[Peace-discuss] Fw: The Generals' Revolt

[unionyes]

What never ceases to amaze and discourage me, is the unfortunate reality 
that the U.S. is more like ( and becoming more so ) a third world country 
( politicaly / culturaly as well as economicaly ) than an advanced 
industrialized country.
This article is testimony to that fact.

David J.

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Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 8:28 PM
Subject: The Generals' Revolt


> The Generals' Revolt
>
>     As Obama rethinks America's failed strategy in
>     Afghanistan, he faces two insurgencies: the Taliban
>     and the Pentagon
>
> ROBERT DREYFUSS
> Posted Oct 28, 2009 1:51 PM
> Rollingstone.com
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/30493567/the_generals_revolt
>
> In early October, as President Obama huddled with top
> administration officials in the White House situation
> room to rethink America's failing strategy in
> Afghanistan, the Pentagon and top military brass were
> trying to make the president an offer he couldn't
> refuse. They wanted the president to escalate the war -
> go all in by committing 40,000 more troops and another
> trillion dollars to a Vietnam-like quagmire - or face a
> full-scale mutiny by his generals.
>
> Obama knew that if he rebuffed the military's pressure,
> several senior officers - including Gen. David Petraeus,
> the ambitious head of U.S. Central Command, who is
> rumored to be eyeing a presidential bid of his own in
> 2012 - could break ranks and join forces with hawks in
> the Republican Party. GOP leaders and conservative media
> outlets wasted no time in warning Obama that if he
> refused to back the troop escalation being demanded by
> Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander overseeing the
> eight-year-old war, he'd be putting U.S. soldiers' lives
> at risk and inviting Al Qaeda to launch new assaults on
> the homeland. The president, it seems, is battling two
> insurgencies: one in Afghanistan and one cooked up by
> his own generals.
>
> "I don't understand why the military is putting so much
> pressure on the White House now over Afghanistan," says
> a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan. "Unless it has
> something to do with the presidential ambitions of a
> certain Centcom commander."
>
> The military's campaign to force Obama's hand started in
> earnest in September, when the Commander's Initial
> Assessment of the war - a highly classified report
> prepared by McChrystal - was leaked to The Washington
> Post. According to insiders, the leak was coordinated by
> someone close to Petraeus, McChrystal's boss and ally.
> Speculation has centered on Gen. Jack Keane, a retired
> Army vice chief of staff and Petraeus confidant, who
> helped convince George W. Bush to get behind the "surge"
> in Iraq. In the report, McChrystal paints a dire picture
> of the American effort in Afghanistan, concluding that a
> massive increase in troop levels is the only way to
> prevent a humiliating failure.
>
> On Capitol Hill, hawkish GOP congressmen seized the
> opening to turn up the heat on Obama by demanding that
> he allow McChrystal and Petraeus to come to Washington
> to testify at high-profile hearings to ask for more
> troops. "It is time to listen to our commanders on the
> ground, not the ever-changing political winds whispering
> defeat in Washington," declared Sen. Kit Bond, a
> Republican from Missouri. Attempting to usurp Obama's
> authority as commander in chief, Sen. John McCain
> introduced an amendment to compel the two generals to
> come before Congress, but the measure was voted down by
> the Democratic majority.
>
> As the pressure from the military and the right built,
> McChrystal went on 60 Minutes to complain that he had
> only talked to Obama once since his appointment in June.
> Then, upping the ante, the general flew to London for a
> speech, where he was asked if de-escalating the war,
> along the lines reportedly suggested by Vice President
> Joe Biden, might work. "The short answer is: no," said
> McChrystal, dismissing the idea as "shortsighted." His
> comment - which bluntly defied the American tradition
> that a military officer's job is to carry out policy,
> not make it - shocked political observers in Washington
> and reportedly angered the White House.
>
> "Petraeus and McChrystal have put Obama in a trick bag,"
> says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former top aide to
> Secretary of State Colin Powell. "We had this happen one
> time before, with Douglas MacArthur" - the right-wing
> general who was fired after he defied President Truman
> over the Korean War in 1951.
>
> It isn't clear how far McChrystal and his boss,
> Petraeus, are willing to go. There have been rumors
> around the Pentagon that McChrystal might quit if Obama
> doesn't give him what he wants - a move that would fuel
> Republican criticism of Obama. "He'll be a good soldier,
> but he will only go so far," a senior U.S. military
> officer in Kabul told reporters.
>
> For his part, Obama moved quickly to handle the
> insurrection. One day after McChrystal's defiant London
> speech, the president unexpectedly summoned the general
> to a one-on-one meeting aboard an idling Air Force One
> in Copenhagen. No details of the discussion were
> released, but two days later Jim Jones, the retired
> Marine general who now serves as Obama's national-
> security adviser, publicly rebuked McChrystal, declaring
> that it is "better for military advice to come up
> through the chain of command."
>
> The struggle between the White House and the Pentagon is
> an important test of whether the president can take
> command in a political storm that could tear his
> administration apart. Obama himself is partly to blame
> for the position he finds himself in. During the
> presidential campaign last year, Obama praised the
> Afghan conflict as "the right war," in contrast to the
> bungled and unnecessary invasion of Iraq. Once in
> office, he ordered 21,000 additional troops to Kabul,
> painting the war as vital to America's national
> security. "If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban
> or allows Al Qaeda to go unchallenged," the president
> declared, "that country will again be a base for
> terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as
> they possibly can." He also fired the commanding general
> in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, and replaced him with
> McChrystal, a close Petraeus ally and an advocate of the
> doctrine of counterinsurgency.
>
> When it comes to COIN, as it's known in military jargon,
> Petraeus literally wrote the book: the Counterinsurgency
> Field Manual, which has become the bible for proponents
> of COIN. In its essence, counterinsurgency demands an
> extremely troop-intensive, village-by-village effort to
> win hearts and minds among the population of an occupied
> country, supported by a lethal killing machine and an
> expensive "clear, hold and build" program to eliminate
> the enemy from an area and consolidate those gains.
> Within the military, COIN has developed a cult
> following. "It has become almost a religion for some
> people," says Paul Pillar, a former top intelligence
> official with wide expertise in terrorism and the Middle
> East.
>
> Supporters of Petraeus and McChrystal acknowledge that
> applying COIN to Afghanistan means a heavy U.S.
> commitment to war, in both blood and treasure. Even if
> Obama dispatches 40,000 additional troops, on top of the
> 68,000 Americans already committed, we won't even know
> if it's working for at least a year. "That is something
> that will certainly take 12 to 18 months to assess,"
> said Kim Kagan, the president of the Institute for the
> Study of War, who helped write McChrystal's request for
> more troops. Bruce Riedel, a COIN advocate and veteran
> CIA officer who led Obama's review of the war last
> March, is even more blunt. "Anyone who thinks that in 12
> to 18 months we're going to be anywhere close to
> victory," he said, "is living in a fantasyland."
>
> In addition, the doctrine of counterinsurgency virtually
> assures long-running military campaigns in other hot
> spots, even as we're engaged in combat and rebuilding
> operations in Afghanistan. "We're going to be involved
> in this type of activity in a number of countries for
> the next 15 to 20 years," said Lt. Gen. David Barno, a
> COIN advocate who served as commander of U.S. forces in
> Afghanistan.
>
> So far, though, COIN hasn't exactly delivered on its
> promises. Despite the addition of 21,000 troops in
> March, the Taliban have continued to make gains across
> Afghanistan, establishing control or significantly
> disrupting at least 40 percent of the country. According
> to McChrystal's own report, Taliban leaders "appoint
> shadow governors for most provinces," set up courts,
> levy taxes, conscript fighters and boast about providing
> "security against a corrupt government." What's more,
> U.S. casualties have skyrocketed: In the four months
> since McChrystal took over, 165 Americans have died in
> Afghanistan - nearly one-fifth of those killed during
> the entire war.
>
> By late summer, some in the Obama administration began
> to have doubts about the efficacy of McChrystal's
> counterinsurgency strategy - doubts that greatly
> increased in the wake of Afghanistan's disastrous
> presidential election in August. Hamid Karzai,
> Washington's hand-picked president, was accused of
> widespread fraud, including ballot-box stuffing and
> "ghost" polling stations. Without a credible Afghan
> government, COIN can't succeed, since its core idea is
> to build support for the Afghan government.
>
> Even before the election fiasco, Obama had sent Jones,
> his national-security adviser, to Kabul to deliver a
> message to his military commander: The White House
> wouldn't look favorably on sending more soldiers to
> Afghanistan. If the Pentagon asked for more troops,
> Jones told McChrystal's top generals, the president
> would have "a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment" - that is,
> What the fuck? According to The Washington Post, which
> reported the encounter, the generals present "seemed to
> blanch at the unambiguous message that this might be all
> the troops they were going to get."
>
> Not long after the Afghan elections, Obama began a top-
> to-bottom strategy review of the war. Among those who
> started to question the basic assumptions of McChrystal
> and his COIN allies were Jones, many of his colleagues
> on the National Security Council, and Vice President
> Biden. By contrast, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
> and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remained
> remarkably quiet during the assessment, seeming to defer
> to the White House when it came to challenging the
> Pentagon brass.
>
> The issue has presented the most difficult political
> decision of Obama's presidency thus far. The White House
> knew that if Obama were to "fully resource" the military
> campaign, he would be going to war without his own
> political base, which has turned strongly against the
> Afghan war. For the first time since 2001, according to
> polls, a majority of Americans believe that the war in
> Afghanistan is "not worth fighting." Fifty-seven percent
> of independents and nearly three-quarters of Democrats
> oppose the war - and overall, only 26 percent of
> Americans support the idea of adding more troops.
> Indeed, if Obama were to escalate the war, his only
> allies would be the Pentagon, Congressional Republicans,
> an ultraconservative think tank called the Foreign
> Policy Initiative, whose supporters include Karl Rove,
> Sarah Palin and a passel of neoconservatives and former
> aides to George W. Bush.
>
> On the other hand, rejecting McChrystal's demands for
> more troops would make Obama vulnerable to GOP
> accusations that he was embracing defeat, and give
> congressional Republicans another angle of attack during
> midterm elections next year. Even worse, the
> administration has to take into account the possibility
> of a terrorist attack, which would allow the GOP to put
> the blame on the White House. "All it would take is one
> terrorist attack, vaguely linked to Afghanistan, for the
> military and his opponents to pounce all over him," says
> Pillar.
>
> Within the administration, Biden has emerged as the
> leading opponent of McChrystal's approach to never-
> ending war. "He's proposing that we stop doing large-
> scale counterinsurgency, that we rely on drones, U.S.
> Special Forces and other tools to combat Al Qaeda," says
> Stephen Biddle, an expert at the Council on Foreign
> Relations who served on McChrystal's advisory team.
> Biden's view, which has support among a significant
> number of officials and analysts in and out of
> government, is that rather than trying to defeat the
> Taliban, the United States ought to focus on targeting
> Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that want to strike
> at American targets.
>
> That Biden took the lead, says one former national-
> security official, may be a sign that he has the
> president's support. "Biden is playing a very inside
> game," says the official. "He's in every meeting." In
> early October, the vice president held a private session
> to discuss war strategy with two members of the
> administration who are considered among the more hawkish
> members of Obama's team: Hillary Clinton and Richard
> Holbrooke, the State Department's special adviser on
> Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition, Biden and Obama,
> both former senators, are said to be relying on the
> counsel of a pair of relatively dovish former
> colleagues, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Sen. John
> Kerry of Massachusetts. Kerry, the chairman of the
> Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has recently made
> comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Also
> weighing in, apparently to advise against sending more
> troops, has been Colin Powell, who met quietly with
> Obama in mid-September.
>
> Supporters of Biden's view argue that adding more troops
> would actually make the problem worse, not better,
> because the Taliban draw support from the fiercely
> nationalist Pashtun ethnic group in Afghanistan and
> Pakistan, who will mobilize to resist a long-term
> occupation. "The real fact is, the more people we put
> in, the more opposition there will be," says Selig
> Harrison, a longtime observer of Afghanistan at the
> Center for International Policy, a think tank formed in
> the wake of the Vietnam War by former diplomats and
> peace activists. The only exit strategy that might work,
> say Harrison and others, is dramatically reducing the
> U.S. military role in Afghanistan, shifting the focus
> from the Taliban to Al Qaeda, and stepping up political
> and diplomatic efforts. Such an initiative would also
> require an intensive push to secure support from
> Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - which maintain links to the
> Taliban - as well as Iran, Russia, India and China.
>
> "There's only one mission there that we can accomplish,"
> says Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's anti-Osama bin
> Laden unit for years. "To go into Afghanistan, kill Al
> Qaeda, do as much damage to the Taliban as possible and
> leave."
>
> Opponents of that approach insist that it would allow Al
> Qaeda to re-establish a safe haven in Afghanistan and
> resume plotting attacks. But many terrorism experts
> point out that Al Qaeda doesn't need Afghanistan as a
> base of operations, since it can plan actions from
> Pakistan or, for that matter, from a mosque in London or
> Hamburg. "We deal with Al Qaeda in every country in the
> world without invading the country," says Sen. Russ
> Feingold, a Democrat who serves on both the Senate
> foreign-relations and intelligence committees. "We deal
> with them in Indonesia, the Philippines, Yemen, Somalia,
> in European countries, in our own country, with various
> means that range from law enforcement to military action
> to other kinds of actions."
>
> Feingold, who has proposed setting a flexible timetable
> for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, says that the
> administration must listen to advisers like Biden who
> favor shifting course in Afghanistan. "If they do not,
> if they refuse to, then we in Congress have to start
> proposing our own timetables, just as we did when we
> were stonewalled by the Bush administration," Feingold
> says. "I'm prepared to take whatever steps I need to, in
> consultation with other members of Congress, to make
> those proposals if necessary."
>
> Other Democrats have also expressed doubts about
> appropriating more money for the conflict. Monthly
> spending on the war is rising rapidly - from $2 billion
> in October 2008 to $6.7 billion in June 2009 - and Obama
> has requested a total of $65 billion for 2010, even
> without another troop surge. "I don't think there is a
> great deal of support for sending more troops to
> Afghanistan in the country or in Congress," said House
> Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the
> Senate Armed Services Committee, has declared his
> preference for sending trainers to Afghanistan to build
> that country's armed forces, instead of U.S. combat
> troops. And Rep. Jim McGovern recently got 138 votes for
> an amendment that would have required the administration
> to declare its exit strategy. "The further we get sucked
> into this war, the harder it will be to get out of it,"
> McGovern says. "What the hell is the objective? Tell me
> how this has a happy ending. Tell me how we win this.
> How do we measure success?"
>
> Given the political pressure from both sides, Obama
> appears to favor sidestepping the issue. At a meeting
> with congressional leaders from both parties at the
> White House on October 6th, the president said he won't
> significantly reduce the number of troops in
> Afghanistan, as many Democrats had hoped - but he also
> seemed unlikely to endorse the major troop buildup
> proposed by McChrystal. While that approach may quell
> the Pentagon's insurrection for now, it only prolongs
> the conflict in Afghanistan, postponing what many see as
> an inevitable withdrawal. Wilkerson, the former aide to
> Colin Powell, hopes Obama will follow the example of
> President Kennedy, who faced down his generals during
> the Cuban Missile Crisis. "It's going to take John
> Kennedy-type courage to turn to his Curtis LeMay and
> say, 'No, we're not going to bomb Cuba,'" Wilkerson
> says. "It took a lot of courage on Kennedy's part to
> defy the Pentagon, defy the military - and do the right
> thing."
>
> [From Issue 1090 - October 29, 2009]
>
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