Fighting in Afghanistan gets worse; UN OKs Syrian peace roadmap; Obama talks to NPR; How Trump and ISIS help each other; and a bit more...

Six U.S. troops were killed today in Kabul when a motorcycle-borne suicide bomber drove into a joint U.S.-Afghan foot patrol in Parwan province, north of Kabul, at 1 p.m. local, NBC News and Fox News reports. In addition to the six Americans killed, two more were wounded along with an Afghan interpreter. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack in an email sent to the Associated Press.

Elsewhere in Afghanistan, clashes are still going on in southern Helmand province—where, for weeks, U.S. special forces have been taking on a larger role than many had thought. Fighting on Monday flared in Helmand’s Sangin district, where the Taliban have reportedly captured the police HQ, governor’s office, and an office for Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, Helmand’s governor told Agence France-Presse. In addition, “trapped residents told AFP that roads to Sangin had been heavily mined by insurgents and exhausted soldiers besieged in government buildings were begging for food rations.”

For what it’s worth: “All but two of Helmand’s 14 districts are effectively controlled or heavily contested by Taliban insurgents,” AFP reports.

Helmand could fall to the Taliban any day now, the province’s deputy governor said Sunday after some 90 Afghan troops were killed from fighting near the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah late last week. In desperation, Deputy Governor Mohammad Jan Rasulyar took to Facebook to relay this message to President Ashraf Ghani: “Your Excellency, Helmand is standing on the brink and there is a serious need for you to come.” Reuters has more, here.

ICYMI: a recent Pentagon report said the security situation in Afghanistan has gotten worse in 2015. More on that from AP, or read the report for yourself, here.

President Barack Obama admits more could have been done to explain the threat of the Islamic State to Americans. In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Obama said, “I think that there is a legitimate criticism of what I’ve been doing and our administration has been doing in the sense that we haven’t, you know, on a regular basis I think described all the work that we've been doing for more than a year now to defeat ISIL.”

But he also pushed back against critics who say the U.S. military hasn’t done enough to eliminate the group in Iraq and Syria. “One of the interesting things that you've seen evolve over the last several weeks, including in the debates that are taking place between the Republican candidates, is that those who are critics of our administration response, or the military, the intelligence response that we are currently mounting, when you ask them, well, what would you do instead, they don’t have an answer. And the reason they don’t have an answer is because the truth is that the approach that we are taking is one that's based on the best counsel and best advice of our top military, top intelligence, top diplomatic teams.”

On more U.S. ground troops: “I've tested this repeatedly with our military intelligence folks, when you start looking at an Iraq-type deployment of large numbers of troops — 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 troops — we are now in a situation in which we are committing ourselves not only to going door to door in places like Mosul and Raqqa, which I'm confident that we could do, but we have essentially said to the Iraqis and the Syrians that we are going to govern for you. And that ends up being of an indefinite period.”

On carving out a “safe zone” in Syria: “This is something we’ve been talking about for three or four years. The challenge there is that ISIL doesn't have an air force, so the damage done there is not against ISIL, it's against the Syrian regime...We’ve tested, we’ve looked at repeatedly, the problem is that, again, without a large number of troops on the ground, it’s hard to create a safe zone like that. And that doesn’t solve the ISIL problem.” Read (or listen to) the rest, here. More on ISIS below the fold.

From Defense One

The global conflicts to watch in 2016. Concerns about the Middle East, and especially Syria, have displaced other threats, writes The Atlantic’s Uri Friedman, who ranks them as high, moderate, and low priority, here.

What is America fighting for? You cannot beat ISIS’ surging ideology without a higher sense of purpose, writes The Atlantic’s Larry Diamond. “In the face of the persistent challenge of violent Islamist extremism and the global recession of freedom, what the world has needed is a powerful reaffirmation of the universal relevance of liberal values. Instead, the democratic West has been retreating into moral relativism and illiberal impulses.” Read more, here.

How Trump and ISIS help each other, and what to do about it. The Atlantic’s Dominic Tierney: “Hardliners represent each other’s meal ticket. They may rail against the enemy, but the enemy is what keeps them in business.” What’s the solution? “Moderates must also build their own international networks..The moderates on the other team may be closer partners than the extremists on one’s own side.” Read on, here.

Israel vs. Hezbollah, round three? The Lebanon-based terror group fired rockets into northern Israel just hours after an Israeli strike killed a senior Hezbollah leader in Syria. The Atlantic has more, here.

Poland’s new government raided a NATO intel facility in the dark of night. Poles woke up on Dec. 18 to news that “officials from the country’s new right-wing government tried to enter NATO-affiliated counter-intelligence offices in Warsaw after midnight, using a copied key and accompanied by military police, in order to replace the head of the office.” Opposition members were scandalized, going so far as to apologize to Slovakia, whose agents also use the office, while NATO tried to downplay the attempted breaking-and-entering. Quartz has more, here.

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The UN Security Council on Friday unanimously approved a roadmap to peace for Syria. Included: “calls for a ceasefire, talks between the Syrian government and opposition, and a roughly two-year timeline to create a unity government and hold elections.”

Not included: “who may represent the opposition as well as on the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.”

What’s next: “Talks between Syria’s government and opposition should begin in early January, the resolution said, though [U.S. State Secretary John] Kerry said mid-to-late January was more likely.” More here.

A new poll of Iraqis and Syrians reminds us that “a vast majority of civilians on the ground there believe the U.S. created the extremist network, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and sees it as no better than the proxies the White House supports to win the war remotely.” US News’ Paul Shinkman has that, here.

The Pentagon is mulling an escalation of its cyber offensive against ISIS, including “an array of malware [developed at U.S. Cyber Command] that could be used to sabotage the militants' propaganda and recruitment capabilities.” More here.

Meantime in Iraq, Russia is courting Sunni tribes in a move some see as filling a vacuum left by a U.S. that’s not totally committed to the fight against ISIS. “Two U.S. officials told The Daily Beast that they are seeing early signs of this Russian outreach to Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq, aimed at bolstering the minority sect’s efforts to combat ISIS militants embedded within Sunni communities… Part of this recent charm offensive is the Kremlin’s offer to provide Sunni tribes with weapons faster than the U.S. has thus far been able to, and to do so unilaterally, bypassing the Shiite-dominated central government entirely.” More here.

And Turkey’s military unleashed on Kurdish militants in the country’s southeast, killing more than 100 this weekend as part of an offensive began Wednesday involving 10,000 troops and tanks. Al-Jazeera has more, here.

Yemen peace talks break down, again: A UN official who had been moderating efforts in Switzerland to end the 9-month-old conflict called off the talks because of continued fighting between Houthi rebels and a Saudi Arabia-led military coalition. Wall Street Journal, here.

New U.S.-Israeli missile-defense system passes final test, paving the way for the David’s Sling system to go operational next year, AP reports. David’s Sling is meant to shoot down medium-range missiles and long-range, low-flying cruise missiles.

Oops? U.S. B-52s overfly artificial Chinese island, drawing howls from Beijing’s military. “Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said that the Dec. 10 mission was not a ‘freedom of navigation’ operation and that there was ‘no intention of flying within 12 nautical miles of any feature,’ indicating the mission may have strayed off course.” AP, here. (Recall that last week, U.S. officials said no more freedom-of-nav transits were planning in 2015.)

U.S. power grid alert: Iranian hackers accessed the control system of a small dam just outside of New York City back in 2013, the Wall Street Journal reports. “These systems control the flow in pipelines, the movements of drawbridges and water releases from dams. A hacker could theoretically cause an explosion, a flood or a traffic jam…The still-classified dam intrusion illustrates a top concern for U.S. officials as they enter an age of digital state-on-state conflict.”

Indeed, “About a dozen times in the last decade, sophisticated foreign hackers have gained enough remote access to control the operations networks that keep the lights on,” the AP reports in their own investigation into the vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid. “As Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged in an interview, however, ‘we are not where we need to be’ on cybersecurity. That’s partly because the grid is largely privately owned and has entire sections that fall outside federal regulation, which experts argue leaves the industry poorly defended against a growing universe of hackers seeking to access its networks.” More here.

Lastly today—your Monday #LongRead comes from former Marine C.J. Chivers of the NYT on a Syrian rebel-turned-ISIS utility man. Chivers draws on months of reporting to tell the story of Hassan Aboud, a man with former ties to Al Qaeda who killed many of his friends as he accepted large cash sums from ISIS in their rise to power in Iraq and Syria. It’s a fascinating tale of a man who lost portions of his both his legs, and so is carted around the battlefield like royalty atop the shoulders of his fighters. Read on, here.