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

[John W.]

Very well and cleverly written.  I wish I could have more of a sense of
humor about the topic.



On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 8:06 PM, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>wrote:



>        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.
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