[Peace-discuss] The Further Adventures of the Desert Ox & Bananas (with dead people)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Helmand in a Handbag
	by Jeff Huber, July 06, 2010

(“What, Me McWorry?” 
<http://original.antiwar.com/huber/2010/06/28/what-me-mcworry/> [THE BEST 
ACCOUNT I'VE READ OF THE MCCHRYSTAL AFAIR --CGE] noted that by replacing Stan 
McChrystal with David Petraeus, Barack Obama has bought the Pentagon’s Long War 
agenda lock, stock, and pork barrel. “Helmand in a Handbag” discusses why it 
seems that our national security team is losing its woebegone wars on purpose.)

Gen. Stanley McChrystal had ample reasons for wanting to get fired as top banana 
in the Bananastans*. The Marjah offensive that was hyped as the “test” of the 
Afghanistan strategy had, by his own admission, turned into a “bleeding ulcer.” 
He’d been forced to postpone the follow-on offensive to liberate Kandahar – 
called “the most critical operation of the war” – because the Kandaharis told 
him thanks anyway, but they were liberated enough for now. “It takes time to 
convince people,” McChrystal told his press entourage in early June, well aware 
that time was a commodity he was fresh out of.

Inside reports have it that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the fraudulent head 
of state of the second most corrupt country in the world, has “lost his 
confidence in the capability of either the coalition or his own government to 
protect this country.” That’s probably why he’s told us to bugger off and is 
looking to strike his own deal with the Taliban and arch-rival country Pakistan.

Afghan troops, whom we’ve been training for nine bloody years, still woefully 
suck. A January 2010 60 Minutes piece noted that “elite” Afghan Special Forces 
were incapable of loading their rifles or even carrying them the right way. Once 
their Green Beret instructors helped them load and hold their weapons, the 
Afghan commandos quite literally shot their instructors and themselves in the foot.

A June report by the U.S. Special Inspector General in Afghanistan says Afghan 
soldiers rated by their American trainers as “first class” are, in fact, 
incapable of fighting the Taliban on their own. Petraeus says it could take a 
“number of years” before Afghan forces can fight without training wheels. 
British Foreign Secretary William Hague says, “The Afghan forces should be able 
to conduct their own affairs by 2014.” That would be the same 2014 that occurs 
significantly later than the summer of 2011, when President Obama promised he’d 
begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan. The good news: Afghan security 
forces are already as competent as Iraq’s F Troopers will ever be.

As reported by journalist Michael Hastings in his celebrated Rolling Stone 
article “The Runaway General,” our NATO allies in the International Security 
Assistance Force (ISAF) are a sorry squad of sad sacks as well. American 
soldiers mutter that ISAF stands for “I Suck at Fighting” or “In Sandals and 
Flip Flops.”

Throughout the command structure, our troops despair at the futility of their 
mission. Pfc. Jared Pautsch says, “What are we doing here?” Staff Sgt. Kenneth 
Hicks says, “We’re f***ing losing this thing.” A “senior adviser” to McChrystal, 
who didn’t have the courage to go on record like enlisted men Pautsch and Hicks 
did, says, “If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, 
it would become even less popular.”

(By the by, if freelancer Hastings doesn’t win a Pulitzer for his Rolling Stone 
piece it will be because the access-poisoned stenographers who cover the 
military full time for Big News pressured their pals on the committee into 
screwing him out of it.)

Nobody understands what the hell we’re doing there. McChrystal says, “Even 
Afghans are confused by Afghanistan.” And yet, remarkably, Secretary of Defense 
Robert Gates said at a 24 June press conference, “I do not believe we are bogged 
down.” Gates does, however, believe in Santa. At the same propaganda 
opportunity, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen insisted that, “The strategy 
hasn’t changed in any way. Nor has the policy.”

It’s comforting, I suppose, to hear that our senior military officer understands 
that there’s a difference – or at least there’s supposed to be a difference – 
between policy and strategy. One is hard pressed to define what the difference 
between the two is exactly. Even the U.S. Naval War College, which has an entire 
department and curriculum called Policy and Strategy, is suspiciously ambiguous 
on the topic. “The Strategy and Policy Course is designed to teach students to 
think strategically,” our most prestigious institute of higher war learning 
vaguely explains. Maybe that’s why the brainiacs in charge of our national 
security have such a tough time coming up with coherent strategies that achieve 
national policy goals: too many of them studied at the Naval War College. 
Notable graduates include Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno and “Bananas” Stan McChrystal.

The Naval War College doesn’t say much about policy except that it’s something 
related to strategy. The Strategy and Policy Course probably doesn’t bother to 
teach students to think politically because the students who matter – future 
flag and general officers – already know how to think politically or they 
wouldn’t be on track to wear stars.

The policy/strategy model of armed conflict derives from the doctrine of 
19th-century Prussian war philosopher Carl Von Clausewitz, who noted that “war 
is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means.” It’s not wholly 
clear, though, what Clausewitz means by “other means” of policy. The 
balance-of-power political model of the Europe he knew reflected millennia of 
nearly constant warfare as the primary means of settling scores among the 
continent’s cross-pollinated aristocracy.

The same holds true of post-World War II America. We’ve become so addicted to 
wielding our bully force to achieve – or rather attempt to achieve – our foreign 
policy objectives that our ability to affect global events with economy, 
diplomacy, and information has atrophied. That fact bodes ill given the 
white-elephant reality that without a peer military competitor our armed might 
has become an impotent tool of policy as well.

Our policy in Afghanistan can best be framed as Obama clinging to the campaign 
policy he made to appease the war mongrels that he’d “get the job done” there. 
If the “job” consists of ridding the country of al-Qaeda, we can declare mission 
accomplished. Al-Qaeda already left. In fact, it left before the Petraeus mob 
bullied Obama into firing the previous commander, David McKiernan, and putting 
career assassin McChrystal in his place. If the job consists of ridding the 
country of the Taliban, forget it. We’d have better success trying to eradicate 
the world’s insect population.

If the job involves extending the Pentagon’s Era of Persistent Conflict through 
the entire New American Century, then by golly we’ve got a strategy/policy match 
made in heaven. Gates and Mullen have admonished us to have more “patience” with 
a strategy that is proven to create more militants than it eliminates. Change 
merchant Obama, apparently determined to be the first man in history to do the 
same thing and achieve different results, promises there will be no change in 
the strategy or policy come Helmand or high water. And it looks like that stuff 
he said about a July 2011 withdrawal date was just a manifestation of his wacky, 
Second City-inspired Chicagoland sense of humor. “We didn’t say we’d be 
switching off the lights and closing the door behind us,” he told reporters 
after he sentenced Stan McChrystal to a life as a retired four-star general. “We 
said that we’d begin a transition phase.”

Petraeus puts things more bluntly. He now says that the July 2011 date only 
applies to the 30,000 “surge forces” that Obama approved last year. Even so, 
Super Dave will only support a drawdown based on “conditions that we hoped we’d 
obtain.” The Teflon General didn’t go into detail as to what those conditions 
might be.

In related news, the end of the “combat mission” in Iraq is scheduled for next 
month. Everybody knows Iraq’s Beetle Bailey security forces won’t be able to 
pick up the combat load and that U.S. troops will do as much fighting as they 
did before. Not to worry, though: Gates’ bull-feather merchants have figured out 
a way to meet the deadline. They’ll just change the name “combat mission” to 
“stability operations,” which I believe is synonymous in Pentagon Newspeak with 
“transition phase.”

* The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our banana republics in Central 
Asia.