Has Trump done anything to dummy down USA intelligence/threat assessment? Is Congress receiving a real picture?
NATO would have a valid assessment if that were the case. The USA and NATO threat assessment should run parallel to each other, not conflict the facts.
Nancy Pelosi never went to Afghanistan. That is a blind spot. She was supposed to travel there anonymously and Trump exposed her. But, the trip was after a meeting by Russia with parties from Afghanistan. One could ask why did Trump reveal a trip into a war zone of a member of Congress? And why was the trip canceled after a summit by Russia?
9 November 2018
By Andrew Roth
Russia has hosted talks with Taliban delegates (click here) and members of Afghanistan’s high peace council, as the Kremlin seeks a role as peace broker between Islamist rebels and the US-backed government in Kabul.
The meeting on Friday demonstrated Moscow’s renewed aspirations in Afghanistan almost 30 years after the Soviet Union withdrew its battered forces.
Russia’s foreign ministry touted the attendance of the Taliban, who sent a five-person delegation to Moscow from their political office in Doha, as unprecedented for an international conference aimed at peace in Afghanistan, although the meeting produced few concrete results.
The Afghan government did not send direct representatives to Friday’s talks, electing instead to send members of the peace council “in its own capacity as a national but non-government institution”.
The Afghan government and the Taliban both denied that the conference marked direct negotiations for peace. But Russia’s foreign ministry focused attention on the spectacle of delegates from both sides of the line in Afghanistan sitting together at Moscow’s President hotel, alongside representatives from Iran, China, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan....
