A draft of US President Donald Trump’s new counterterrorism strategy demands that US allies shoulder more of the burden in combating Muslim militants, while acknowledging that the threat of terrorism will never be totally eliminated.
The 11-page draft, seen on Friday by reporters, said the US should avoid costly, “open-ended” military commitments.
“We need to intensify operations against global jihadist groups while also reducing the costs of American ‘blood and treasure’ in pursuit of our counterterrorism goals,” reads the document, which is expected to be released in coming months.
“We will seek to avoid costly, large-scale US military interventions to achieve counterterrorism objectives and will increasingly look to partners to share the responsibility for countering terrorist groups,” it says.
However, it acknowledges that terrorism “cannot be defeated with any sort of finality.”
“As part of its overall approach, the administration is taking a fresh look at the entire US national security strategy, to include the counterterrorism mission — which is especially important since no such strategy has been produced publicly since 2011,” US National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said.
The process is aimed at ensuring “the new strategy is directed against the preeminent terrorist threats to our nation, our citizens, our interests overseas and allies,” Anton said. “Moreover, this new strategy will highlight achievable and realistic goals, and guiding principles.”
The draft strategy paper, which officials said was still being fine-tuned at the White House, describes the threat from Muslim militant groups in stark tones.
It remains to be seen how Trump can square his goal of avoiding military interventions with ongoing conflicts involving US troops in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
Rather than scale back US commitments, he has so far largely adhered to plans of the administration of former US president Barack Obama to intensify military operations against militant groups and granted the Pentagon greater authority to strike them in places like Yemen and Somalia.
Trump might soon reverse years of drawdowns in Afghanistan. His administration is considering boosting by between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers the 8,400-strong US contingent helping Afghan forces fight a resurgent Taliban, current and former US officials have said.
Since Obama released the last US counterterrorism strategy in 2011 before the emergence of the Islamic State, the threat has “diversified in size, scope and complexity from what we faced just a few years ago,” the draft strategy document says.
In addition to the Islamic State, the US and its allies are endangered by a reconstituted al-Qaeda, groups such as the Haqqani network and Hezbollah, as well as from homegrown extremists radicalized online, it says.
The draft’s first guiding principle is that the US “will always act to disrupt, prevent and respond to terrorist attacks against our nation, our citizens, our interests overseas and our allies. This includes taking direct and unilateral action, if necessary.”
Yet, it provides few details on how the US — which has led global counterterrorism efforts since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 — can achieve those goals by passing more of the burden to other countries, many of which lack the requisite military and intelligence capabilities.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS