[Peace-discuss] The official story

[C. G. Estabrook]

[From a Birch Society mag, a recognition of the strategy.  --CGE]

	September 30 2009
	Afghanistan: Recycling an Old Strategy
	By Thomas R. Eddlem
	New American

U.S. military commander for Afghanistan General Stanley McCrystal told CBS's 60 
Minutes that the situation in Afghanistan is worsening. Asked if things are 
worse or better than he expected, he said in the television news show aired 
September 27:

"They're probably a little worse ... In some areas the breadth of the violence, 
the geographic spread of violence ... are a little more than I would have gathered."

The assessment was perhaps a case of stating the obvious, since the numbers of 
U.S. casualties have risen to the highest levels in the eight-year-long war. 
McCrystal had gained notoriety last week for the leak to the Washington Post of 
his report to President Obama about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. 
The McCrystal report stressed that the U.S. government was on the verge of 
losing the conflict. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent 
momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity 
matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer 
possible,” the report said.

McCrystal's “new” strategy is really an old strategy, according to top political 
officials in Washington, D.C., who support his efforts. Asked what victory in 
Afghanistan means on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Defense Secretary 
Robert Gates told Stephanopoulos that “we'll know it when we see it, and we see 
it in Iraq.”

But if Iraq represents victory, why have there been bombing attacks and deaths 
related to the insurgents every day in that country? And why are U.S. soldiers 
still stationed in Iraq? More importantly, why are they still dying in IED 
bombings and firefights if “victory” has already been achieved? One would think 
that victory is a case of soldiers being sent home and out of harm's way. Not so 
to politicians in Washington.

On the other side of the political aisle, Republican Senator John McCain 
acknowledged that what McCrystal has proposed is not a new strategy. “We can 
implement this new strategy, which is really an old strategy called 
counterinsurgency, or get out,” McCain told This Week.

McCrystal's strategy, as laid out in his report published by the Washington 
Post, is to:

1. Put U.S. soldiers in greater personal danger: “To gain accurate information 
and intelligence about the local environment,” McCrystal explains, “ISAF 
[International Secutiry Assistance Force] must spend as much time as possible 
with the people and as little time as possible in armored vehicles or behind the 
walls of forward operating bases.” McCrystal says that he needs to put U.S. 
soldiers in greater harm. “Better force protection may be counterintuitive; it 
might come from less armor and less distance from the population.” McCrystal 
says that the U.S. must “change the operational culture of ISAF to focus upon 
protecting the Afghan people, understanding their environment, and building 
relationships with them.” What this means, he says, is that “Hard-earned 
credibility and face-to-face relationships, rather than close combat, will 
achieve success.” But that leaves an open question: How can heavily-armed 
foreigners who don't even know how to speak the native languages, such as 
Pashtun or Uzbek, build those close personal relationships of trust? If 
“security may not come from the barrel of a gun,” as McCrystal says, why is the 
military needed at all? When McCrystal writes that “ISAF will change its 
operating culture to pursue a counterinsurgency approach that puts the Afghan 
people first,” he sounds more like a social worker than a military general.

2. Increase the number of troops committed: “Our campaign in Afghanistan has 
been historically under-resourced and remains so today,” McCrystal noted, 
“resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it.... Success 
is not ensured by additional forces alone, but continued under-resourceing will 
likely cause failure.” The bottom line, McCrystal says, is that “ISAF requires 
more forces.”

3. Extend the length of U.S. commitment indefinitely: While most news organs 
noted that McCrystal's report means at least another five years of U.S. combat 
in Afghanistan, McCrystal didn't place any timetables on U.S. withdrawal. This, 
despite the fact that McCrystal acknowledges that Afghanistan has “an isolating 
geography and a natural aversion to foreign intervention further works against 
ISAF.” With a very public open-ended commitment to U.S. intervention in 
Afghanistan, it's reasonable to ask what kind of impact this will have on that 
Afghan national pride. Wouldn't any people — faced with an open-ended commitment 
of foreign troops on their soil — fight back indefinitely?

4. Increase foreign aid to Afghanistan: Under the heading of “Economic support 
for counterinsurgency” McCrystal makes an explicit call for the transfer of more 
wealth from the broken budget of the U.S. government and its people to 
Afghanistan. “The request for support from the Ministry of Finance for civilian 
technical assistance must be welcomed and met.” The call for more foreign aid 
gives yet one more indication that the U.S. military are being used as social 
workers rather than as soldiers in Afghanistan.

The McCrystal report notes that the Afghan situation is “a situation that defies 
simple solutions or quick fixes.” True enough, and he was clearly right when he 
wrote that “our conventional warfare culture is the problem, the Afghans must 
ultimately defeat the insurgency.”

In sum, McCrystal's basic strategy is the old Vietnam strategy to win their 
hearts and minds. But U.S. troops have already been fighting in Afghanistan for 
eight years, and the Afghan people (like all other people) have a “natural 
aversion to foreign intervention.” Why should the old strategy be any more 
successful now than in the past?

In his This Week interview, Senator McCain made it clear that he is convinced 
that the United States should implement the old strategy. However, he did raise 
the fundamental question: Will we get out now, or will we get out after hundreds 
or thousands more American soldiers have died?


C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> [The Obama administration is removing those who embarrassingly point out 
> the fraudulence of the Karzai government, which suggests that they 
> intend to fight it out on this line if takes all summer -- and even much 
> longer.  I think we should avoid overstating parallels between Vietnam 
> and Afghanistan, but Obama seems once again to be following rather 
> closely the practice of the Johnson administration.  After the 
> fraudulent election of September 1967 in South Vietnam, the USG expanded 
> the war with the notion that it had an adequate puppet in place.  They 
> seem to be doing it again.   --CGE]
> 
> 
>     Published on Wednesday, September 30, 2009 by BBC News
>     UN 'to Remove Afghanistan Envoy'
> 
> A senior UN official in Afghanistan is to be removed from his post 
> following a row about the country's presidential election, the BBC has 
> learned...