including ranching and logging—are Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou; Nevada’s Gold Butte; Maine’s Katahdin; and New Mexico’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks and Rio Grande Del Norte. The ocean preserves Mr. Zinke wants reopened to commercial fishing include Northeast Canyons and Seamounts off the Massachusetts coast and both Rose Atoll and the Pacific Remote Islands.

Mr. Zinke recommended no changes to 17 other national monuments that the president included in the review, which he ordered after complaining some of his predecessors had locked up too much land and water in the preserves that can be created by presidents or Congress under the Antiquities Act of 1906. Most of the monuments that Mr. Zinke reviewed were created by two of Mr. Trump’s Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s divisive presidency reshapes a key part of his private business

The Washington Post reports: For two years, a shelter for victims of domestic violence called Safe+Sound Somerset held its fundraiser golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.

They loved it.

Then they quit it.

“Beautiful golf course. Beautiful facilities. We were treated well. But we couldn’t go back,” said Debbie Haroldsen, the charity’s acting executive director. President Trump’s campaign-trail comments about women and Mexicans had offended staff and clients. They found another course.

In Florida this year, the president’s politics attracted a new client for one of his businesses. Steven M. Alembik, a conservative activist, is planning a $600-per-seat gala at the Mar-a-Lago Club.

His logic: Trump helped Israel. So Alembik will help Trump in return.

“He’s got Israel’s back,” Alembik said. “We’ve got his back.’”

Trump’s divisive political career is reshaping a key — and previously apolitical — part of his business empire. [Continue reading…]

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A giant baby peering over the U.S.-Mexico border is a startling reminder of those affected by DACA

Quartz reports: The French street artist JR has presented a challenging image of cross-border interaction, just as US president Donald Trump declared his intent to wind down a program that allows undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children the ability to stay and work in the US.

Along the US-Mexico border near Tecate, Mexico, JR erected a massive black and white photo of a child looking over the border fence towards the US, with an amused smile.


JR’s installation comes just days after Trump announced that he will end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) after a six-month delay. The boy pictured is a 1-year-old that lives in Tecate, Mexico, according to the New York Times. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s lack of humor reflects his craving for adoration and power

David Litt writes: Donald Trump almost never laughs. The leader of the free world frequently displays a tight-lipped smile, but mirth-wise, that is as far as he will go. Except for the fact that Nazis don’t seem to mind him too much, Mr. Trump is the Captain von Trapp of commanders in chief.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a personality quirk. Some people are just hard laughs. Perhaps Mr. Trump is simply the hardest laugh of all. But the president’s laughter, or lack thereof, is a window into the way he views the world’s most difficult job. For the first time in recent memory, we have a commander in chief without a sense of humor — and America is paying the price.

For most presidents, humor is a tool for building bridges, especially with voters who may not be persuaded by their policy goals. When I wrote speeches for President Barack Obama, we would often open with a throwaway line, something about sports, the weather or the best barbecue joint in town. These were not exactly comedy gold. Still, they served a purpose. Even audience members who didn’t vote for Mr. Obama could appreciate one of his harmless asides.

The presidential equivalent of dad jokes — safe, well-placed quips that crowds are well primed to laugh at — are a bipartisan Oval Office tradition. Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and especially Ronald Reagan knew how to use laugh lines to win over skeptics. On his way into the operating room after a 1981 assassination attempt, Mr. Reagan famously declared to his doctors, “Please tell me you’re all Republicans.” The head surgeon, a Democrat, replied, “We’re all Republicans today.” Even at that moment, the president deftly cleared a patch of common ground.

Mr. Trump, to put it mildly, lacks this ability. With no talent for gracious one-liners, he finds himself ill at ease in front of all but the most adoring audiences. This is not to say that he is without charisma. The difference lies in the way his charisma is deployed. Surrounded by followers at rallies, he uses his well-honed sense of timing as a cudgel. He jeers. He mocks. His goal is to insult, rather than to entertain.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Mr. Trump governs the way he delivers a punch line: consolidating support among the hard core while alienating everybody else. [Continue reading…]

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Trump shares GIF of himself striking Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball

The Washington Post reports: President Trump retweeted a meme on Sunday morning that showed him hitting Hillary Clinton in the back with a golf ball, prompting another round of outrage from critics who felt the president’s tweets had once again crossed the line.

The animated GIF spliced together a clip of Trump swinging a golf club with footage of Clinton falling, apparently edited to appear as though a golf ball had struck her down.

The image was originally posted as a reply to the president by a Twitter user named @Fuctupmind, whose bio consists of pro-Trump, anti-Clinton hashtags.


The retweet immediately drew hundreds of Trump’s critics and supporters into a familiar vortex of debate, with many criticizing the GIF for seeming to encourage violence and others defending the president.

“You’re a child. Beneath the dignity of your office. Grow up. Be a man,” the actor James Morrison replied to Trump.

“The man is unfit,” declared Walter M. Shaub Jr., the former director of the independent Office of Government Ethics who resigned in July after clashing with the White House. [Continue reading…]

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Insane Clown Posse fans outnumber Trump supporters on the National Mall

HuffPost reports: Nine months into the administration of President Donald Trump, fans of the eccentric Detroit rap duo Insane Clown Posse assembled a larger rally on the national mall this Saturday than the president’s diehard supporters stationed a few hundred yards away.

The dueling rallies reflected the difficulty that any sitting president has in mobilizing his base, and the particular challenge that Trump has as he struggles to pass major legislation and honor his campaign promises.

Unlike the pro-Trump rally, Juggalos, as clown-makeup-wearing Insane Clown Posse fans call themselves, protested on the National Mall on Saturday for an actual specific purpose. That could explain why the gathering that surrounded the base of the reflection pool at the Lincoln Memorial this afternoon was significantly larger than the pro-Trump rally. [Continue reading…]

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Conflicting statements on Trump administration’s position on Paris climate accord

The Wall Street Journal reports: Trump administration officials said Saturday the U.S. wouldn’t pull out of the Paris Agreement, offering to re-engage in the international deal to fight climate change, according to multiple officials at a global warming summit.

The U.S. position on reviewing the terms of its participation in the landmark accord came during a meeting of more than 30 ministers led by Canada, China and the European Union in Montreal. In June, President Donald Trump said the U.S. would withdraw from the deal unless it could find more favorable terms.

U.S. officials in Montreal, led by White House senior adviser Everett Eissenstat, broached revising U.S. climate-change goals, two participants said, signaling a compromise that would keep the U.S. at the table even if it meant weakening the international effort. Still, the move would maintain international unity behind the painstakingly negotiated Paris accord, after Mr. Trump suggested he might seek a new agreement.

“The U.S. has stated that they will not renegotiate the Paris accord, but they will try to review the terms on which they could be engaged under this agreement,” European Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Cañete said.

In a statement Saturday afternoon, a White House spokeswoman said the administration’s position on Paris had not changed, but also noted that the president’s stance on withdrawing from the deal had never been set in stone.

“There has been no change in the U.S.’s position on the Paris agreement,” said deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters. “As the president has made abundantly clear, the U.S. is withdrawing unless we can re-enter on terms that are more favorable to our country.”

Multiple participants at the Montreal gathering said Mr. Eissenstat’s approach, though it is likely to entail a significant reduction in the U.S.’s ambition to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, fueled optimism among proponents of the Paris deal. Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January, officials from China to the EU and Canada have tried to convince his administration that fighting climate change is also a boon for the economy and jobs, and not just an ideological battle.

“We are pleased the U.S. continues to engage and recognize the economic opportunity of clean growth, including clean energy,” said Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. [Continue reading…]

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Another prosecutor joins Trump-Russia probe

Politico reports: An attorney working on the Justice Department’s highest-profile money laundering case recently transferred off that assignment in order to join the staff of the special prosecutor investigating the Trump campaign’s potential ties to Russia, POLITICO has learned.

Attorney Kyle Freeny was among the prosecutors on hand Friday as a spokesman for former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jason Maloni, testified before a grand jury at federal court in Washington.

Freeny, whose assignment to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s staff has not been previously reported, is the 16th lawyer known to be working with the former FBI chief on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. She departed from the courthouse Friday with two other members of Mueller’s squad: former Criminal Division chief and Enron prosecutor Andrew Weissman and Civil Division appellate attorney Adam Jed, a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Before being detailed to Mueller’s team, Freeny was shepherding the Justice Department’s headline-grabbing effort to seize the profits from the film “The Wolf of Wall Street” on grounds that the film was financed with assets looted from the Malaysian government. [Continue reading…]

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Digging in for next decade, U.S. expands Kabul security zone

The New York Times reports: Soon, American Embassy employees in Kabul will no longer need to take a Chinook helicopter ride to cross the street to a military base less than 100 yards outside the present Green Zone security district.

Instead, the boundaries of the Green Zone will be redrawn to include that base, known as the Kabul City Compound, formerly the headquarters for American Special Operations forces in the capital. The zone is separated from the rest of the city by a network of police, military and private security checkpoints.

The expansion is part of a huge public works project that over the next two years will reshape the center of this city of five million to bring nearly all Western embassies, major government ministries, and NATO and American military headquarters within the protected area.

After 16 years of American presence in Kabul, it is a stark acknowledgment that even the city’s central districts have become too difficult to defend from Taliban bombings.

But the capital project is also clearly taking place to protect another long-term American investment: Along with an increase in troops to a reported 15,000, from around 11,000 at the moment, the Trump administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan is likely to keep the military in place well into the 2020s, even by the most conservative estimates. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. plan for new Afghan force revives fears of militia abuses

The New York Times reports: Around the time President Trump announced his new strategy for Afghanistan, a delegation of American and Afghan military officials arrived in New Delhi.

They wanted to learn more about the Indian Territorial Army, which has been deployed in contentious areas to ease the burden on India’s regular army.

The American military has turned to that force as a potential model for how to maintain the Afghan government’s waning control — without too high a cost — in difficult parts of Afghanistan at a time when the Taliban are resurgent.

But diplomats and human rights groups worry that the proposal looks much like an older model — the Afghan Local Police, local militias who were trained and paid by the Americans but were accused of a long series of human violations, including abuse of civilians and sexual abuse of boys. [Continue reading…]

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