Two U.S. service members have been killed in action in Afghanistan in what appears to be an insider attack.The NATO-led Resolute Support Mission said Monday that two Americans are dead, withholding additional information pending notification of their families. A U.S. official later confirmed the deaths were the result of a so-called “green on blue” attack, during which an Afghan service member or an attacker wearing an Afghan uniform, fires on U.S. or allied forces. The initial U.S. assessment followed claims by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid on Twitter that the Americans died when an Afghan soldier turned his gun on them in a military camp in Afghanistan’s southern Kandahar province.FILE – The Twitter page of Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid is pictured on a computer monitor in the newsroom at Maiwand TV station in Kabul, Feb. 6, 2019.Taliban negotiators have insisted any peace deal include the withdrawal of U.S. forces, and those of U.S. allies, from Afghanistan. The Taliban have also refused to hold direct talks with the government of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, saying such talks can only take place once the U.S. leaves.For its part, Washington is seeking assurances from the Taliban that Afghanistan will never again be used as a base to launch terror attacks against the U.S.Yet despite the talks, attacks by either the Taliban or the Islamic State terror group have continued to plague much of Afghanistan.An attack Sunday in Kabul that targeted the office of Amrullah Saleh, Ghani’s choice for vice president in elections set for September, killed at least 20 people and wounded another 50, officials said.No group has claimed responsibility for the bombing.FILE – Afghan security personnel stand guard after the offices of Amrullah Saleh was targeted in a deadly attack, in Kabul, Afghanistan, July 28, 2019.In comments in Washington Monday, John Sopko, the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), raised concerns that despite Washington’s efforts, Afghan security forces may not be capable of sustaining peace, even if a deal with the Taliban can be reached.”Afghan security forces cannot survive without external donor support, both financial and technical,” Sopko said.”Problems don’t miraculously disappear. We, and other oversight bodies, have identified problems that affected reconstruction. And some of these problems could affect lasting peace,” he said.U.S., NATO effortsSIGAR estimates the U.S. alone has spent about $18 billion to equip Afghanistan’s security forces, buying more than 600,000 weapons, 70,000 vehicles and more than 200 aircraft.But its audits have found that U.S. and NATO efforts have often been unorganized, with Afghan forces suffering as a result.Specifically, SIGAR blamed an eight-year lag in shifting Afghan forces to the latest standardized NATO weaponry for an ammunition shortage that left them unable to repel a Taliban attack in Ghazni province in 2018.FILE – A member of the Afghan security forces prepares to fire an RPG during a battle with insurgents in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 16, 2018.Sopko called a lack of armored ambulances for Afghan security forces — there are just 38 — another “absurd example” of missed opportunities to better support Afghan forces.SIGAR officials also warned the performance of Afghan forces has tended to rise and fall in sync with the U.S. presence in the country.””It’s like a shark tooth,” James Cunningham, SIGAR’s security sector project lead, said Monday. “The shark tooth is really based on our [U.S. military] deployment cycle.”Despite such concerns, both U.S. President Donald Trump and other top officials have said the U.S. intended to reduce the number of troops in Afghanistan.”We want to reduce what is, for us, tens of billions of dollars a year in expenditures and enormous risk to your kids and your grandkids who are fighting for America,” U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told an audience Monday in Washington, adding he expects more U.S. troops to come home before the next U.S. presidential election in November 2020.”That’s my directive from the president,” Pompeo said.
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The roughly 2,000 state and local governments suing the drug industry over the deadly opioid crisis have yet to see any verdicts or reach any big national settlements but are already tussling with each other over how to divide any money they collect.The reason: Some of them want to avoid what happened 20 years ago, when states agreed to a giant settlement with the tobacco industry and used most of the cash on projects that had little to do with smoking’s toll.“If we don’t use dollars recovered from these opioid lawsuits to end the opioid epidemic, shame on us,” Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear said.Overdoses from opioids, which include prescription painkillers and illegal drugs like heroin, have surpassed automobile crashes in recent years as the biggest cause of accidental deaths in the U.S., accounting for the loss of more than 400,000 lives since 2000.An Associated Press analysis found that by 2011 and 2012, the industry was shipping enough prescription opioids to give every man, woman and child in the U.S. nearly a 20-day supply each year.In their lawsuits, the governments contend the brand-name manufacturers fraudulently downplayed the addiction risks of the powerful painkillers while encouraging doctors to prescribe their patients more drugs and at higher doses. They also argue that drugmakers and distributors failed to stop suspiciously large shipments. The defendants dispute the allegations.In the late 1990s, attorneys general for all 50 states reached colossal settlements under which tobacco companies would pay them forever. A tally by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids found states have received more than $161 billion so far.But some of the money has gone toward such things as roads, bridges or teacher pensions. Some of the money went into states’ general fund accounts, available for all sorts of uses.“Most states have used their settlement recoveries, which are massive, for everything but the problem that gave rise to the litigation,” said Doug Blake, a former Minnesota assistant attorney general who worked on the state’s tobacco settlement.The anti-smoking group says that for the fiscal year that ended in June, states took in $27.3 billion from the settlements and from tobacco taxes and spent just 2.4% of that on kick-the-habit and smoking-prevention programs. The group also found that states spend, on average, less than one-fifth of what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends on anti-smoking programs.In the opioid litigation, plaintiffs want to make sure the money goes toward treating addiction and preventing drug abuse. Some also want to be reimbursed for extra taxpayer costs associated with the epidemic, such as rising expenses for jails and mental health services, more ambulance runs and police calls, and more children of addicts placed in the care of the child-welfare system.Close to 2,000 local governments have made claims against the drug industry. While the states’ lawsuits are in state court, most of the city and county claims are in federal court, where they have been consolidated under one Cleveland-based judge who is pushing for a settlement.Joe Rice, an architect of the tobacco settlement and one of the lead lawyers in the opioid cases, with clients including both local governments and states, said local governments are suing partly because they think they can do a better job with the money than states did with the tobacco funds. Rice noted the opioid crisis has run up costs for local governments in ways cigarettes did not.New Jersey’s Camden County, for instance, started allocating extra money for its Office of Mental Health and Addiction to deal with problem back in 2015. That first year, the county of a half-million people just outside Philadelphia kicked in $150,000. This year, it is up to $600,000.The sum does not include other crisis-related costs sprinkled throughout the county budget: $156,000 for opioid treatment for jail inmates, cleaning up “needle parks” and holding an annual recovery softball game.In the event of a nationwide settlement, Rice and other lawyers representing local governments have proposed a plan that would set in advance how much county and local governments would get, based on the amount of drugs shipped there, the overdose deaths and the number of people addicted.In the case of a $1 billion national settlement, for instance, Camden County would get $1.3 million, and the communities in the county would share an additional $900,000.But many attorneys general have asked U.S. District Judge Dan Polster not to approve the plan. Thirty-eight warned in a filing this month that the process “would make global peace' more, not less, difficult to achieve.”The states also worry about the wisdom of splitting settlement funds with local governments.“Doling out small buckets of funds without regard to how the funds should be spent is the opposite of acoordinated’ response, which would balance statewide efforts — such as public education campaigns — with any local efforts,” the attorneys general wrote.
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U.S. and Chinese trade negotiators shift to Shanghai this week for their first in-person talks since a G20 truce last month, a change of scenery for two sides struggling to resolve deep differences on how to end a year-long trade war.Expectations for progress during the two-day Shanghai meeting are low, so officials and businesses are hoping Washington and Beijing can at least detail commitments for “goodwill” gestures and clear the path for future negotiations.These include Chinese purchases of U.S. farm commodities and the United States allowing firms to resume some sales to China’s tech giant Huawei Technologies.President Donald Trump said on Friday that he thinks China may not want to sign a trade deal until after the 2020 election in the hope that they could then negotiate more favorable terms with a different U.S. president.”I think probably China will say “Let’s wait,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “Let’s wait and see if one of these people who gives the United States away, let’s see if one of them could get elected.”For more than a year, the world’s two largest economies have slapped billions of dollars of tariffs on each other’s imports, disrupting global supply chains and shaking financial markets in their dispute over China’s “state capitalism” mode of doing business with the world. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed at last month’s G20 summit in Osaka, Japan to restart trade talks that stalled in May, after Washington accused Beijing of reneging on major portions of a draft agreement — a collapse in the talks that prompted a steep U.S. tariff hike on $200 billion of Chinese goods.Trump said after the Osaka meeting that he would not impose new tariffs on a final $300 billion of Chinese imports and would ease some U.S. restrictions on Huawei if China agreed to make purchases of U.S. agricultural products.Chips and commoditiesSince then, China has signaled that it would allow Chinese firms to make some tariff-free purchases of U.S. farm goods. Washington has encouraged companies to apply for waivers to a national security ban on sales to Huawei, and said it would respond to them in the next few weeks. But going into next week’s talks, neither side has implemented the measures that were intended to show their goodwill. That bodes ill for their chances of resolving core issues in the trade dispute, such as U.S. complaints about Chinese state subsidies, forced technology transfers and intellectual property violations.U.S. officials have stressed that relief on U.S. sales to Huawei would apply only to products with no implications for national security, and industry watchers expect those waivers will only allow the Chinese technology giant to buy the most commoditized U.S. components.Reuters reported last week that despite the carrot of a potential exemption from import tariffs, Chinese soybean crushers are unlikely to buy in bulk from the United States any time soon as they grapple with poor margins and longer-term doubts about Sino-U.S. trade relations. Soybeans are the largest U.S. agricultural export to China.”They are doing this little dance with Huawei and Ag purchases,” said one source recently briefed by senior Chinese negotiators.White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Friday said he “wouldn’t expect any grand deal,” at the meeting and negotiators would try to “reset the stage” to bring the talks back to where they were before the May blow-up. “We anticipate, we strongly expect the Chinese to follow through (on) goodwill and just helping the trade balance with large-scale purchases of U.S. agriculture products and services.” Kudlow said on CNBC television.U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will meet with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He for two days of talks in Shanghai starting on Tuesday, both sides said.”Less politics, more business,” Tu Xinquan, a trade expert at Beijing’s University of International Business and Economics, who closely follows the trade talks, said of the possible reason Shanghai was chosen as the site for talks. “Each side can take a small step first to build some trust, followed by more actions,” Tu said of the potential goodwill gestures.‘Do the Deal’A delegation of U.S. company executives traveled to Beijing last week to stress to Chinese officials the urgency of a trade deal, according to three sources who asked to not be named. They cautioned Chinese negotiators in meetings that if a deal is not reached in the coming months the political calendar in China and the impending U.S. presidential election will make reaching an agreement extremely difficult.”Do the deal. It’s going to be a slog, but if this goes past Dec. 31, it’s not going to happen,” one American executive told Reuters, citing the U.S. 2020 election campaign. Others said the timeline was even shorter.Two sources briefed by senior-level Chinese negotiators ahead of next week’s talks said China was still demanding that all U.S. tariffs be removed as one of the conditions for a deal. Beijing is opposed to a phased withdrawal of duties, while U.S. trade officials see tariff removal — and the threat of reinstating them — as leverage for enforcing any agreement. China also is adamant that any purchase agreement for U.S. goods be at a reasonable level, and that the deal is balanced and respects Chinese legal sovereignty.U.S. negotiators have demanded that China make changes to its laws as assurances for safeguarding U.S. companies’ know-how, an insistence that Beijing has vehemently rejected. If U.S. negotiators want progress in this area, they might be satisfied with directives issued by China’s State Council instead, one of the sources said.One U.S.-based industry source said expectations for any kind of breakthrough during the Shanghai talks were low, and that the main objective was for each side to get clarity on the “goodwill” measures associated with the Osaka summit.There is little clarity on which negotiating text the two sides will rely on, with Washington wanting to adhere to the pre-May draft, and China wanting to start anew with the copy it sent back to U.S. officials with numerous edits and redactions, precipitating the collapse in talks in May.Zhang Huanbo, senior researcher at the China Centre for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE), said he could not verify U.S. officials’ complaints that 90 percent of the deal had been agreed before the May breakdown. “We can only say there may be an initial draft. There is only zero and 100% – deal or no deal,” Zhang said.
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