Why did McChrystal want to be fired?

The only reasonable explanation of McChrystal and his staff's actions is that he wanted to be fired. McChrystal allowed Michael Hastings a reporter for the anti-war magazine Rolling Stone tag along with them for about a month. Hastings was able to record all sorts of intimate details of the goings on of McChrystal and his staff. He also recorded remarks that were insulting to many important U.S. politicians, including Joe Biden, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Holbrooke, and on and on. The McChrystal staff called the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), I Suck At Fighting. This is the force that McChrystal commands.

When Hastings subsequently penned a long article for Rolling Stone repeating remarks that obviously involved insubordination nevertheless McChrystal did not contest anything said in the article. He surely must have known that Obama would really have no choice but look like a complete wuss or have him fired or resign.

The question now becomes why did McChrystal want to be fired. No doubt there are other possibilities but here is my view. McChrystal believes that the Afghan policy is failing. He wants to get out before this becomes obvious to everyone and a complete disaster. Pakistan and Afghanistan are not waiting either. They are negotiating as to how they can make peace with the insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

McChrystal realizes things are not working out. He has called Marjah a bleeding ulcer. He has been unable to sell troops on the idea that they should be very cautious about killing civilians even if it means more casualties for them. But he has not been able to win hearts and minds of the Afghans either. At a meeting with elders they made it clear that they did not want an offensive in Kandahar. He had to postpone it. Obama wants to begin a withdrawal next year while the COIN strategy takes years if not decades. Better to get out now and take a swipe at those you don't like on the way out the door.

Now Obama is left to go on with the costly mess led by the reliable Bush General Petraeus and pursuing the same failing COIN strategy.

US spurs rise of militias in Afghanistan.

No doubt the US hopes to use the Awakening movement in Iraq as a model. Recent events in Iraq show that once payment is stopped problems immediately begin to crop up. You have a trained armed militia that could turn against the government if things do not go the way the group wants. As the article mentions in Afghanistan the policy is just a recipe for increased warlordism. Many of the warlords were so brutal and arbitrary that people turned to the Taliban just to receive some justice and consideration of their concerns crude as it may have been. That McChrystal is head of the Afghan command is ominous since he was earlier in command of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) that was involved in a lot of classified secret operations in Iraq. McChrystal no doubt might encourage clandestine operations such as funding groups that if anything are worse than the Taliban but would be glad to be on the US payroll.

November 22, 2009
As Afghans Resist Taliban, U.S. Spurs Rise of Militias
By DEXTER FILKINS
ACHIN, Afghanistan — American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban.

The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

The American and Afghan officials say they are hoping the plan, called the Community Defense Initiative, will bring together thousands of gunmen to protect their neighborhoods from Taliban insurgents. Already there are hundreds of Afghans who are acting on their own against the Taliban, officials say.

The endeavor represents one of the most ambitious — and one of the riskiest — plans for regaining the initiative against the Taliban, who are fighting more vigorously than at any time since 2001.

By harnessing the militias, American and Afghan officials hope to rapidly increase the number of Afghans fighting the Taliban. That could supplement the American and Afghan forces already here, and whatever number of American troops President Obama might decide to send. The militias could also help fill the gap while the Afghan Army and police forces train and grow — a project that could take years to bear fruit.

The Americans hope the militias will encourage an increasingly demoralized Afghan population to take a stake in the war against the Taliban.

“The idea is to get people to take responsibility for their own security,” said a senior American military official in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “In many places they are already doing that.”

The growth of the anti-Taliban militias runs the risk that they could turn on one another, or against the Afghan and American governments.

The Americans say they will keep the groups small and will limit the scope of their activities to protecting villages and manning checkpoints.

For now, they are not arming the groups because they already have guns.

The Americans also say they will tie them directly to the Afghan government.

These checks aim to avoid repeating mistakes of the past — either creating more Afghan warlords, who have defied the government’s authority for years, or arming Islamic militants, some of whom came back to haunt the United States.

The American plan echoes a similar movement that unfolded in Iraq, beginning in late 2006, in which Sunni tribes turned against Islamist extremists.

That movement, called the Sunni Awakening, brought tens of thousands of former insurgents into government-supervised militias and helped substantially reduce the violence in Iraq. A rebellion on a similar scale seems unlikely in Afghanistan, in large part because the tribes here are so much weaker than those in Iraq.

The first phase of the Afghan plan, now being carried out by American Special Forces soldiers, is to set up or expand the militias in areas with a population of about a million people. Special Forces soldiers have been fanning out across the countryside, descending from helicopters into valleys where the residents have taken up arms against the Taliban and offering their help.

“We are trying to reach out to these groups that have organized themselves,” Col. Christopher Kolenda said in Kabul.

Afghan and American officials say they plan to use the militias as tripwires for Taliban incursions, enabling them to call the army or the police if things get out of hand.

The official assistance to the militias so far has been modest, consisting mainly of ammunition and food, officials said. But American and Afghan officials say they are also planning to train the fighters and provide communication equipment.

“What we are talking about is a local, spontaneous and indigenous response to the Taliban,” said Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister. “The Afghans are saying, ‘We are willing and determined and capable to defend our country; just give us the resources.’ ”

In the Pashtun-dominated areas of the south and east, the anti-Taliban militias are being led by elders from local tribes. The Pashtun militias represent a reassertion of the country’s age-old tribal system, which binds villages and regions under the leadership of groups of elders.

The tribal networks have been alternately decimated and co-opted by Taliban insurgents. Local tribal leaders, while still powerful, cannot count on the allegiance of all of their tribes’ members.

Militias have begun taking up arms against the Taliban in several places where insurgents have gained a foothold, including the provinces of Nangarhar and Paktia.

So far, there appears to be some divergence in the American and Afghan efforts. While American Special Forces units have focused on helping smaller militias, Afghan officials have been channeling assistance to larger armed groups, including those around the northern city of Kunduz. In that city, several armed groups, led by ethnic Uzbek commanders as well as Pashtuns, are confronting the Taliban.

“In Kunduz, after they defeated the Taliban in their villages, they became the power and they took money and taxes from the people,” Mr. Atmar, the interior minister, said. “This is not legal, and this is warlordism.”

Colonel Kolenda said, “In the long run, that is destabilizing.”

One of the most striking examples of a local militia rising up on its own is here in Achin, a predominantly Pashtun district in Nangarhar Province that straddles the border with Pakistan.

In July, a long-running dispute between local Taliban fighters and elders from the Shinwari tribe flared up. When a local Taliban warlord named Khona brought a more senior commander from Pakistan to help in the confrontation, the elders in the Shinwari tribe rallied villagers from up and down the valley where they live, killed the commander and chased Khona away.

The elders had insisted that the Taliban stay away from a group of Afghans building a dike in the valley. When Khona’s men kidnapped two Afghan engineers, the Shinwari elders decided they had had enough.

“The whole tribe was with me,” one of the elders said in an interview. “The Taliban came to kill me, and instead we killed them.”

The two tribal elders in Achin who led the rebellion spoke at length with The New York Times about their activities. At the request of American commanders in Kabul, who feared that the elders would be killed by the Taliban, the identities of the men are being withheld.

Since the fight, the Taliban have been kept away from a string of villages in Achin District that stretch for about six miles. The elders said they were able to do so by forming a group of more than 100 fighters and posting them at each end of the valley.

The elders said they had been marked for death by Taliban commanders on both sides of the border.

“Every day people call me and tell me the Taliban is trying to kill me,” one of the Shinwari elders said. “They call me and tell me: ‘Don’t take this road. Take a different one.’ I am worried about suicide bombers.”

The feud between the Taliban and the Shinwari elders caught the attention of American officers, who sent a team of Special Forces soldiers to the valley. This reporter was unable to reach the interior of the valley where the men live, so it was difficult to verify all of the elders’ claims.

Both the Shinwari elders said that “Americans with beards” had flown into the valley twice in recent weeks and had given them flour and boxes of ammunition. (Unlike other American troops, Special Forces soldiers are allowed to wear beards.)

American officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said they intended to help organize and train the Shinwari militia. They said they would give them communication gear that would enable them to call the Afghan police if they needed help.

But that, as well as other aspects of the plan, seems problematic, at least for now. There are only about 50 Afghan police officers in Achin, the district center, and none in the valley. There are no Afghan Army soldiers in the area, and the nearest American base is many miles away.

The hope, of course, is that the revolt led by the Shinwari elders spreads. Each of the elders interviewed leads a branch of the 12 Shinwari tribes. If they survive, both elders said, they believe that others will join them.

“The Taliban are not popular here, not educated,” another Shinwari elder said. “They are stray dogs.”



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Bacevich on the Afghan war

Bacevich is right about the hawk view that the two options are to accept the McChrystal recommendations or accept defeat but this is obviously simplistic. In my own opinion the McChrystal recommendations also will probably lead to defeat and certainly to many more casualties and higher costs than relying on a strategy such as Biden suggests. However the hawks are probably correct that it will not be successful either. It would be less damaging in terms of losses and costs though and that is of some significance. Withdrawing all NATO and US forces on the other hand would lead to negotiations between the Taliban and the Karzai government. Both the Taliban and Karzai would prefer a negotiated settlement. It would be much easier to do this than to continue a civil war with the West supplying the Afghan government with all the military supplies it needed to carry on the war.
Bacevich is correct in noting the lack of significance in the global scheme of U.S. power of Afghanistan. The recommendations of McChrystal simply represent a sign that the military at least would like to carry out the same strategy for global dominance as Bush, the projection of military might anywhere the US may feel some sort of challenge. Obama could change this but his campaign strategy was precisely to carry on with this strategy in Afghanistan and even go further than Bush in escalating drone attacks and probably special operations within Pakistan. The only reason he might change is because of the political opposition at home and especially within his party but I doubt that this will ultimately have much effect.


Andrew J. Bacevich

Afghanistan - the proxy war

By Andrew J. Bacevich
October 11, 2009

NO SERIOUS person thinks that Afghanistan - remote, impoverished, barely qualifying as a nation-state - seriously matters to the United States. Yet with the war in its ninth year, the passions raised by the debate over how to proceed there are serious indeed. Afghanistan elicits such passions because people understand that in rendering his decision on Afghanistan, President Obama will declare himself on several much larger issues. In this sense, Afghanistan is a classic proxy war, with the main protagonists here in the United States.

The question of the moment, framed by the prowar camp, goes like this: Will the president approve the Afghanistan strategy proposed by his handpicked commander General Stanley McChrystal? Or will he reject that plan and accept defeat, thereby inviting the recurrence of 9/11 on an even larger scale? Yet within this camp the appeal of the McChrystal plan lies less in its intrinsic merits, which are exceedingly dubious, than in its implications.
If the president approves the McChrystal plan he will implicitly:
■ Anoint counterinsurgency - protracted campaigns of armed nation-building - as the new American way of war.
■ Embrace George W. Bush’s concept of open-ended war as the essential response to violent jihadism (even if the Obama White House has jettisoned the label “global war on terror’’).
■ Affirm that military might will remain the principal instrument for exercising American global leadership, as has been the case for decades.
Implementing the McChrystal plan will perpetuate the longstanding fundamentals of US national security policy: maintaining a global military presence, configuring US forces for global power projection, and employing those forces to intervene on a global basis. The McChrystal plan modestly updates these fundamentals to account for the lessons of 9/11 and Iraq, cultural awareness and sensitivity nudging aside advanced technology as the signature of American military power, for example. Yet at its core, the McChrystal plan aims to avert change. Its purpose - despite 9/11 and despite the failures of Iraq - is to preserve the status quo.
Hawks understand this. That’s why they are intent on framing the debate so narrowly - it’s either give McChrystal what he wants or accept abject defeat. It’s also why they insist that Obama needs to decide immediately.
Yet people in the antiwar camp also understand the stakes. Obama ran for the presidency promising change. The doves sense correctly that Obama’s decision on Afghanistan may well determine how much - if any - substantive change is in the offing.
If the president assents to McChrystal’s request, he will void his promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned. The Afghanistan war will continue until the end of his first term and probably beyond. It will consume hundreds of billions of dollars. It will result in hundreds or perhaps thousands more American combat deaths - costs that the hawks are loath to acknowledge.
As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe’’ obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial.
If the Afghan war then becomes the consuming issue of Obama’s presidency - as Iraq became for his predecessor, as Vietnam did for Lyndon Johnson, and as Korea did for Harry Truman - the inevitable effect will be to compromise the prospects of reform more broadly.
At home and abroad, the president who advertised himself as an agent of change will instead have inadvertently erected barriers to change. As for the American people, they will be left to foot the bill.
This is a pivotal moment in US history. Americans owe it to themselves to be clear about what is at issue. That issue relates only tangentially relates to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the well-being of the Afghan people. The real question is whether “change’’ remains possible.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His new book “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War’’ is forthcoming.

McChrystal Looks to Spin Afghan Civilian Deaths Problem

As the article mentions the real war is shifting to public relations. More and better intelligence gathering may help but probably not much. The Taliban do not wait around apart from civilians to be bombed. Usually they are among the population and often indeed hoping that they will not be bombed because they are with civilians--but to no avail. The public relations will be to blame the Taliban and go ahead and bomb them.
Another aspect of the situation is that msm is basically an entertainment medium. When there is little immediate interest in an issue or it has little effect on most citizens it will disappear off the radar screen. Right now for example much foreign affairs coverage is concentrated upon Iran and this ensures that issues such as the bombings of civilians are below the radar screen and thus create little problem for the military.
So far there does not seem much criticism of the Afghan war in the US whereas citizens in countries allied with the NATO effort almost all have majorities opposed to their involvement.

- Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com -
McChrystal Looks to Spin Afghan Civilian Deaths Problem
Posted By Gareth Porter
At his confirmation hearings two weeks ago, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said reducing civilian deaths from air strikes in Afghanistan was "strategically decisive" and declared his "willingness to operate in ways that minimize casualties or damage, even when it makes our task more difficult."
Some McChrystal supporters hope he will rein in the main source of civilian casualties: Special Operations Forces (SOF) units that carry out targeted strikes against suspected "Taliban" on the basis of doubtful intelligence and raids that require air strikes when they get into trouble. But there are growing indications that his command is preparing to deal with the issue primarily by seeking to shift the blame to the Taliban through more and better propaganda operations and by using more high-tech drone intelligence aircraft to increase battlefield surveillance rather than by curbing the main direct cause of civilian casualties. U.S. officials at a NATO conference in Brussels last Friday were telling reporters that "public relations" are now considered "crucial" to "turning the tide" in Afghanistan, according to an AFP story on Jun 12. CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus also referred to the importance of taking the propaganda offensive in a presentation to the pro-military think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) Jun. 11. "When you’re dealing the press," he said, "when you’re dealing the tribal leaders, when you’re dealing with host nations… you got to beat the bad guys to the headlines." The new emphasis on more aggressive public relations appears to respond to demands from U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan to wrest control of the issue of civilian casualties from the Taliban. In a discussion of that issue at the same conference, Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, said, "We’ve got to be careful about who controls the narrative on civilian casualties." U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan "see the enemy seeking to take air strikes off the table" by exaggerating civilian casualties, Barno said. He objected to making civilian casualties an indicator of success or failure, as a CNAS paper has recommended. The U.S. command in Afghanistan has already tried, in fact, to apply "information war" techniques in effort to control the narrative on the issue. The command has argued both that the Taliban were responsible for the massive civilians casualties in a U.S. air strike on May 4 that killed 147 civilians, including 90 women and children, and that the number of civilian deaths claimed has been vastly exaggerated, despite detailed evidence from village residents supporting the casualty figures. Col. Greg Julian, the command’s spokesman, said in late May that a "weapon-sight" video would show that the Taliban were to blame. However, Nancy A. Youssef reported Jun. 15 in McClatchy newspapers that the video in question shows that no one had checked to see if women and children were in the building before it was bombed, according to two U.S. military officials. The Afghan government has highlighted the problem of SOF units carrying out raids which result in air strikes against civilian targets. Kai Eide, the chief of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, has now publicly supported that position, saying in a video conference call from Kabul to NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels Jun. 12 that there is an "urgent need" to review raids by SOF units, because the civilian casualties being created have been "disproportionate to the military gains." But McChrystal hinted in his confirmation hearing that he hoped to reduce civilian casualties by obtaining more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. Petraeus confirmed that approach to the problem in remarks at the CNAS conference last week, announcing that he was planning to shift some high-tech intelligence vehicles from Iraq to Afghanistan. Petraeus referred to "predators, armed full motion video with Hellfire missiles," "special intelligence birds," and unmanned intelligence vehicles called Shadows and Ravens, which fly 24 hours a day. Although such intelligence aircraft may make U.S. battlefield targeting more precise, Petraeus’s reference to drones equipped with Hellfire missiles suggests that U.S. forces in Afghanistan may now rely more than previously on drone strikes against suspected Afghan insurgents. Given the chronic lack of accurate intelligence on the identity of insurgent leaders, that would tend to increase civilian casualties. Petraeus’s past reluctance to stop or dramatically reduce such SOF operations, despite the bad publicity surrounding them, suggests that high level intra-military politics are involved. The Marine Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC) has been involved in the most highly publicized cases of massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It was established by the Marine Corps only in February 2006, and the first MarSOC company arrived in Afghanistan just a year later. MarSOC was unable to recruit the more mature officers and troops needed for cross-cultural situations, and its recruits had only a few months of training before being sent to Afghanistan. The unit’s commanding officer had been warned by one participant in the training before the unit had arrived in Afghanistan that his troops were too young and too oriented toward killing to serve in Afghanistan, according to Chris Mason, a former U.S. official in Afghanistan familiar with the unit’s history. In March 2007, a company of MarSOC troops which had only arrived in the country the previous month were accused of firing indiscriminately at pedestrians and cars as they sped away from a suicide bomb attack, killing as many as 19 Afghan civilians. Five days later the same unit reportedly fired on traffic again. As a result, a powerful Pashtun tribe, the Shinwari, demanded to the governor of Nangahar province and Afghan President Hamid Karzai that U.S. military operations in the province be terminated. Within a month, the 120-man MarSOC company was pulled out of Afghanistan. Significantly, however, a new MarSOC unit was sent back to Afghanistan only a few weeks later, assigned to Herat province. Last August, a MarSOC unit launched an attack against a preplanned target in Azizabad that combined unmanned drones, attack helicopters and a Specter gunship. More than 90 civilians were killed in the attack, including 60 children, but not a single Taliban fighter was killed in the attack, according to Afghan and U.N. officials. Karzai said the operation had been triggered by false information given by the leader of a rival tribe, and no U.S. official contradicted him. When Petraeus took command at CENTCOM just a few weeks later, Afghans were still seething over the Azizabad massacre. That would have been the perfect time for him to take decisive action on MarSOC’s operations. But Petraeus took no action on MarSOC. Meanwhile, other SOF units were continuing to carry out raids that did not get headlines but which regularly killed women and children, stirring more Afghan anger. Petraeus may have been confronted with the necessity of stopping all the operations if he wished to discipline MarSOC, which would have been too serious a blow to the reputation of U.S. Special Operations Forces. For two weeks, from mid-February to early March, the rate of SOF raids was reduced. But in early March, they were resumed, despite the near certainty that there would be more embarrassing incidents involving SOF operations. The worst case of massive civilian deaths in the war would come just two months later, and involved the MarSOC unit.
(Inter Press Service)
Article printed from Antiwar.com Original: http://original.antiwar.com
URL to article: http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2009/06/17/mcchrystal-looks-to-spin-Copyright © 2009 Antiwar.com Original. All rights reserved.

Gen. McKiernan Replaced as Afghan Commander

This is from antiwar.com. It seems that media did not see this coming at least no one speculated on it beforehand that I am aware. The motive for the change simply seems to be that Obama wants a new person to oversee his supposed new policy. Actually the surge strategy was part of Bush's pack of policies! McChrystal the replacement was head of Special Forces. This group is responsible for covert assassinations and attacks in Afghanistan and act with impunity it seems no matter what they do. Obama is going to try to win hearts and minds while using military force both in conventional and a covert manner. The military actions will no doubt help create hearts and minds devoted to the Taliban.


Gen. McKiernan Replaced as Afghan Commander
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal Recommended as Replacement
by Jason Ditz, May 11, 2009

With the Pentagon and the White House both feeling the need for “fresh thinking” in the war, General David McKiernan, the top US and NATO commander in Afghanistan has been ousted from his position. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he believed it was the “right time” for a change.
Gen. McKiernan held the position for just under a year. It was a memorable year, with Afghanistan torn by record violence and the US announcing multiple massive strategy changes, all of which involved throwing more troops and money at the nation. McKiernan’s tenure was also bookended by two attacks which each shattered the previous record for civilians killed in a single US air strike: a Herat strike last August killing 90 and last week’s Farah Province strike, which appears to have killed 147 civilians.
But for the media, Gen. McKiernan will be perhaps best remembered for his unflappable optimism in the face of ever-deteriorating conditions, and his penchant for lashing out at the press for reporting the facts on the ground without his trademark rose-colored glasses.
Secretary Gates is recommending Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal to replace him. McChrystal had previously seen his nomination to be director of the Joint Staff delayed by questions about detainee abuse by forces under his command. With American soldiers still holding detainees in Afghanistan, it seems curious that this question has yet to resurface among lawmakers.