[Peace-discuss] Honor war dead by adding to their number

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Right, as far as it goes, on both murder in the Mideast and PowerPoint. --CGE]


	Death by Bananastan
	by Jeff Huber, September 15, 2009

I keep finding further proof that our ever increasing but directionless 
escalation of the Bananastan* conflict is the maddest military misadventure in 
human history. A former colleague recently sent me information regarding the 
newly formed Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell (PACC). From the looks of 
things, PACC intends to defeat the Taliban through the U.S. military’s most 
effective tactic: Death by PowerPoint.

Nobody in the Department of Defense writes particularly well or particularly 
likes to read. That in part is why the new counterinsurgency field manual Gen. 
David Petraeus supposedly "wrote" is little more than a cobbling together of 
plagiarized passages from previous manuals. In the early Nineties, shortly after 
Microsoft Windows hit the scene, all the illiterates became computer literate 
and discovered PowerPoint (which Bill Gates had plagiarized from the Aldus 
program Persuasion).

 From then on, everybody could write, because nobody had to know how to write a 
complete sentence; they could just write bullets that left out whatever parts of 
speech they didn’t understand. More importantly, nobody had to actually read the 
incomprehensible bullets because they were accompanied by indecipherable diagrams.

Neither the bullets nor the diagrams mattered, though, because they were just 
something to stare at while somebody stood next to the projection screen and 
babbled incoherently. Eventually, the head of everyone in the audience imploded 
and nobody understood or remembered anything they’d seen and heard.

The advent of the worldwide Web cut the talking head out of the process. 
PowerPoint presentations could be promulgated to every person on the planet, who 
could choose to view them or not. In either case, the results were the same as 
before. Nobody could understand or remember anything contained in a PowerPoint 
presentation.

Thus it is that the most significant product of PACC, which was established on 
May 22, 2009, is a PowerPoint presentation dated Aug. 27, 2009. It is quite 
possibly the most beautiful piece of military humbuggery I have ever seen.

First and foremost, it’s a discombobulating confluence of acronyms. PACC was 
created to recruit the best available TTPs who understand COIN to support 
CDRUSCENTCOM and the COMISAF of AFPAK. Its core task is to form teams across 
DOD/IA. It’s a new construct that operates under authority of POTUS, SECDEF, 
CJCS, DJS, and VDJS, and it coordinates with ISAF, COCOMs, SRAP, OSD, CIA, DOJ, 
DNI, and OTHRS.

The key to PACC’s ability to provide all this omniscience is its "Afghan Hands 
Program." AF/PAK Hands will be selected from throughout the government based on 
their ability to know everything about everything and communicate it perfectly 
to everyone all the time in Pashto and Dari. (Linguists will be able to learn 
both of these languages in 16 weeks. When they do, they’ll become "leaders" who 
are "strategic game changers.")

AF/PAK Hands will be selected, focused, and experienced people who form enduring 
relationships and make repetitive rotations. Their organization will be 
networked, feature continuity and relationships, and connect with NATO/Coalition 
forces and interagency agencies. They will understand the problem, develop 
shared situational awareness and inform key decision makers. Most importantly, 
AF/PAK hands will spend most of their government careers in PACC and be 
guaranteed promotion paths in which they will not have to compete against anyone.

PACC has the look and feel of an idea cooked up by a bunch of REMFs (Reservists 
Evading Meaningful Function) who want to create a full-time job for themselves 
and make bird colonel without having to work hard at it. The manner in which the 
PACCers present themselves is laughable, and what they claim to be able to 
accomplish is impossible. Nonetheless, PACC enjoys the aegis of Joint Chiefs 
Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, Gen. David Petraeus of Central Command, and Gen. 
Stanley McChrystal, our man in Bananastan.

A Department of Defense press release says McChrystal is the one who came up 
with the PACC concept. The release states, "Three weeks after the PACC began 
standing up within the bowels of the Pentagon, cell members say they’re already 
seeing evidence that it’s making a difference." It’s difficult to say what kind 
of difference it’s making considering the situation in Bananastan continues to 
deteriorate. Moreover, it’s telling that a press release would cite evidence of 
the PACC cell’s success to anonymous sources in the cell. A direct quote saying 
"We can be the catalyst. We can be the accelerant" is credited to "an official."

Neocon thug Max Boot heartily approves of PACC. In a recent Wall Street Journal 
op-ed piece, he refers to it as part of "General McChrystal’s new way of war" 
and says that PACC "could wind up changing how the entire military does 
business." PACC is actually military business as usual: form a committee, make a 
PowerPoint presentation about it, release propaganda about how it will fix 
everything that’s wrong, and sweep it under the carpet when it turns out to be a 
bust.

PACC is frightening, however, in that the Pentagon expects to offer people 
20-to-30-year careers as facilitators of the Bananastan conflict, on which the 
war mafia has hung its hope for a long war. It is just another example of how 
the Pentagon and its supporters (like Max Boot and the rest of the neocon 
punditry) are entrenching themselves as deeply into Bananastan as they are able 
while the country is distracted by the economy, health insurance reform, and the 
opening of the NFL’s regular season.

By the time the body politic wakes up to what the warmongery has done behind its 
back, the country will be hairline deep in Bananastan; so deep, the argument 
will go, that we need to keep digging until we come out on the other side of the 
planet because that’s the shorter exit strategy.

By then, the fact that we entangled ourselves foolishly will be moot. The only 
good reason (good-sounding, anyway) the Obamans have given us for escalating in 
Afghanistan is to "disrupt terror networks," and that argument is specious at 
best. McChrystal himself confesses that he sees no signs of a major al-Qaeda 
presence in the country.

Counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen, a former adviser to Petraeus who is 
about to become an adviser to McChrystal, says that counterterrorism isn’t a 
particularly important reason to stay committed to the Bananastan conflict. He’s 
more interested in preserving NATO, a military alliance that, like the U.S. 
military, has been trawling for an excuse to justify its existence since the 
Berlin Wall came tumbling down 20 years ago. `

But as with Iraq, the Bananastan war cry will be that we have to honor our war 
dead by adding to their number, and that we can fix our past mistakes by making 
even more of them. I can’t wait to see the PowerPoint presentation that explains 
how that works.

*Pakistan and Afghanistan, our banana republic-style quagmires in Central Asia.
Read more by Jeff Huber

http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2009/09/14/death-by-bananastan/