Donald Trump "still leads" the Republican Party

Most people this side of the Atlantic will probably not have heard of Ronna McDaniel but she's the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee and therefore she is a big influencer. She says Donald Trump is still very much the boss of the Republican Party and the party's heaviest hitter and donation attraction, and so everyone has to acknowledge it. It's true because he has just helped get donations for the party of more than $100 million, every time he goes out to speak all his voter fans are there to hear him and whatever he says makes big headlines. Can anyone else in the Republican Party match all that? The answer is no, but yet again it underlines the dire straits the party is in if no one but Trump is their future. McDaniel said in a commercial radio interview that Trump was the most popular Republican in the country and therefore remained the leader. Full stop. On that basis, Trump almost has an obligation to stand for president again, if the chairwoman of the national commitee believes there is no one else to touch him. Trump I'm sure will be delighted by her words but his potential would-be rivals for the top job will no doubt be fuming.

What is Biden going to do about Afghanistan?

Do Joe Biden and his national security team have something up their sleeve to end this daily slaughter in Afghanistan? It just can't go on like this, with the Taliban now seizing control of cities. Perhaps Biden knew this was what was going to happen and made the decision that it was no longer of concern to the United States, never mind the likelihood that women in Afghanistan will have no future and that life will be an appalling nightmare for all Afghans if the Taliban seize power. Biden will be blamed, so what is he going to do? I fear the answer is: nothing, apart from authorising more and more airstrikes. It seems very much like a last gasp from the United States. A big gasp, however, since both B-52s and the fearsome AC-130 Spectre gunships are back in action, both of which the Taliban have learned to dread over the years. But they know this is an act of desperation by the Americans and it cannot go on for ever. Peace, in the meantime, is on the back burner.

Biden needs his infrastructure bill done and dusted

A huge amount rests on Joe Biden's ability to get his $1 trillion infrastructure programme passed by the Senate because right now his honeymoon period is over and a lot of things are going wrong. It sounds as if he is in luck because there should be enough Republicans ready to get his programme through the Senate in the next day or so. He needs a success more than ever because his most important policies are falling apart. Only now has he persuaded 70 per cent of the population to get vaccinated - his original promised date was July 4th. And while his vaccination programme is being challenged, Delta variant infection rates are climbing alarmingly and there's talk of lockdowns reemerging. The other big issue going nowhere is immigration. Unprecedented numbers of people are queuing up to get over the Mexican border and the Biden administration does not appear to have a clue what to do about it. Certainly Kamala Harris, vice president who was handed immigration as part of her portfolio has come up with nothing of note. And then there's Afghanistan. The withdrawal of US troops is leading to appalling atrocities by the Taliban, with the killing of hundreds of civilians. So the infrastructure legislation is all he has to revive his popularity. Yes indeed the honeymoon is truly over.

Please talk peace with the Taliban, says US secretary of state.

The only images coming out of Afghanistan are violence violence violence. There is nothing to stop the Taliban rampage, apart of course from the 350,000 or so Afghan troops and police, and Afghan Air Force and US airstrikes from afar, but so far nothing has stopped the insurgents from making their relentless way towards Kabul. So the plea by Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, to President Ghani,the Afghan leader, to accelerate peace talks with the Taliban is pretty meaningless because there is absolutely no chance that the Taliban will stop fighting, lay down their arms, and talk seriously about peace. They have no reason to because they are making so much military progress that they have no time or interest in reawakening the peace talks which have dried up in Doha, Qatar. Both Blinken and Ghani, in a chat on the phone, condemned the Taliban violence. But the Taliban won't care about that either. They have basically taken no notice of anyone else in 20 years, especially not the Americans, so they are hardly going to react positively to pleas for peace when they haven't finished their fighting and killing. Blinken said if they didn't stop the violence they would be isolated from the international community. But do they care? I don't think so.They have already got the Chinese sidling up to them and promising support - as you would expect from the ever-conspiratorial Beijing - so I'm afraid with the US troops now 95 per cent pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban are not going to bother to listen to Blinken or anyone else from the US. That's just the way it is and it's a tragedy.

US artificial intelligence experiment to predict enemy's next move

The Pentagon is testing ways to forecast the future using artificial intelligence and cloud computing resources which could uncover an enemy’s next move days before it actually happens. Predicting the future is normally “a mug’s game” but advances in computer technology and the increasing focus on using robotic brains to replace humans to assist decision-making have opened up science-fiction possibilities for warfighting. The US defence department has created a new acronym for the computerised crystal ball gazing, calling it GIDE or global information dominance experiments. The aim is to achieve “decision-making superiority”, said General Glen VanHerck, commander of Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD) both of which protect the US homeland from every form of enemy attack. “What we’ve seen is the ability to get way further what I call left, left of being reactive to actually being proactive, and I’m talking not minutes and hours, I’m talking days,” he said at a Pentagon briefing. America’s peer competitors - Russia and China – “hold the homeland at risk in every vector and every domain”, he said. In the latest of three experiments carried out by the Pentagon and all 11 combatant commands, one of the focuses was on envisaging a threatened takeover of the Panama Canal “by a peer competitor”, disrupting a crucial line of communication for US military logistics, the general said. During the experiment, artificial intelligence systems exploited a mass of data beyond any human ability to absorb to predict how the enemy might react by examining patterns and changes. Once alerted to anything significant, commanders fed the information to geospatial intelligence satellites (GEOINT) which can examine human activity on Earth, in order for them to “take a closer look at what might be going on in a specific location,” VanHerck said. “The ability to see days in advance creates decision space,” he said. In the past, secret information provided by the intelligence services could take a long time for an analyst to pore over. “Now the machine can take a look and tell you exactly how many cars are in a parking lot or how many airplanes are parked on a ramp or if a submarine is getting ready to leave or if a missile’s going to launch. Where that may have taken days before, or hours, today it can take seconds or less than minutes,” he said. The project outlined by the general which has now been researched for about a year, echoes the Hollywood film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg. In the 2002 film, future technology makes it possible for the police to catch criminals before they have committed a crime. VanHerck said: "Decision space for me as an operational commander [is] to potentially posture forces to create deterrence operations [for] the secretary [of defence] or even the president." It represented "a fundamental change in the way we use information and data" to accelerate decision-making at the tactical and strategic level at a time when both Russia and China were challenging the US on a daily basis, he said. The project was not about new ways of gathering data. “This information exists from today’s satellites, today’s radar, today’s undersea capabilities, today’s cyber, today’s intelligence capabilities,” he said. “What we’re doing is making that data available and shared into a cloud where machine learning and artificial intelligence look at it and they process it really quickly and provide it to decision makers,” he said. “This gives us days of advanced warning and ability to react. Where in the past, we may not have put eyes on with an analyst of a GEOINT satellite image, now we are doing that within minutes or near real-time,” VanHerck said.

The scramble to get out of Afghanistan

Before the Taliban takes over most of Afghanistan there is a mad scramble by the US to get thousands of Afghan interpreters and their families out and into safety in America. These Afghans were paid well and their role was vital during the 20 years of the US-led campaign but they risked their lives and those closest to them, never more so than now as the Taliban takes over more and territory. But the evacuation is taking a long time. The first 200 or so interpreters and families have arrived in the US and are being looked after and processed at Fort Lee army base in Virginia. But there are at least 1,700 interpreters to bring to the US and now the State Department has announced that thousands more Afghans who worked for American organisations in one form or other in Afghanistan are also to be allowed to leave for the US. Except there's a nasty stipulation. They have to leave on their own steam, no special flights for them, so queuing up for flights out of Kabul is going to be a high-risk move. It all looks like last-minute panic on the part of the US administration as they watch all the hard-won towns and cities during the 20-year campaign falling to the Taliban. It's a period of terror for anyone who threw his or her lot in with the Americans, attracted by the money and guaranteed job. Right now it's a mess but the US has without question a moral obligation to get them out of Afghanistan and into safety. It's increasingly looking like another Saigon evacuation.

Iran and the hidden truths

The outgoing Iranian president Hassan Rouhani has come up with a wonderful tautological definition of truth. He is reported to have said that during his eight years in office: "What we told people was not contrary to reality, but we did not tell part of the truth at times". By way of explanation he said he didn't think the whole truth would have been helpful and that it might have harmed national security. That old chestnut. Anything unhelpful or embarrassing or tricky can always be explained away as potentially a national security mattter. Well I guess if he was referring to Iran's nuclear research programme, his government wouldn't have wanted anyone to know about it, let alone the Iranian electorate. But Rouhani is leaving office knowing what he knows about what the US and Israel say is a clandestine, although not so clandestine nuclear weapons programme and is feeling a little guilty about it obviously because the Iranian people have been told what Tehran has been telling the rest of the world, that the nuclear programme is only about civilian nuclear power and nothing to do with bombs. There are all kinds of ways of not telling the truth or lying or at least not giving the full picture, the most popular of which is to "omit" the full truth and just give the basics. This is prettty well what Rouhani has admitted to. Then there was the exquisite phrase used by Kellyanne Conway, counsellor to Donald Trump. In giving a different perspective on what press secretary Sean Spicer had claimed about the size of the crowd who came to Trump's inauguration, she referred to the evidence of "alternative facts". Little has been said to improve on that phrase since then. But Rouhani had a go.