Posted on 06/29/2010 12:24:41 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The removal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the US commander in Afghanistan and his replacement by Gen. David Petraeus is not, as portrayed by Obamas political apologists, a principled defense of civilian control over the military. Nor is it, as the official line emanating from the White House would have it, a change in personnel only, not in policy.
There is every indication that the change in command is the result of growing dissatisfaction with McChrystals counterinsurgency methods, which have failed to dislodge the Taliban-led guerrilla forces that control the bulk of southern and eastern Afghanistan. It presages a drastic increase in the level of US military violence, and especially the scale of civilian casualties among the Afghan population. Their crime is to sympathize with and support the anti-US insurgency.
Petraeus is already, according to one media report, preparing to modify the rules of engagement to allow for greater use of force.
According to a report Sunday in the British Independent, McChrystal had grown increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for success, particularly after he was compelled to postpone the planned offensive into the key southern city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He reportedly briefed NATO defense ministers earlier this month and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months.
The newspaper writes: It was this briefing, according to informed sources, as much as the Rolling Stone article, which convinced Mr. Obama to move against McChrystal. The article adds, The general was judged to be off message in his warning to ministers not to expect quick results and that they were facing a resilient and growing insurgency.
A media campaign has begun in the United States, spearheaded by the New York Times, portraying McChrystal as excessively concerned about the deaths of Afghan civilians caught in the escalating warfare between US and NATO forces and the Taliban-led guerrilla forces. This began with an article June 22 by C. J. Chivers which described growing frustration among field officers, NCOs and rank-and-file soldiers in Afghanistan over being handcuffed by McChrystal. The generals tactics supposedly restricted the use of Western firepowerairstrikes and guided rocket attacks, artillery barrages and even mortar fireto support troops on the ground. This theme was taken up by several Times correspondents in online commentaries on the newspapers web siteRobert Mackey, John Burns and Dexter Filkins all chimed inand then by the newspapers op-ed columnists, both liberal and conservative.
Bob Herbert, a liberal columnist, suddenly discovered his vocation as an adviser on military tactics in a column Saturday headlined Worse Than a Nightmare. He denounced the counterinsurgency strategy of McChrystal and Petraeus, declaring that its advocates seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You dont go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you dont want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or dont know how to do it, dont go to war. The men who stormed the beaches at Normandy werent trying to win the hearts and minds of anyone.
He continued: Among the downsides of this battlefield caution is a disturbing unwillingness to give our own combat troops the supportive airstrikes and artillery cover that they feel is needed.
Ross Douthat, a conservative Times columnist, raised the same issue Monday, arguing that success is our only ticket out of Afghanistan. The Obama administration hasnt been choosing between remaining in Afghanistan and withdrawing from the fight. Its been choosing between two ways of stayingi.e., a prolonged stalemate, or outright military victory. Douthat noted that the Rolling Stone article which provided the occasion for McChrystals ouster was ostensibly a left-wing, antiwar critique of counterinsurgency. But it actually gave voice to complaints that the current strategy places too much value on innocent Afghan lives. He cited another analyst summing up the article as criticizing the current strategy because it doesnt allow our soldiers to kill enough people.
It might appear farfetched that General McChrystal, a longtime commander of Special Operations forces who was responsible for the assassination of thousands of insurgents during his years in Iraq, should be deemed insufficiently bloodthirsty. The logic of such criticism was spelled out in a significant analysis in the July 2010 issue of Washington Quarterly, the magazine of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major policy think tank in the US capital.
Written by Lorenzo Zambernardi, an Italian academic now working in the US, the article discusses what it calls Counterinsurgencys Impossible Trilemma.
Zambernardi argues: Counterinsurgency involves three main goals, but in real practice a counterinsurgent needs to choose two out of three. The impossible trilemma in counterinsurgency is that, in this type of conflict, it is impossible to simultaneously achieve: 1) force protection, 2) distinction between enemy combatants and noncombatants, and 3) the physical elimination of insurgents.
According to this schema, McChrystal had chosen the second and third goals, with the resulting spike in US-NATO casualties and increasing dissatisfaction among the rank-and-file soldiers ordered to take greater risks to avoid civilian casualties. The alternative, the author writes, is to focus on the first and third goals instead: A state can protect its armed forces while destroying insurgents, but only by indiscriminately killing civilians as the Ottomans, Italians, and Nazis did in the Balkans, Libya, and Eastern Europe, respectively. This choice, what the author later calls a policy of barbarism, could perhaps be described as the Hitler option.
That is where American policy in Afghanistan is now headed: towards a dramatic escalation of violence in a war that has always been characterized by extreme brutality and disregard for the destruction of innocent lives.
Such is the response of US imperialism to its failure to suppress popular opposition in Afghanistan to Washingtons neo-colonial war and occupation. The push to escalate the bloodbath arises because the anti-US insurgency has mass popular support. This struggle of the Afghan masses against foreign occupation is entirely legitimate.
Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed in more than nine years of warfare, the longest single military engagement in American history. US air strikes have hit wedding celebrations, family outings, even funeral ceremonies.
Thousands of Afghans have been seized and detained and tortured at the infamous Bagram prison camp and at other such facilities throughout the country. US Predator missiles have been fired from drone aircraft at villages on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with hundreds, probably thousands, dead.
This is the bloodbath that Obama publicly supported as the good war in his presidential campaign, and which the liberal wing of the Democratic Party embraces enthusiastically to this day, in the face of growing popular opposition within the US. Those who are making the decisions to continue and escalate this conflict are guilty of war crimes. Those who supply the political rationalizations to sell this war to the American people are their accomplices.
Why would socialists be against Hitler. Hell, he and Mussolini were their boys in the 1930s. Speaking honestly, Afghanistan would welcome Hitler. Hell, Adolph is a favored named among the Afghans and Pakistanis.
The author must not realize that D-Day June 6th 1944 happened LONG after Germany declared war on the US December 11, 1941. A whole 2 years, 5 months, 26 days between the two dates. The truth is, wars are complex supply and logistics operations. Get there firstest with the mostest is an well known axiom of war. And due to the teliban being there firstest, we are left with the mostest option. That requires a large amount of planning and executing to make happen.
Some side with the Taliban out of belief in their leadership. Others side with the Taliban out of fear for their lives.
When they are told that the Americans will be pulling up stakes and hightailing it out of town next year, the locals wise up that if they choose to side with the Americans, they can expect to be killed as "traitors" by the Taliban after we leave.
But we aren't supposed to mention this.
What a load of horse-pooh. I can’t believe no one is talking about how Petraes was basically show the door by BO and his moon-bat buddy was given the job. Then we went 4 plus months while Teh-one dithered over deployment orders, and basically let MacCristal know he wouldn’t support his requests.
Now the media thinks Obama is a god for replacing Mac with Petraes, and majically now ROA are being changed. Guarenteed Petraes cut a deal on that.
Good argument if this were 2002. It has been the better part of a decade you can’t tell me we shouldn’t have had the “mostest” by now.
Well for much of the time, we have been getting the mostest in Iraq. Once the surge was allowed to proceed, we were able to get things under control.
....
The socialists are stark raving kooks, but at least I learned a new word today; “trilemma”.
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