The debate over jobs in India is missing the point

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Shamika Ravi

As nearly a billion Indians go to the polls this month and next, no one doubts jobs will be central to their vote. We just can’t agree on whether the employment picture is rosy or dark. While the government cites payroll data to claim significant job creation, the opposition holds up a leaked preliminary report that pegged unemployment in 2017 at 6.1 percent, which if true would be the highest rate in 45 years.

It might be more useful instead to concentrate on the most recent numbers we can all agree on, which come from a government survey of over 150,000 households across India between April and December of 2015. Although dated — it was conducted before demonetization and the introduction of a nationwide goods-and-services tax — the survey reveals several interesting things about employment in India, including one trend of particular relevance to policymakers and another to jobseekers. 

The data suggest that, at least in 2016, unemployment hovered around 5 percent. More worryingly, the labor force participation rate stood at an unusually low 50 percent, meaning only half the working-age population was actively working or seeking employment. By comparison, China’s labor participation rate averaged 75 percent from 1990 to 2017. Rates in other emerging Asian economies such as Vietnam (77 percent), Indonesia (70 percent), Thailand (69 percent) and Bangladesh (57 percent) are typically much higher as well. 

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Early Warning? The Resignation of Pakistan’s Finance Minister Raises Unpleasant Questions

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By Umair Jamal

Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s confidant and a longtime member of the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party, Asad Umar, resigned as finance minister last week. The development comes at a time when Pakistan is facing a serious economic crisis. Umar’s resignation raises fresh questions regarding Pakistan’s plans for averting an economic crisis amid bailout talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The nature of Umar’s resignation shows that all is not well within the PTI’s government. The ongoing speculation about flaring divisions in the party’s ranks is one explanation for Umar’s hasty departure. For months, a group of supporters of the PTI have argued that Umar should have gone to the IMF right after the party came to power. Umar has not only criticized the group for interfering in his ministry but has also accused such people of undermining Khan’s mission of taking Pakistan away from international loan dependency. While the politics within the party’s ranks may have created pressure, the deteriorating economic situation of Pakistan’s foreign exchange reserves attracted a host of external pressures that ultimately forced Khan into sacking Umar within hours’ notice.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Unintended Consequences of U.S.-Taliban Talks

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By Jessie Durrett

The U.S.-Taliban talks are aimed at resurrecting the path to peace and security for Afghanistan. As U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted in late January, “The U.S. is serious about pursuing peace, preventing Afghanistan from continuing to be a space for international terrorism & bringing forces home.” However, as currently structured, the negotiations will create new challenges regardless of their stated success. Zalmay Khalilzad, President Trump’s special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, may achieve some of the goals outlined by Pompeo, at least on paper, but direct talks with the Taliban are unlikely to bring about an enforceable deal that maintains the authority of the Afghan state and significantly reduces the threat of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. What’s more, if Khalilzad does not achieve meaningful gains, the negotiations will leave the U.S. and Afghan governments worse off than before. Afghanistan will face not only continued violence but also less favorable conditions for negotiating and governing, which will hamper Kabul’s and Washington’s abilities to realize their key interests.

Is the Taliban’s Former Capital Ready to Welcome Them Back?

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By Ezzatullah Mehrdad

In October 2001, U.S. B-52 aircraft flew over the capital of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Kandahar, to drop bombs on headquarters of the Taliban movement. Senior officials of the Taliban, including Mullah Omar, the emir of the Islamic Emirate, fueled their trucks and left Kandahar behind.

The headquarters of the Taliban was turned into the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (and later Afghanistan’s intelligence agency’s) base in Kandahar. The U.S-backed Afghan government housed female students of Kandahar University in the former compound of Mullah Omar.

The Taliban group waged insurgency for more than 17 years to return back to their capital. In late 2018, the group switched their focus to coming back through talks with the United State. For 16 days in March, U.S. envoy on Afghan reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad and representative of the Taliban Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai talked in Doha, Qatar, making progress on deal to end the insurgency. Stanikzai came to the negotiation table to open the way to his old office in Kandahar.

What’s Behind the Terrorist Attacks in Sri Lanka?

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Nearly 300 people have been killed in simultaneous explosions at churches and hotels in Sri Lanka that also injured several hundred victims. The coordinated attacks took place on Sunday morning.

According to media reports, there were eight blasts in all, including at churches in Negombo and Kochchikade in the country’s west, and Batticaloa in the east. Three luxury hotels in the capital Colombo were also targeted.

Sri Lanka’s government says the attacks were carried out by National Thowheeth Jamaath, a little-known radical Islamist group. Colombo has declared an indefinite national curfew and blocked social media networks such as Facebook and WhatsApp in order to prevent the spread of rumors that might spark intercommunal violence, as happened in March 2018 when Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim mosques, businesses, and homes.

Easter terrorist attacks open new front of violence in Sri Lanka

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The series of coordinated blasts that struck several Sri Lankan churches and several hotels Easter Sunday has left more than 207 people reported dead and more than 450 injured — making the cluster of terrorist attacks more deadly than both the 2008 Mumbai attacks and the 2002 Bali bombings.

The big picture: The attacks targeting Christian worshippers suggest a new front in the annals of violence in Sri Lanka. Since the end of the bloody civil war in 2009, the country has mainly returned to peace, so the Easter attacks came as a shock.

Details: The attacks took place in the capital city of Colombo, the nearby city of Negambo, and in Batticaloa, across the island on the country's eastern coast.

By the end of day, the government had attributed the blast to suicide bombings and announced the arrests of 13 unnamed suspects.

Between the lines: Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war was driven largely by ethnolinguistic cleavage, with Tamil separatists in the north and east fighting against the Sinhalese-majority government. The pattern of today’s Easter Sunday attacks in churches point to yet another growing divide.

The U.S. Must Treat China as a National Security Threat to 5G Networks

Klon Kitchen

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China is an adversarial power, and the U.S. must prevent China from using its government-controlled companies to gain a significant foothold in the United States’ burgeoning fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks. Such a presence would be a clear national security threat that could decisively compromise American telecommunications and data infrastructure—including the communications integrity of the U.S. military and intelligence community. The U.S. must not be complacent. Beijing’s “civil-military fusion” practices must not be allowed to threaten U.S. national security. Further, the United States must meaningfully penalize Beijing’s blatant attempts to threaten America’s critical infrastructure and to use its technology industry as an extension of state espionage. 

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Beijing will, if not prevented, use equipment, software, and services from Chinese state-controlled companies to compromise U.S. telecommunications networks.

China is implementing a concerted strategy of civil-military fusion through the sale and deployment of 5G telecom systems—a national security threat to the U.S.

What Xi Jinping Means for China—and the U.S.

With no term limits, and no named successor, Xi Jinping could be the president of China for life. But whispers of dissent might be emerging. What does that mean for China–and for the United States? Find out more when you subscribeto World Politics Review (WPR). 

Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, made waves among Chinese academics and China-watchers in July with a published essay denouncing President Xi Jinping’s hard-line policies. The essay has been cited in numerous Western media outlets as a “rare rebuke” of Xi. 

The incident and other rumors of internal party dissent led Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, to wonder whether Xi has “passed his peak.” The pushback among elites, which McGregor characterizes so far as “whisperings,” have mainly been concerned with the Mao-like cult of personality surrounding Xi, who has amassed power unseen in China since Mao Zedong.

The president of China may be finding, as Tom Mitchell wrote in the Financial Times, that “with absolute power has come absolute responsibility.” 

How Europe learned to fear China

By BRUNO MAÇÃES

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Last month, the European Commission published its much-awaited new strategic outlook on China. The document offers up sweeping judgments on China’s development strategy and 10 detailed responses. It is written in the usual technocratic jargon that is second, or even first, nature to officials in Brussels, but it also shows signs of a more political approach. China is described as a “systemic rival,” whose economic power and political influence have grown with unprecedented scale and speed.

There’s been a significant change in Europe’s attitude to Beijing. Not too long ago, Europeans shrugged at China’s rise. Overnight, it seems, their world changed. So, why did the tide turn? And how did we get here?

First, there was the story of the solar panels. European producers once enjoyed a clear first-mover advantage, and yet the industry has been all but wiped out in Europe. Look at the list of the world’s 10 largest solar-panel manufacturers. In 2001, five were European. In 2018, eight were Chinese; the other two were Canadian and South Korean.

Report: China’s Closing the Innovation Gap

By Brandi Vincent

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China is progressing more rapidly in innovation and advanced technology industries than the United States, according to a report published by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation today.

“In the span of about a decade, the Chinese economy has made dramatic progress in innovation relative to the United States,” Robert Atkinson, ITIF president and lead author of the report said in a statement. “Backed up by a powerful, unfair arsenal of state policies, China has evolved from an innovation-copier to a reverse innovator and now an innovator in its own right.”

The report concludes that China has done more than any other government in history to promote an innovation-based economy—and the implications could threaten its competitors.

China’s Belt and Road: The new geopolitics of global infrastructure development

Amar Bhattacharya

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The growing strategic rivalry between the United States and China is driven by shifting power dynamics and competing visions of the future of the international order. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a leading indicator of the scale of China’s global ambitions. The intent behind the initiative—either economic or strategic—has raised significant concern in the United States and elsewhere. While Beijing portrays the infrastructure development initiative as a benign investment and development project that is economically beneficial to all parties—and in certain cases clearly has been—there are strategic manifestations that contradict this depiction. Washington is skeptical of the initiative, warning of the risks to recipients and the harm it will cause to America’s strategic interests abroad. But many of America’s partners reject the U.S. interpretation and are forging ahead with Beijing. Ahead of China’s second Belt and Road Summit in late April 2019, Brookings Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy Bruce Jones convened seven Brookings scholars—Amar Bhattacharya, David Dollar, Rush Doshi, Ryan Hass, Homi Kharas, Mireya Solís, and Jonathan Stromseth—to interrogate popular perceptions of the initiative, as well as to evaluate the future of BRI and its strategic implications. The edited transcript below reflects their assessment of China’s motivations for launching BRI, its track record to date, regional responses to it, the national security implications of BRI for the United States, as well as potential policy responses. The highlights:

ISIS offshoot in Afghanistan willing, able to strike US, says intelligence official

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WASHINGTON – ISIS-affiliated terrorists in Afghanistan, noted for their brutality in a brutal land, pose the top threat for spectacular attacks in the United States, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.

The group known as ISIS-K, like al-Qaeda, which plotted the 9/11 terror attacks from Afghanistan, also has designs on striking targets in Western nations, said the U.S. intelligence official, who is not authorized to speak publicly.

ISIS-K has hundreds of fighters and has shown increasing effectiveness in its tactics and recruiting in Afghanistan, said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.), the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee who recently visited Afghanistan.

"It's growing in sophistication and numbers," Reed said.

Hard Truths in Syria

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By Brett McGurk

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Over the last four years, I helped lead the global response to the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS)—an effort that succeeded in destroying an ISIS “caliphate” in the heart of the Middle East that had served as a magnet for foreign jihadists and a base for launching terrorist attacks around the world. Working as a special envoy for U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, I helped establish a coalition that was the largest of its kind in history: 75 countries and four international organizations, their cooperation built on a foundation of U.S. leadership and consistency across U.S. administrations. Indeed, the strategy to destroy the ISIS caliphate was developed under Obama and then carried forward, with minor modifications, under Trump; throughout, it focused on enabling local fighters to reclaim their cities from ISIS and then establish the conditions for displaced people to return.

From the outset, the strategy also presumed that the United States would remain active in the region for a period after the caliphate’s destruction, including on the ground in northeastern Syria, where today approximately 2,000 U.S. Special Forces hold together a coalition of 60,000 Syrian fighters known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. But in late December 2018, Trump upended this strategy. Following a phone call with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump gave a surprise order to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, apparently without considering the consequences. Trump has since modified that order—his plan, as of the writing of this essay, is for approximately 200 U.S. troops to stay in northeastern Syria and for another 200 to remain at al-Tanf, an isolated base in the country’s southeast. (The administration also hopes, likely in vain, that other members of the coalition will replace the withdrawn U.S. forces with forces of their own.) But if anything, this new plan is even riskier: it tasks a small cohort of troops with the same mission as the current U.S. deployment in northeastern Syria, which is ten times as large.

EU slams China as ‘systemic rival’ as trade tension rises

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By HANS VON DER BURCHARD

Europe dramatically sharpened its political stance against China on Tuesday by slamming Beijing as a "systemic rival" for the first time.

In a strategic communication mapping out 10 proposals for dealing with Beijing, the European Commission also slapped down countries such as Italy for aligning too closely with China's landmark One Belt, One Road program, which promotes Chinese trade via infrastructure running across Asia into Europe.

In a departure from its usual softly-softly approach on Beijing, the EU called China “an economic competitor in pursuit of technological leadership and a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.”

The US Is Pushing Back Against China. What Happens If We Succeed?

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By Chi Wang

Those hoping for the collapse of China’s communist government need to think seriously about what the consequences would be.

This October will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. This is an anniversary many Western observers doubted the PRC would ever reach – or, at least not in its present form with unchallenged authoritarian one-party rule.

It was the hope of American policymakers that by engaging with China and encouraging China to participate in the international system, the country would not just open up economically but would also liberalize and, eventually, democratize. There was also a belief among some scholars that economic growth and prosperity was not sustainable under China’s current political system and that China would ultimately be forced to change or face collapse.

Spies, Lies, and Algorithms Why U.S. Intelligence Agencies Must Adapt or Fail

By Amy Zegart and Michael Morell

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For U.S. intelligence agencies, the twenty-first century began with a shock, when 19 al Qaeda operatives hijacked four planes and perpetrated the deadliest attack ever on U.S. soil. In the wake of the attack, the intelligence community mobilized with one overriding goal: preventing another 9/11. The CIA, the National Security Agency, and the 15 other components of the U.S. intelligence community restructured, reformed, and retooled. Congress appropriated billions of dollars to support the transformation.

That effort paid off. In the nearly two decades that U.S. intelligence agencies have been focused on fighting terrorists, they have foiled numerous plots to attack the U.S. homeland, tracked down Osama bin Laden, helped eliminate the Islamic State’s caliphate, and found terrorists hiding everywhere from Afghan caves to Brussels apartment complexes. This has arguably been one of the most successful periods in the history of American intelligence.

FATF Report to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors

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Paris, 8 April 2019 - The FATF published its report to the April 2019 G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors' meeting.

The report sets out FATF’s ongoing work to fight money laundering and terrorist financing, and in particular in the following areas:

Strengthening the institutional basis, governance and capacity of FATF

FATF’s work programme on virtual currencies/crypto assets

Countering the financing of terrorism

Countering the financing of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction

Improving transparency and the availability of beneficial ownership information

Improving the effectiveness of the criminal justice system: FATF engagement with judges and prosecutors

Financial Technologies, Regulatory Technologies: Digital Identity

De-risking

The report provides an overview of the FATF’s recent and future work in these areas.

It’s Time for a Global Pact for the Environment

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Stewart M. Patrick

With each successive Earth Day, the scale of the global environmental crisis becomes more disheartening. So too does the collective failure to respond to the planet’s plight. Over the past year, scientists have issued dire warnings about global warming, mass extinction, the extent of plastic pollution and the death of the world’s oceans. Humanity is now deep in the Anthropocene, a new geologic era defined by the human transformation of the natural world, and the lights are blinking red. 

In a harrowing report last October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, warned that even a 2 degree Celsius rise in average global temperatures—the fallback target of the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, which the world is nowhere close to achieving—will be calamitous. While the Trump administration continues to try and dispute the scientific reality of climate change, American scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have backed the IPCC consensus, warning U.S. citizens to prepare for severe heat waves, water shortages, violent storms, dying coral reefs, rising seas and destructive wildfires. 

A cyber-attack in Japan could now bring the US into war

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By Daniel Wolfe

In a briefing yesterday in Washington, DC, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared that “a cyberattack could, in certain circumstances, constitute an armed attack under Article 5 of the US-Japan Security Treaty.” The security agreement, ratified after World War II, guarantees the United States’ defense in the event of an attack on Japan.

“This is significant from the perspective of deterrence,” said Japanese defense secretary Takeshi Iwaya, also present at the briefing.

In the first such meeting between Japanese and US defense officials since 2017, the two sides shared their concerns for stability in the region. “Geopolitical competition and coercive attempts to undermine international rules, norms, and institutions—especially from China—present challenges to the alliance,” Pompeo said.

At a time when US lawmakers quibble over what constitutes state-coordinated digital espionage, definitions are in order. According to the Japanese defense ministry, a cyber-attack is an “abuse of information and communications networks” in the attempt to “access, steal, falsify or destroy information.”

Report: Weaponized PDFs on the Rise

By Brandi Vincent

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Security experts have reported a substantial increase in the number of weaponized PDFs being sent largely to recipients in the United States and Britain—most of which seem to be originating in Russia.

Through all of 2018, network security company SonicWall discovered more than 47,000 new attack variants within PDF files. But in March 2019 alone, 73,000 PDF-based attacks were discovered, according to a report released Thursday.

SonicWall’s President and CEO, Bill Conner, told Nextgov the company saw a rise in threats originating in PDFs in December and January—but by March—“It was just like, ‘Woah!’ It was really off the charts,” he said. Conner added that many of the threats “are emanating from Russia.”

Conner said that in March, the company’s “Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection” technology identified more than 83,000 “never-before-seen or identified” malicious events. Of those, 67,000 were PDFs linked to scammers and more than 5,500 were PDFs with direct links to other malware. PDF is the acronym used to refer to Portable Document Format. The file format was developed in the 1990s to maintain the aesthetic of an original document’s text and images that can be viewed across many programs and computer systems.

Solutions for Mission Success: New Approaches to Weapon System Cybersecurity

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True cybersecurity in weapon systems requires new ways of thinking, ranging from looking at cybersecurity through a mission lens, to using a common language, to building a pipeline of cyber talent and expertise.

Those were just a few of the important insights that emerged at the recent roundtable on cybersecurity for weapon systems, convened byForeign Policy in partnership with Booz Allen Hamilton as part of their Defense and National Security Roundtable Series.

Participants in the roundtable included senior leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), representatives of the Joint Staff, the Services, the U.S. Cyber Command and a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC), as well as senior leaders at Booz Allen. Read the full report here.

To learn more, download Booz Allen Hamilton’s thought piece “Managing Cyber Risk and Building Cyber Resilience in Weapon Systems” here.

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THE FBI WANTED A BACKDOOR TO THE IPHONE. TIM COOK SAID NO

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IN 2016, TIM Cook fought the law—and won.

Late in the afternoon of Tuesday, February 16, 2016, Cook and several lieutenants gathered in the “junior boardroom” on the executive floor at One Infinite Loop, Apple’s old headquarters. The company had just received a writ from a US magistrate ordering it to make specialized software that would allow the FBI to unlock an iPhone used by Syed Farook, a suspect in the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015 that left 14 people dead.

The iPhone was locked with a four-digit passcode that the FBI had been unable to crack. The FBI wanted Apple to create a special version of iOS that would accept an unlimited combination of passwords electronically, until the right one was found. The new iOS could be side-loaded onto the iPhone, leaving the data intact.

But Apple had refused. Cook and his team were convinced that a new unlocked version of iOS would be very, very dangerous. It could be misused, leaked, or stolen, and once in the wild, it could never be retrieved. It could potentially undermine the security of hundreds of millions of Apple users.

REVISING THE THEORY OF HYBRID WAR

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Lessons From Ukraine 

Today, the term “hybrid warfare” is widely used to describe Russia’s approach to the war it has been waging in Ukraine since 2014. But this notion has largely been absent from Russian military literature. Some Russian strategists only adopted the term after its use by numerous Western journalists and experts.

In Revising the Theory of Hybrid War, CEPA's Andrássy FellowKrisztián Jójárt assess the lessons learned by Moscow in eastern Ukraine and the implications for the West. How has the Kremlin’s military thinking evolved with the introduction of “hybrid warfare” into the equation? And what are the implications for the West when considering potential hybrid threats in the future?

CIA Offers Proof Huawei Has Been Funded By China’s Military And Intelligence

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by Zak Doffman 

In the battle between Washington and Huawei, there has long been the taunt from Shenzhen that U.S. officials have failed to produce any evidence of actual collusion between the telecom equipment giant and the Chinese state. Has that now changed?

On Saturday, the Times reported that such evidence exists, it has just not been openly published. According to the newspaper’s U.K. source, Huawei “has received funding from branches of Beijing’s state security apparatus… American intelligence shown to Britain says that Huawei has taken money from the People’s Liberation Army, China’s National Security Commission and a third branch of the Chinese state intelligence network.”

Earlier this month, Joy Tan, Huawei’s chief global communicator, told me that “the assumption that the Chinese government can potentially interfere in Huawei’s business operation is completely not true. Huawei is a private company. The Chinese government does not have any ownership or any interference in our business operations.”

The CIA has now directly refuted this. If true, the equipment maker taking funding from the Chinese military and state security machine would explode every defense offered through this long-running campaign to protest their innocence.

Anatomy of a Taiwan Invasion Part 2: Missile and Naval Domains

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By Rick Joe

This is part 2 of a three-part series considering the way in which a Taiwan invasion may be conducted. Part 1 set the political basis and military parameters and timeline for such a contingency, stating a late 2019 onset of conflict. The air domain of the conflict was also discussed, arguing that Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) fighter forces and Republic of China Armed Forces (ROCArF) air defenses and early warning systems would likely suffer significant early losses and disadvantages in terms of situational awareness, fighter sortie rates, and IADS coherency.

Part 2 now will consider the goals and prospects of other People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) kinetic domains, including missile power, naval power, and the beach landing. As described in part 1, this series will only consider first week of active fighting (T-day to T-day+7), with the conclusion that the PLA will seek to have successfully conducted amphibious assaults to have attained at least one or more major beachheads. Part 3 next month will review methods in which the ROCArF may seek to counter existing PLA capabilities as well as to consider what the likely future trajectory of PLA development may mean for ROCArF prospects in the next decade or more.

The Longest Wars Richard Holbrooke and the Decline of American Power

By George Packer

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One of the most celebrated diplomats of his generation, Richard Holbrooke helped normalize U.S. relations with China; served as U.S. ambassador to a newly reunified Germany and then to the United Nations; and, most famously, negotiated the 1995 Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia. But he began and ended his career struggling with how to resolve two American wars: first in Vietnam, then in Afghanistan.

Richard Holbrooke was six feet one but seemed bigger. He had long skinny limbs and a barrel chest and broad square shoulder bones, on top of which sat his strangely small head and, encased within it, the sleepless brain. His feet were so far from his trunk that, as his body wore down and the blood stopped circulating properly, they swelled up and became marbled red and white like steak. He had special shoes made and carried extra socks in his leather attaché case, sweating through half a dozen pairs a day, stripping them off on long flights and draping them over his seat pocket in first class, or else cramming used socks next to the classified documents in his briefcase. He wrote his book about ending the war in Bosnia—the place in history that he always craved, though it was never enough—with his feet planted in a Brookstone shiatsu foot massager. One morning he showed up late for a meeting in the secretary of state’s suite at the Waldorf Astoria in his stocking feet, shirt untucked and fly half zipped, padding around the room and picking grapes off a fruit basket, while Madeleine Albright’s furious stare tracked his every move. During a videoconference call from the U.S. mission to the United Nations, in New York, his feet were propped up on a chair, while down in the White House Situation Room their giant distortion completely filled the wall screen and so disrupted the meeting that President Bill Clinton’s national security adviser finally ordered a military aide to turn off the video feed. Holbrooke put his feet up anywhere, in the White House, on other people’s desks and coffee tables—for relief, and for advantage.