Mchrystal Retires as Four Star General

McChrystal has decided to retire after being relieved of his duties as commander in Afghanistan. However normally he would simply receive a pension as a three star general. The rules are that a general must serve two years at a given rank before retiring with a pension at that rank. McChrystal served only one year before he handed in his resignation. However Obama always generous with taxpayer money and anxious to please the military who often regard him with some uneasiness has seemingly waived the rules for McChrystal. McChrystal was after all Obama's choice. McChrystal will have to survive on a mere $12,475 per month. However, one can bet that McChrystal will not fade away and just enjoy his newfound leisure. He can busy himself writing memoirs, or become a military expert on one of the big TV chains or even buy out Xe (Blackwater) and resume a life at doing what he loves.

McChrystal informed the Army of his planned retirement on Monday.

America's new Electronic, Troop-less Wars

While the trend may in the direction of more robots, drones, and smart missiles and bombs, plenty of troops and civilian contractors are still needed and casualties will continue. In Afghanistan in particular General McChrystal's strategy is bound to bring more casualties for all sides in the conflict. The article is much longer I have just copied the abstract. This is from Global Research.

Towards America’s Electronic, Troop-less Wars
Future U.S Wars will involve Massive Use of Drones

by Prof. Marc W. Herold






Global Research, March 1, 2010




Abstract.

Future U.S wars in the Third World will involve massive use of drones to police the territory, employ local satrap[1] forces (like those of Karzai’s Afghan Army) and once the territory has been pacified sufficiently, the deployment of “Government Ready-to-Rule (GRR)” kits. The drones provide the critical and the weak link: critical insofar as they represent the ultimate American-style war where only the “Others” (opponents and civilians) die but weak insofar as this type of warfare only works against an opponent without any anti-drone/aircraft capability. In other words, this type of technological warfare can only be carried out upon weak opponents lacking independent industrial capacities (not against China, Russia, and India). This approach represents the culmination of disconnecting the delivery of deadly force – the rain of Hellfire missiles - upon the Others and incurring no human (physical or psychological – PTSD) costs. Or put in other terms, it represents the quintessential American way of “solving” problems with technological short-cuts, a military effort begun in 1942 with the Allied fire-bombing of German cities.[2] The current American war in Afghanistan is a harbinger of what is to come, America’s electronic, troop-less war.

Prophetically the first victims in 2010 of Obama in his Afghan war were a teacher in a government school, Sadiq Noor, and his nine-year old son, Wajid as well as three other persons. Both were killed on Sunday night, January 3, 2010 in a U.S. drone strike involving two missiles fired into the home of Sadiq Noor in the village of Musaki, North Waziristan in Pakistan.[3] During January 2010, a record number of twelve deadly missile strikes were carried out on Pakistan’s tribal areas. Three Al-Qaeda leaders were killed and 123 innocent civilians.[4] During 2009, 44 U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan killed 708 people but only five Al Qaeda or Taliban; that is for each enemy fighter 140 civilian Pakistanis had to die.[5]

Those who pull the gray trigger to fire are located in Nevada, Kandahar, or Pakistan.[6] As Philip Alston points out, “Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life?”[7] In early 2010, the U.S. Air Force had more drone operators in training than fighter and bomber pilots.[8]

Our McMan in Bananastan

Quite a bit of extraneous ad hominem remarks about supposed idiosyncrasies of McChrystal. If McChrystal is interested in shielding Afghans from violence a great way to start would be to stop most of the air attacks. McChrystal was head of JSOC the outfit that has operated outside of the bounds of ordinary rules and simply murdered people thought to be insurgents or whatever. Many of their operations have outraged Afghans and even the Afghan authorities. The JSOC was run under Dick Cheney until the Bush administration was turfed. Now it seems it is answerable to no one. Obama may not be a fawing servant of American warlords. It seems he believes that these warlords are the agents of US imperial humanistic values in the hinterlands of the world.


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Our McMan in Bananastan
Posted By Jeff Huber On June 8, 2009
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our new Bananastan war chief, may be more dangerous and even crazier than his boss, Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command. McChrystal reportedly eats one meal a day and sleeps three hours a night. We can’t know for sure if that’s true, but we can assume McChrystal wants us to think it is because it comes from the New York Times, who almost certainly got it from the press kit McChrystal’s public affairs colonel gave them.
Unconfirmed rumor also has it that McChrystal only drinks rain water to avoid the effects of fluoridation on his precious bodily fluids, and that he takes acai berry purgatives to maintain his purity of essence. However much of this is true or merely legend-crafting, it’s all loony enough to make Petraeus’ one-arm pushup contests with teenage privates look dignified in comparison.
From the sound of McChrystal’s recent confirmation hearing testimony, the insanity is just leaving the station. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee "I believe [the Afghanistan conflict] is winnable, but I don’t think it will be easily winnable.” It won’t be easy to win because it will be impossible to tell when we’ve won. “The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed," McChrystal told the SASC, "it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence." How many shielded Afghans will equate to victory? More importantly, who is going to shield them? Certainly not McChrystal.
As commander of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), McChrystal was directly responsible for the assassination strikes that have killed so many innocents in the Bananastans. Paradoxically, those strikes were the reason McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. Mark McKiernan, got the ax. Compounding the irony is the way McKiernan came to be cast as the fall stooge.
Throughout our post-9/11 missteps, the JSOC has largely operated outside the established chain of command; the only authority it appeared to answer to was Dick Cheney. When the Dark Lord left office in January 2009, the JSOC became a free agent. By mid-February the mounting outrage over the collateral deaths from JSOC strikes forced Vice Adm. William McRaven, who had succeeded McChrystal as head of the JSOC in the summer of 2008, to put a temporary halt to them. McKiernan’s spokes-colonel Gregory Julian confessed that his boss had not ordered the stand-down, and a "senior military official" said Petraeus allowed as how throttling back on the baby killing for a couple of weeks was maybe a good idea. Those statements from the four-stars made it clear that the three-star McRaven was running his own program.
When the stand-down story hit the press in March, Petraeus likely determined someone would have to ride the rap for the collateral deaths the JSOC had caused, and he didn’t want it to be McRaven or McChrystal, whom he still had use for. So Petraeus quietly issued an order that put the JSOC under tactical control of McKiernan, which made McKiernan responsible for the McCluster bombs McRaven and McChrystal and their howling commandos had created. McKiernan’s transfer to Fort Palooka came through in short order, and McChrystal became the new McMan in Bananastan. The McHinations didn’t stop there.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he nominated McChrystal because he wanted "new military leadership" to go along with the "new strategy." The new strategy is the one National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks wretched together. It is a compendium of platitudes, aphorisms, and non sequiturs, a fusty heap of "realistic and achievable objectives" that are delusional and doomed to failure. We will never establish a "stable constitutional government in Pakistan" or a "capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan." If by some miracle we manage to create "self-reliant Afghan security forces," all we’ll have done is organize another armed mob that doesn’t like us. We’re already "involving the international community" for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Gates has forged a hobby career out of alternately begging NATO for more help in Afghanistan and blaming NATO for everything that goes wrong there.
The strategy’s stated aim to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan" is as hallucinatory as it is poorly written. You can’t "defeat" a safe haven any more than you can climb a tennis ball; but even if you could, there would be no point in doing it. Modern evildoers can run their operations from the sanctuary of the pockets that hold their Blackberries. Averting "the possibility of extremists obtaining fissile material" is a snipe hunt. Evildoers are about as likely to convert Pakistani nukes into suitcase bombs as they are to find a cure for herpes.
Yet Stanley McChrystal has sworn to Congress that he can accomplish all these things and more if only he can shield enough Afghans from violence. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees had a golden opportunity to decapitate McChrystal and the Pentagon over their Bananastan plan and torture of detainees and the Pat Tillman cover-up and a host of other mortal sins, but they vaginalized it. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) made a show of growling at McChrystal for a few minutes before he rolled over and begged for a tummy scratch.
Nobody in the legislature had the baby-makers to oppose McChrystal’s nomination, because he enjoys the aegis of the most powerful man on earth. As military analyst Andrew Bacevich puts it, “McKiernan’s removal confirms that it’s now Petraeus’ army," and King David’s hand-picked "unconventional warriors" like McChrystal and McRaven are "in the saddle." In 2007, Petraeus purposely misled Congress into believing he was seeking a way to bring troops home from Iraq while he was actually using the surge as a stratagem to buy time to sell the "long war" to the public, and he got away with it. Now he and his protégés McChrystal and McRaven are poised to get away with the same shenanigans in the Bananastans.
And where does our commander in chief Barack Obama stand on all of this? He’s the one who blessed the resumption of the errant air strikes and who nominated McChrystal to take over in the Bananastans. Our self-anointed "agent of change" has changed into what his predecessor was: a fawning servant of America’s warlords.
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McChrystal wants ''holistic" approach to Afghan war.

Perhaps this is meant to parallel the Taliban jihad or "holy war". Both sides will resort to unholy tactics. McChrystal used to be head of a special operations (black ops) group and no doubt he will increase those operations. This is no doubt another aspect of Obama's emphasis upon change bringing in a master of dirty tactics and calling them by nice names.

This is from abc (Australia)

McChrystal wants 'holistic' approach to Afghan war
By Washington correspondent Kim Landers for AM

Posted Wed Jun 3, 2009 9:11am AEST Updated 11 hours 36 minutes ago

US President Barack Obama has ordered an extra 21,000 troops to Afghanistan. (US Army: Staff Sgt Michael L Casteel, file photo)
The US general who has been put in charge of the Afghanistan war says success in the seven-year-old conflict will not be quick or easy.
Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal says the war can be won if a proper counter-insurgency campaign is mounted.
His comments came as more than 40 people were killed in a surge of militant attacks across Afghanistan yesterday.
Fighting is escalating across Afghanistan, with suicide attacks, roadside bombs and battles between US troops and Taliban fighters.
The violence raises fresh concerns about the stability in Afghanistan ahead of the August presidential election, and Lieutenant General McChrystal says the situation is serious.
"There is no simple answer. We must conduct a holistic counterinsurgency campaign, and we must do it well," he said.
"Success will not be quick or easy; casualties will likely increase; we will make mistakes."
Lieutenant General McChrystal has been testifying at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He is set to replace General David McKiernan, who was sacked last month in an unusual wartime shake-up.
Republican Senator Lindsay Graham has quizzed him about the consequences of failing in the more than seven-year-old conflict.
"Everyone's asked about winning; tell me the consequence of losing. What would happen if America lost in Afghanistan?" Senator Graham said.
"What would happen is it would break down into civil war," Lieutenant General McChrystal said.
"There would be... I don't believe that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan; I think it would go back to what it was before 2001, and that would be an ongoing civil war between different factions.
"I believe that Al Qaeda would have the ability to move back into Afghanistan, and I cannot imagine why they would not do that.
"I think that if they're within that kind of safe haven in Afghanistan with the ongoing problem in Pakistan, I think Pakistan would find winning its insurgency very, very difficult, if not impossible."
Senator Graham: "Would it probably lead to the collapse of the civilian government in Pakistan?"
Lieutenant General McChrystal: "I think it's very likely."
Lieutenant General McChrystal says he will also draw on the advice of Australian

Tom Engelhardt: Six Ways the Af-Pak war is expanding.

This is from antiwar.com.

This article not only gives information about how the Af-Pak was is expanding under Obama but also has more info about Stanley McChrystal and shows his connection to the worst Bush hawks and neo-cons. The two party system in the U.S. is absolutely useless as far as producing much in the way of change but then that is how it is designed to work. Change occurs mostly at the level of rhetoric especially in foreign policy although Obama has opened up a little re Cuba and it is just possible that he might abandon the missile defence system and he also has spoken out against torture and some day he may even close Guantanamo but will still adopt Bush lite military tribunals and may also introduce indefinite detention without trial. One step forward two steps back.
An interesting aspect of this article is the discussion of the role of Zalmay Khalilzad in the new Afghan govt. assuming Karzai wins. Originally the US groomed him for the job as president but having decided that he could not be elected they are now going to force Karzai to appoint him as a sort of chief of staff to actually run the government. Perhaps this is possible but it would leave Karzai totally without credibility or power. Karzai might not worry too much about the first once he is elected but he probably will not be willing to give up all power!



Antiwar.com Original - http://original.antiwar.com -
Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
Posted By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander Gen. David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal’s appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seem to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It’s heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as “the big muddy.”
Gen. McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an “executive assassination wing” out of then-vice president Cheney’s office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: “I think you’d be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.”)
McChrystal gained a certain renown when then-president Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of “manhunters” he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: “If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.” Since some of the task force’s men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn’t avoided.
In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld’s effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.
Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak – that is, expanded – war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a “key advocate … of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan.” This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.
All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of “new thinking and new approaches” – to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ words – that the Obama administration expects Gen. McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington’s growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.
Hagiography
And here’s the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.
We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him “a rising star” in the Army and one of the “Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls ‘the shadows.’”
It’s no different today in what’s left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is “assembling an all-star team” and that McChrystal himself is “a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army.” Is that all?
When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, “A General Steps from the Shadows,” that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.
Among other things, it described the general as “an ascetic who… usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod. … [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists. … [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians…” and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: “He’s got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect.” “If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal … I think of no body fat.”
From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the “elite” world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.
Above all, as we’re told here and elsewhere, what’s so good about the new appointment is that Gen. McChrystal is “more aggressive” than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring “a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war.” The general, we’re assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to “take the gloves off” on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), “the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.”
Think of McChrystal’s appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the china shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won’t be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post’s Ignatius even compares McChrystal’s boss Petraeus and Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to “two headstrong bulls in a small paddock.” He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage – far more ominous than he means it to be:
“Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he’s marching his presidency into the ‘graveyard of empires’ anyway.”
McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.
An Expanding Af-Pak War
Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular china shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:
1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a “surge” of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50 percent. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisers and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a “civilian surge” of diplomats, advisers, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisers couldn’t be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.
In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region’s “desert of death.” When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the “largest such project in the world in a combat setting.”
2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a “targeted” assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks – the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 – have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room Web site:
“According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed ‘at least 25 militants.’ In the local media, the dead were simply described as ‘29 tribesmen present there.’ That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors.”
David Kilcullen, a key adviser to Petraeus during the Iraq “surge” months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. (”Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent – hardly ‘precision.’”) As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al-Qaeda leadership.”
3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.
4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports – hotly denied by Holbrooke and others – broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to “undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the government.” Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to “figurehead” status, while a “chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers” not provided for in the Afghan constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.
This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He “could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.” He would then be “the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.”
Cooper’s report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.
Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It’s best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration’s 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.
5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military – pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) – has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call “the Pakistani Taliban.”
It’s been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.
With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, UN officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.
In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an “Islamic Pashtunistan” would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, “Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true,” applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.
6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).
Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban “militants”; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as “thinly sourced”); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were “extremely over-exaggerated,” and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.
An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a “very exhaustive” investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.
Two things make this “incident” at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines’ version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself “Taskforce Violence”), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat province. McChrystal’s appointment, reports Starkey, has “prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.”
Second, back in Washington, National Security Adviser James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai’s repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Well, I think he understands that… we have to have the full complement of… our offensive military power when we need it. … We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back….”
In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. “No hands,” he said, “are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam.”
Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge “I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back” is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.
Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one “hand” tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.
The Pressure of an Expanding War
President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander Gen. McKiernan believed that, “as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don’t consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas.”
That the “responsibilities” of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War “ended at the border with Pakistan,” Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an “old mindset.” McChrystal represents those “fresh eyes” that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general’s appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, “Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.”
For those old enough to remember, we’ve been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in – psychically, if nothing else – if things don’t work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post’s Ignatius puts it, cracking the “Taliban coalition” and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.
So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already “Obama’s war.” With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don’t expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.
As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: “The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban’s reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement’s heartland.” And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country’s intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.
So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive “team” in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn’t go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops Gen. McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region “crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.”
And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the “Washington coalition” is the one that cracks first? What then?
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
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