Did McChrystial Want Out?

 

 

McChrystal...bailed?

By Immanuel Wallerstein

McChrystal's Chief of Operations, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, says Afghanistan will be like Vietnam: "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win....This is going to end in an argument."

Hastings ends his article this way: "Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge."

So, what would you do if you were McChrystal? You'd invite a reporter for a rock-and-roll magazine, considered to be on the left, to accompany you on airplanes and to drink fests, and sneer at the government.

This was guaranteed to get you fired. And it meant that the future "argument" would not involve you.

What could Obama do? He had to fire McChrystal. Then, he tossed the hot potato to Petraeus, who couldn't refuse it.

The next year or two are going to be a fast-moving game in which Obama and Petraeus are going to try to shift the public's blame for the defeat on the other.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine in which he and his staff insulted the civilian leaders of his country.

He was fired for insubordination by Pres. Obama. Even his defenders said that McChrystal's remarks were impolitic and a mistake. Given the fact that McChrystal is an exceptionally intelligent and very ambitious person, why did he do it?

McChrystal gave the interview in order that he be fired. And why did he want to be fired? He wanted to be fired because he knew that the policies he was pursuing and championing in the war in Afghanistan were not working, could not work. And he didn't want to be the one tarnished with the public blame.

Consider the long history that led up to this interview. The military strategy the United States forged in Afghanistan and Iraq was originally that imposed by then U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

The policy was one of unlimited machismo. Bomb the enemy from way up high and don't worry about who gets killed. Use torture on those you capture. Don't consult with anyone, even if they are so-called allies. Occupy the country, indefinitely.

Stanley McChrystal was a one-star general at the beginning of these wars, working in Washington as one of Rumsfeld's "golden boys."

He had a long history, since his West Point days, of being a daring rebel who knew just when to stop -- contemptuous of superiors he did not respect but always seeking to advance himself.

Rumsfeld placed him in charge of the military's most secretive elite units, engaged in "special operations" and known to be a "killing machine." He performed brilliantly, as usual.

Then in 2006, if we still remember, the military, the politicians, and the press all began to say that the United States was losing the war in Iraq.

Resistance seemed too strong, and the number of U.S. lives lost was steadily going up month by month. The Republicans did very badly in the elections of 2006. Something had to be done.

Something was done. Rumsfeld was fired by President Bush. Vice-President Cheney, Rumsfeld's strongest defender, lost influence to Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld's successor, Robert Gates, who championed more "moderate" views, emphasizing diplomacy.

A new military strategy suddenly gained ground, counter-insurgency (referred to by an acronym COIN). It was developed by a previously obscure military officer, David Petraeus.

Petraeus is as ambitious and as driven as McChrystal but a quite different personality. He is what might be called a military intellectual. He won the award as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1983. He got a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton in 1989.

He taught international relations at West Point. At the same time, he has a long record as a seasoned combat officer. And he cultivated favor with Washington politicians.

Since the 1980s, his published articles and reports advocated counter-insurgency as a doctrine. He drew on the experiences of the French using it in Algeria and the United States using it in Vietnam.

As Petraeus' right-wing critics note, these were not notable successes. COIN emphasizes the need for "winning hearts and minds," which means necessarily incorporating diplomatic and political considerations into military tactics.

The writer of the Rolling Stone interview, Michael Hastings, described COIN this way: "Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps."

Pres. Bush turned to Petraeus in 2006 and allowed him to implement COIN in Iraq. This was the famous "surge" that involved increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and changing strategy.

Basically, Petraeus did two things that did indeed reduce the amount of violence against U.S. troops.

The first was to bribe Sunni tribal elders in central and western Iraq to cease their tacit support of non-Iraqi al-Qaeda units. Since the Sunni sheikhs had never liked the al-Qaeda units, they were willing to forget their dislike of the Americans - for a price.

The second thing that Petraeus did was to permit ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, turning a multi-ethnic city into two segregated zones, a larger Shi'a zone and a beleaguered smaller Sunni zone.

This reduced violence against the U.S. troops at the expense of increased inter-Iraqi violence. It also served the political interests of the most persistent and effective opponent of U.S. interests in Iraq, Mokhtar al-Sadr, who is emerging as the key broker in the newly-elected Iraqi parliament.

As Hastings said in an interview with the Huffington Post about his article, "Petraeus is sort of a genius. He managed to turn what could have been catastrophic defeat in Iraq into a face-saving withdrawal." But of course, a face-saving withdrawal is not a victory, even if Sen. John McCain insisted so when running for president in 2008 -- unsuccessfully.

When Barack Obama ran for office, he said quite clearly that he was against the war in Iraq and for the war in Afghanistan. So obviously he had to pursue it.

He promoted Petraeus, adopted COIN, and named McChrystal commander in Afghanistan. True to his "rebel" style, McChrystal publicly demanded 40,000 more troops from Obama who, after months of reflection, gave him 30,000 -- plus a withdrawal date.

At this point, however, McChrystal abandoned his previous machismo style and became the enthusiastic, perhaps over-enthusiastic, implementer of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan.

He issued super-strict directives to avoid civilian casualties, a policy not at all appreciated by U.S. infantry units. He developed warm relations with Pres. Hamid Karzai, whom other U.S. leaders held at a distance.

He thought he could win a quick victory in Marja and turn the area over to Afghan forces. Instead, it was a failure. And he recently announced that the key operation in Kandahar province, heartland of the Taliban forces, had to be postponed until September.

Even McChrystal's Chief of Operations, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, says Afghanistan will be like Vietnam: "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win....This is going to end in an argument."

Hastings ends his article this way: "Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge."

So, what would you do if you were McChrystal? You'd invite a reporter for a rock-and-roll magazine, considered to be on the left, to accompany you on airplanes and to drink fests, and sneer at the government.

This was guaranteed to get you fired. And it meant that the future "argument" would not involve you.

What could Obama do? He had to fire McChrystal. Then, he tossed the hot potato to Petraeus, who couldn't refuse it.

The next year or two are going to be a fast-moving game in which Obama and Petraeus are going to try to shift the public's blame for the defeat on the other.

The far right, the friends of Cheney and Rumsfeld, are not fooled. Diana West, one of their pundits, says: "The COIN nightmare continues."

For her, COIN means ordering troops "to exercise fantasies of cultural relativism that makes lefty sense in a PC classroom, but are nothing short of appalling on the front line."

A slightly less acerbic view was that of retired Col. Douglas Macgregor: "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense."

Of course, Macgregor is right. What are the policy choices? The far right wants perpetual war. The only alternative is early and complete withdrawal.

Obama doesn't want the first and is politically afraid to embrace the second. So he sends CIA Director, Leon Panetta, out to give ABC News an interview, saying that making progress in Afghanistan is "harder" and going more slowly than anticipated. Indeed, it is.

Obama Lets McChrystal go

We're F*#!ing losing this thing.

By Barry Grey

Despite McChrystal’s reputation as a ruthless leader, responsible for the killing of thousands of Iraqis, he's become the target of growing criticism that the war in Afghanistan was being undermined by his excessive concern over civilian casualties.

Reactions within the US establishment to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal indicate that disparaging remarks by McChrystal and his aides concerning President Obama and other civilian officials published in a Rolling Stone article were not the principal cause of his dismissal.

Rather, the article brought to a head the deepening failure of the US military to suppress the popular resistance in Afghanistan to Washington’s colonial-style war.

Dissatisfaction with McChrystal’s leadership had been mounting within the Obama administration since the failure of the offensive in Marjah launched last February.

The decision announced earlier this month to delay for at least three months the assault on Kandahar was widely seen as an embarrassing setback.

Despite McChrystal’s reputation as a ruthless practitioner of counterinsurgency warfare, responsible for the killing of thousands of Iraqis, the general has more recently been the target of growing criticism that the effectiveness of the operation in Afghanistan was being undermined by his excessive concern over civilian casualties.

That concern has nothing to do with humanitarian considerations. Rather, it is based on the cold calculation—the Rolling Stone article refers to McChrystal's "insurgent math"—that for every innocent person killed, ten new enemies are created.

The article, written by Michael Hastings, deals relatively briefly with the remarks of McChrystal and his aides about US civilian officials in Afghanistan.

They are predictably crude, and could hardly have come as a surprise to Obama, let alone to the Pentagon.

They are familiar with the fascistic and debased character of McChrystal’s entourage. Hastings concisely describes the general’s staff as “a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs.”

The comments made by McChrystal about Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden and special envoy Richard Holbrooke have generated the most media attention.

But Hastings devotes far more space relating the complaints of American soldiers that McChrystal is tying their hands by enforcing rules of engagement.

These limit the use of air strikes and mortar fire against potential civilian targets and restrict the ability of US troops to enter the homes of Afghan civilians.

Hastings writes that “McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the US military has ever encountered in a war zone.”

He continues: “But however strategic they may be, McChrystal’s new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger.

"‘Bottom line?’ says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.’”

Describing a meeting near Kandahar between McChrystal and disaffected troops, Hastings writes: “The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to fight—like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal.”

Whether this view is really widely held among soldiers is not clear. But it appears that this argument is gaining support within the Washington policy-making elite and within the media.

Hastings indicates his own standpoint—and, more broadly, that of many of McChrystal’s establishment critics—when he declares: “When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side.

The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan—and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny.”

The New York Times weighed in on Wednesday, before the White House meeting between Obama and McChrystal at which the general submitted his resignation, with an article by its Afghan war correspondent, C. J. Chivers, headlined “Warriors Vexed by Rules For War.”

The article makes the case for the US to “take the gloves off” and dramatically escalate its assault on the Afghan population. Chivers quotes unnamed soldiers denouncing McChrystal for limiting the use of air strikes and artillery, and declares:

“As levels of violence in Afghanistan climb, there is a palpable and building sense of unease among troops surrounding one of the most confounding questions about how to wage the war: when and how lethal force should be used.”

He continues: “The rules have shifted risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants… Young officers and enlisted soldiers and Marines…speak of ‘being handcuffed…’”

“No one wants to advocate loosening rules that might see more civilians killed,” he writes. But this is precisely what The New York Times is demanding.

In its lead editorial published on Thursday, entitled “Afghanistan After McChrystal,” the Times demands a “serious assessment now of the military and civilian strategies.”

It then writes, in chilling language: “Until the insurgents are genuinely bloodied they will keep insisting on a full restoration of their repressive power. Reports that some State Department officials are also advocating a swift deal with the Taliban are worrisome.”

This statement, by the authoritative voice of the liberal Democratic Party policy-making establishment, provides an insight into the deeper issues involved in McChrystal’s removal.

Apparently, for the Times, the United States has not pursued with sufficient vigor the work of “seriously bloodying” those in Afghanistan opposed to foreign occupation during more than eight years of war.

Tens of thousands of Afghans have already been killed by US and NATO forces—nobody knows the full extent of the slaughter since Washington does not bother to count its victims. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, jailed or tortured in US prisons.

This campaign of killing and terror is aimed at drowning in blood an entirely legitimate struggle by the Afghan people for national liberation against a colonial occupier.

The main problem the US faces is that after eight years of war and more than three decades of US subversion and provocation, popular resistance by the Afghan masses against American imperialism is growing. The answer of the US ruling elite is to murder more Afghans.

The war in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity, and those who are perpetuating it are war criminals.