The U.S. is shifting combat and intelligence-gathering aircraft to Afghanistan as part of an intensified focus on the Taliban, now that the campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria is winding down, the commander of coalition air forces in Afghanistan said Wednesday.

Air Force Major General James Hecker told reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference from Kabul that on February 1 the U.S. Central Command officially designated Afghanistan as its “main effort,” supplanting the counter-IS campaign in Iraq and Syria. Central Command is responsible for all U.S. military operations in the broader Middle East and Central Asia.

Hecker emphasized the importance of increased support from U.S. intelligence agencies, whose analysis and expertise help the military identify targets to strike.

“This behind-the-scenes legwork allows us to hit the Taliban where it hurts most, whether it’s command-and-control … or their pocketbooks,” Hecker said.

​More drones, attack planes

He said the U.S. now has 50 percent more MQ-9 Reaper drones providing intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance in Afghanistan compared with last year.

He said the U.S. also has added A-10 attack planes and will be adding combat search-and-rescue aircraft.

Even as the U.S. adds air power, the size and capabilities of the Afghan air force are growing, Hecker said. The Afghans are now conducting more strike missions than the Americans, he said.

“We are putting unrelenting pressure on the enemy these days,” Hecker said, with a goal of compelling the Taliban to reconcile with the government. That goal has been pursued by U.S. commanders in Afghanistan for much of the past 16-plus years, without success.

Hecker acknowledged that air power alone is unlikely to do the trick.

“You’re not just going to bomb them into submission,” he said. “But it is another pressure point that we can put on them,” in addition to ground combat operations led by the Afghan army and special operations forces.
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President Donald Trump has asked the Pentagon to plan a grand parade of the U.S. armed forces in Washington this year to celebrate military strength, officials said Tuesday.

 

The Washington Post, which was first to report the plan, said Trump wants an elaborate parade this year with soldiers marching and tanks rolling, but no date has been selected.

 

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders confirmed the request Tuesday evening. She said Trump wants the Pentagon to “explore a celebration” that will allow Americans to show appreciation for the military.

 

A Pentagon spokesman, Charlie Summers, said Pentagon officials are aware of the request and are “looking at options.”

 

Muscular military parades of the kind that are common in authoritarian countries like China and North Korea are not quintessentially American. The U.S. traditionally has not embraced showy displays of raw military power, such as North Korea’s parading of ballistic missiles as a claim of international prestige and influence.

 

U.S. military members commonly participate in parades on the Fourth of July and other holidays to mark appreciation and remembrance of military veterans, but these typically do not include gaudy displays of military hardware.

 

In her brief comment on Trump’s order to the Pentagon, Sanders did not elaborate on what sort of event he envisions.

 

Although Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has not commented publicly on the idea of a Washington military parade, the idea is not an obvious fit with his emphasis on focusing strictly, if not exclusively, on military activities that either improve the lethality of the armed forces or enhance their preparation for combat, or both.

The Post report said a Jan. 18 meeting between Trump, Mattis and top generals at the Pentagon marked a tipping point in Trump’s push for a parade. It quoted an unidentified military official as saying, “The marching orders were: I want a parade like the one in France.” It was thus interpreted as a presidential order, the Post said, adding that the cost of shipping tanks and other military hardware to Washington could run in the millions of dollars.

 

The Post also reported that the Pentagon would prefer to hold such a parade on Veteran’s Day in November, in part because it would coincide with the 100th anniversary of the victorious end of World War I. It would thus be less directly associated with the president and politics, the Post said.

 

John Kirby, a retired Navy rear admiral and former spokesman for the State Department and the Pentagon, reposted on Twitter Tuesday night an article he wrote for CNN’s website last summer after Trump mentioned he had been dazzled by the Paris parade. Kirby said a big military parade in Washington is a bad idea.

 

“First of all, the United States doesn’t need a parade down Pennsylvania or any other avenue to show our military strength,” he wrote. “We do that every day in virtually every clime all over the world.”

 

It has long been conventional wisdom that the U.S. does not need to boast of its military strength because it already is recognized as the leader of the NATO alliance and a model of military professionalism that countries across the global seek to emulate.

Last September, at a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, Trump announced his idea of staging a grand parade of the armed forces in Washington on July 4.

 

Trump reminisced about watching France’s Bastille Day military parade when he visited Paris in July. He said the two-hour parade was a “tremendous thing for France and for the spirit of France,” and said he wanted one on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington that would be grander than the one he saw in Paris.
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False tsunami warnings flashed on cellphones along the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts on Tuesday morning when a U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) systems test went awry, unnerving Americans from Maine to Texas.

The false alerts appeared to have been sent by the private forecasting company AccuWeather, according to cellphone images posted on social media. AccuWeather pointed the finger at the NWS.

“Yikes!” Trish Milburn, a writer of romance novels who lives on Florida’s Gulf Coast, wrote on Twitter. “That warning is not what you want to see when you live less than 10 feet (3 meters) above sea level.”

It was not the first time this year Americans were roused by their cellphones warning of an impending catastrophe. Last month’s false alarm was a missile headed for Hawaii.

The National Weather Service said its National Tsunami Warning Center issued a routine monthly test message that was misconstrued, spooking people in cities as far apart as Boston and Houston.

“The test message was released by at least one private sector company as an official Tsunami Warning, resulting in widespread reports of tsunami warnings received via phones and other media across the East Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean,” the service said in a statement.

At least some people who clicked the alert to read the full message saw a disclaimer that the alert was in fact a test, according to screenshots posted online.

AccuWeather said the National Weather Service wrongly coded the test as a real warning, confusing its automated alerts system.

“AccuWeather has the most sophisticated system for passing on NWS tsunami warnings based on a complete computer scan of the codes used by the NWS,” the company said in a statement. “While the words ‘TEST’ were in the header, the actual codes read by computers used coding for real warning, indicating it was a real warning.”

AccuWeather said it had warned the National Weather Service in 2014 of this vulnerability after a similar error.

The National Weather Service said its investigation confirmed the message was coded as a test.

“We are working with private sector companies to determine why some systems did not recognize the coding. Private sector partners perform a valuable service in disseminating warnings to the public. We will continue to work with our partners to prevent this from occurring again,” NWS said in a statement.

An AccuWeather spokesman could not be reached late Tuesday to respond.

It was not clear how many people saw the false alerts.

Residents of the West Coast were warned in January to brace for a possible tsunami after an earthquake off the coast of Alaska. The warnings were later lifted and no significant damage was reported.
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President Donald Trump has signed a national security memorandum establishing a new National Vetting Center within the Department of Homeland Security to better coordinate information on individuals who may pose a threat to the country.

 

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the effort will allow law enforcement “to better identify individuals seeking to enter the country who present a threat to national security.”

 

She’s calling current vetting efforts “ad hoc” and says they impede the government’s ability to keep up with threats.

 

Trump has promised an “extreme vetting” system to better prevent would-be extremists from entering the country.

 

DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen says the new center will ensure officials “are able to fuse intelligence and law enforcement data from across the government in one place.”
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Among the countless Puerto Rico neighborhoods battered by Hurricane Maria is one named after another storm: Villa Hugo. The illegal shantytown emerged on a public wetland after 1989’s Hurricane Hugo left thousands homeless.

About 6,000 squatters landed here, near the El Yunque National Forest, and built makeshift homes on 40 acres that span a low-lying valley and its adjacent mountainside. Wood and concrete dwellings, their facades scrawled with invented addresses, sit on cinder blocks. After Maria, many are missing roofs; some have collapsed altogether.

Amid the rubble, 59-year-old Joe Quirindongo sat in the sun one recent day on a wooden platform — the only remaining piece of his home. Soft-spoken with weathered skin and a buzzcut, Quirindongo pondered his limited options.

“I know this isn’t a good place for a house,” said Quirindongo, who survives on U.S. government assistance. “Sometimes I would like to go to another place, but I can’t afford anything.”

Villa Hugo reflects a much larger crisis in this impoverished U.S. territory, where so-called “informal” homes are estimated to house about half the population of 3.4 million.

Some residents built on land they never owned. Others illegally subdivided properties, often so family members could build on their lots.

Most have no title to their homes, which are constructed without permits and usually not up to building codes. The houses range in quality and size, from one-room shacks to sizable family homes. Many have plumbing and power, though not always through official means.

The concentration of illegal housing presents a vexing dilemma for local and federal authorities already overwhelmed by the task of rebuilding an economically depressed island after its worst natural disaster in nine decades.

Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló has stressed the need to “build back better,” a sentiment echoed by U.S. disaster relief and housing officials. But rebuilding to modern standards or relocating squatters to new homes would take an investment far beyond reimbursing residents for lost property value. 

It’s an outlay Puerto Rico’s government says it can’t afford, and which U.S. officials say is beyond the scope of their funding and mission. Yet the alternative — as Villa Hugo shows — is to encourage rebuilding of the kind of substandard housing that made the island so vulnerable to Maria in the first place.

“It’s definitely a housing crisis,” said Fernando Gil, Puerto Rico’s housing secretary. “It was already out there before, and the hurricane exacerbates it.”

In Puerto Rico, housing is by far the largest category of storm destruction, estimated by the island government at about $37 billion, with only a small portion covered by insurance.

That’s more than twice the government’s estimate for catastrophic electric grid damage, which was made far worse by the shoddy state of utility infrastructure before the storm.

Puerto Rico officials did not respond to questions about how the territory estimated the damage to illegally built homes.

Maria destroyed or significantly damaged more than a third of about 1.2 million occupied homes on the island, the government estimates. Most of those victims had no hazard insurance — which is only required for mortgage-holders in Puerto Rico — and no flood insurance. Just 344,000 homes on the island have mortgages, according U.S. Census Bureau data.

Officials at the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) acknowledged the unique challenges of delivering critical housing aid to Puerto Rico. Among them: calculating the damage to illegal, often substandard homes; persuading storm victims to follow through on application processes that have frustrated many into giving up; and allocating billions in disaster aid that still won’t be nearly enough solve the island’s housing crisis.

By far the most money for Puerto Rico housing aid is expected to come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

HUD spokeswoman Caitlin Thompson declined to comment on how the agency would spend billions of dollars in disaster relief funds to rebuild housing, or how it planned to help owners of informally built homes. Two HUD officials overseeing the agency’s Puerto Rico relief efforts, Todd Richardson and Stan Gimont, also declined to comment.

But the disaster aid package currently under consideration by the U.S. Congress would provide far less housing aid than Puerto Rico officials say they need. Governor Rosselló is seeking $46 billion in aid from HUD, an amount that dwarfs previous allocations for even the most destructive U.S. storms.

That’s nearly half the island’s total relief request of $94 billion.

The U.S. House of Representatives instead passed a package of $81 billion, with $26 billion for HUD, that still needs Senate and White House approval. The money would be divided between regions struck by several 2017 hurricanes — including Maria, Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida — as well as the recent California wildfires. Congress could also decide to approve additional aid later.

‘My mother is scared’

A generation ago, Maria Vega Lastra, now 61, was among the estimated 28,000 people displaced by Hurricane Hugo. Neighbors helped her build a new home in what would become Villa Hugo, in the town of Canóvanas.

Her daughter, 34-year-old Amadaliz Diaz, still recalls her older brother grinning as he sawed wood for the frame of their self-built, one-floor house, with a porch and three bedrooms.

Now, Vega Lastra’s roof has holes in it, and her waterlogged wooden floorboards buckle with each step.

Vega Lastra has been staying with her daughter, who lives in Tampa, as the family waits on applications for FEMA aid. The agency initially denied her application in December, saying it could not contact her by phone, Diaz said.

Vega Lastra is returning to her home this week, uncertain if its condition has gotten worse. Her daughter bought her an air mattress to take with her.

“My mother is scared,” Diaz said. “I hope the government helps her. I work, but I have three kids to take care of.” The island’s housing crisis long predated the storm.

According to Federal Housing Finance Agency data, Puerto Rico’s index of new home prices fell 25 percent over the last decade, amid a severe recession that culminated last May in the largest government bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.

Legal home construction, meanwhile, plummeted from nearly 16,000 new units in 2004 to less than 2,500 last year, according to consultancy Estudios Tecnicos, an economic data firm.

A 2007 study by environmental consultant Interviron Services Inc., commissioned by the Puerto Rico Builders Association, found that 55 percent of residential and commercial construction was informal. That would work out to nearly 700,000 homes.

That figure might be high, said David Carrasquillo, president of the Puerto Rico Planning Society, a trade group representing community planners. But even a “every conservative” estimate would yield at least 260,000 illegally built houses, he said.

Generations of Puerto Rican governments never made serious efforts to enforce building codes to stop new illegal housing, current and former island officials said in interviews. Past administrations had little political or economic incentive to force people out of neighborhoods like Villa Hugo.

Former Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, in office during Hurricane Hugo, said he tried to help informal homeowners without policing them. 

“Our policy was not to relocate, but rather improve those places,” Hernandez Colon said in an interview.

Subsequent administrations advocated similar policies; none made meaningful headway, partly because of Puerto Rico’s constant political turnover.

Today, informal communities provide a stark contrast to San Juan’s glittering resorts and bustling business districts. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz pointed to poor barrios like those near the city’s Martín Peña Channel, hidden behind the skyscrapers of the financial hub known as the Golden Mile.

“It’s not something I’m proud of, but we hide our poverty here,” Cruz said in an interview.

Recovery dilemma 

The task of rebuilding Puerto Rico’s housing stock ultimately falls to the territory government, which has no ability to pay for it after racking up $120 billion in bond and pension debt in the years before the storm. 

That leaves the island dependent on U.S. relief from FEMA, the SBA and HUD.

The SBA offers low-interest home repair loans of up to $200,000. FEMA provides homeowners with emergency grants, relocation assistance and other help. HUD is focused on long-term rebuilding efforts, working directly with local agencies to subsidize reconstruction through grants. 

FEMA’s cap for disaster aid to individuals is $33,300, and actual awards are often much lower. Normally, FEMA eligibility for housing aid requires proving property ownership, but the agency says it will help owners of informal homes if they can prove residency.

How exactly to help gets complicated. For example, someone who builds their own home with no permits on land they own is more likely to be treated as a homeowner, said Justo Hernandez, FEMA’s deputy federal coordinating officer. Squatters who built on land they didn’t own, however, would likely only be given money to cover lost items and relocate to a rental, he said.

Several Villa Hugo residents said they received money from FEMA, but many didn’t know what it was for and complained it wasn’t enough.

Lourdes Rios Romero, 59, plans to appeal the $6,000 grant she got for repairs to her flooded home, citing a much higher contractor’s quote. Neighbor Miguel Rosario Lopez, a 62-year-old retiree, showed a statement from FEMA saying he was eligible for $916.22, “to perform essential repairs that will allow you to live in your home.”

Without money for major changes, most homeowners said they planned to combine the aid they might get from FEMA with what little money they could raise to rebuild in the same spot.

FEMA does not police illegal building. Code enforcement is left to the same local authorities who have allowed illegal construction to persist for years.

Quirindongo is planning to buy materials to rebuild his Villa Hugo home himself with about $4,000 from FEMA. It will be the third time he has done so, having lost one home to a 2011 flood, another to a fire.

“I just want to have something that I can say, ‘This is mine,’” Quirindongo said.

Giving up

Many others appear to have given up on FEMA aid because the agency’s application process is entangled with a separate process for awarding SBA loans to rebuild homes.

FEMA is legally bound to assess whether applicants might qualify for SBA loans before awarding them FEMA grants. If an applicant passes FEMA’s cursory eligibility assessment, they are automatically referred to SBA for a more thorough screening.

Applicants are not required to follow through on the SBA process — but they cannot qualify for FEMA aid unless they do.

FEMA only provides a grant when the SBA denies the applicant a loan.

FEMA said it has referred about 520,000 people out of 1.1 million total applicants so far to the SBA. But as of Monday, only 59,000 followed through with SBA applications. Of those, some 12,000 later withdrew, SBA data shows.

“As soon as people see SBA they say, ‘I give up, I don’t want a loan — I can’t afford a loan,’” FEMA’s Hernandez said.

SBA spokeswoman Carol Chastang said the agency is working with FEMA to educate flood victims on available benefits and the application process, including sending staffers to applicants’ homes.

330,000 vacant homes

Before the storm hit, Puerto Rico already had about 330,000 vacant homes, according to Census Bureau 2016 estimates, resulting from years of population decline as citizens migrated to the mainland United States and elsewhere. Puerto Ricans are American citizens and can move to the mainland at will.

Puerto Rico and federal officials have considered rehabilitating the vacant housing for short- and long-term use, along with building new homes and buying out homeowners in illegally built  neighborhoods, according to Gil and federal officials.

Rosselló, the Puerto Rican governor, has said the rebuilding plan must include a fleet of properly built new homes. Gil, the housing secretary, said the administration would like to build as many as 70,000 properties.

HUD officials declined to comment on whether the agency would finance new housing. Its Community Development Block Grant program allows for local governments to design their own solutions and seek HUD approval for funding.

The cost of constructing enough new, code-compliant properties to house people displaced by Maria could far exceed the available federal aid. Making them affordable also presents a problem.

Puerto Rico’s subsidized “social interest housing,” geared toward low-income buyers, typically provides units that sell in the mid-$100,000 range, with prices capped by the government.

That’s beyond the means of many displaced storm victims.

Gil offered little detail on a solution beyond saying it will include a mix of new development, buyout programs for owners of illegally built homes and other options.

The answer will come down to how much Washington is willing to pay, he said. He invoked the island’s territorial status and colonial history as a root cause of its poor infrastructure and housing stock before the storm.

“It is precisely because we have been neglected by the federal government that the island’s infrastructure is so weak,” he said.

Many Puerto Rico officials continue to advocate for bringing relief and legitimacy to squatter communities like Villa Hugo, rather than trying to relocate their residents.

Canóvanas Mayor Lornna Soto has been negotiating with island officials to provide property titles to Villa Hugo’s population.

The vast majority still don’t have them.

“It’s long overdue to recognize that they are not going anywhere and their communities need to be rebuilt with proper services,” Soto said.

Diaz said she supports her mother’s decision to return to Villa Hugo, regardless of what aid the government ultimately provides.

“I grew up there,” Diaz said. “Everyone knows us there.”
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U.S. lawmakers grilled Trump administration officials Tuesday about the war in Afghanistan, saying the new White House strategy was inconsistent and was not producing results. 

The comments made at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing reflected growing frustration in Congress about the U.S.-led war, which is entering its 17th year.

As recently as November, General John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, acknowledged that the conflict remained a stalemate.

Since then, a wave of high-profile insurgent attacks have rocked the capital, Kabul. The Taliban now controls or contests almost half the country, according to latest U.S. estimates.

‘Signs of progress’

Despite the setbacks, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, who is helping oversee the new White House strategy, gave a positive assessment of the conflict.

“The president’s South Asia strategy is showing some signs of progress,” Sullivan said. “On the battlefield, we are seeing the Taliban’s momentum begin to slow.”

But lawmakers from both parties expressed skepticism.

“Something is clearly not working,” said Senator Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat and longtime Afghan war critic. “By any standard, the current security situation is grim.”

Some lawmakers took aim at President Donald Trump, who last week said he didn’t want to talk with the Taliban — a statement that seemingly contradicted his own strategy.

After Sullivan and a top Pentagon official told the lawmakers that the U.S. was in fact still open to negotiations with the Taliban, lawmakers pressed for more details.

“You can see that the world and those involved in the peace process may be pretty confused about what the U.S. position is. What is it?” asked Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat.

Unwillingness to negotiate

Sullivan said he thought Trump was expressing a reaction to last month’s terrorist attacks, and was pointing out that “significant elements of the Taliban are not prepared to negotiate.”

“And it may take a long time before they are willing to negotiate,” he added.

But many in the Senate appear tired of waiting, and that impatience was on display Tuesday.

“We’re in an impossible situation. I see no hope for it,” said Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky, another longtime war critic. “I feel sorry for putting the military in this position.”

Even Tennessee’s Bob Corker — the Republican chairman of the committee who has spoken positively of the new White House plan — was skeptical, citing high attrition rates among Afghan defense forces, rampant corruption and a dependence on foreign aid.

“What is the end state that U.S. and NATO troops are fighting for?” Cardin asked. “We’ve been there for 16 years. Should the American people accept that this is a forever war?”

The criticism came as the U.S. military has been ramping up airstrikes on the Taliban and sending thousands more troops to Afghanistan.

On Tuesday, the U.S. military said a B-52 dropped 24 bombs on the Taliban. The Pentagon said it was a record for the “most guided munitions ever dropped” from that type of aircraft.

According to a statement, the targets included Taliban training facilities in Badakhshan province, an area that until recently was relatively calm.

Stolen vehicles

The statement said the airstrikes also destroyed “stolen Afghan National Army vehicles” that insurgents planned to use in truck bomb attacks.

A U.S. military spokesperson did not immediately respond to VOA’s request for comment on the type and number of vehicles that were destroyed.

Taliban militants are thought to have stolen dozens of Humvees and other U.S.-made vehicles in recent years to create massive fortified and disguised truck bombs.

Polls show the U.S. public is divided on Trump’s plan to expand the war in Afghanistan. When Trump unveiled the strategy last year, a Politico/Morning Consult poll suggested 45 percent of voters supported increasing U.S. troop levels, while 41 percent opposed the plan.
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