When a reporter working for Rolling Stone
magazine did a story on then commander of U.S. and ISAF troops in Afghanistan
four-star general Stan McCrystal in 2010 the die was cast for revealing the
V.P. 'Bite-me' appellation heard round the world, and General McCrystal's
resignation was accepted when the pdf report was leaked. The reporter Michael
Hastings wrote a fine book on the in-depth development of the story with
interviews with the general and his staff in Europe and Afghanistan as well as
a wealth of information about the war, the effect on the people of Afghanistan
and the costs. The booked is named 'The Operators' after McCrystal's Special
Forces and JSOC personal history. Operators are what Delta force personnel are
called. Instead of being another truth-better-than fiction action adventure
tale one might expect, The Operators is a high-level view of how politicians
and generals got it wrong.
The Huffington Post blog today has a story on
the soon to be announced transition of Afghan security forces taking the lead
from American and ISAF forces in Afghanistan, and it seems about time.
Hasting's book provides some detail about the Afghan security forces and
American political-military management of the war that are a little disturbing.
The war for one thing just didn't seem necessary. We sent a conventional Army
to fight against a non-existent insurgency. Initially the C.I.A. supported the
Northern Alliances efforts to take down the Taliban successfully helped with a
few Blue-72 bombs, Special Forces and bucket loads of cash. Only then did the
large military build-up begin to take out an Al-Qae'da that were mostly gone
and that had been Arabs and international terrorists doing guest training in
country.
Hastings writes that the majority of Afghan
soldiers and security forces smoke hashish, as does President Karzai.
Homosexual exploitation of boys by Afghan security forces is also common. They
have a phrase 'boys are for
fun and girls are for children' in Afghanistan. We do not need to support
such a Muslim society that is implicitly corrupt perhaps through the effects of
decades of foreign intervention.
In my opinion the United States can't get
anything right economically and uses military power instead of defensible
ecospheric economic intervention that survives anyone's terror attacks. There
is just no green economic genius in the U.S. military and politicians tend to
be clueless about foreign intelligence before intervention militarily.
There are plans to build-up warlords to persist
regionally after the U.S. drawdown and let the corrupt at least offset development
of a Taliban-led fundamentalist state. In such a political climate U.S. Special
Forces might interpolate to attack incipient international terrorist training
bases theoretically. Billions being spent tends to be the first congressional
response to international terrorism defense even if there isn't any good reason
for it. It's as if students with the flunking math scores are running the U.S.
government and that isn't very helpful to the economic bottom line or dead
civilians.
Accuracy is important in chess, and it's
important in economics and war as well. U.S. generals like Stan McCrystal don't
have the authority to just win the war, and civilian political leaders haven't
the competence to run the war if it isn't conventional at least. That is
one present problem for the American democracy. Wrong political choices and
management mean wars are badly addressed. Not even the counter-insurgency
techniques of General Petraeus (COIN) derived
from Galula's doctrine were meaningful for Afghanistan. Insurgent recruitment
increased to resist the foreign invaders (U.S.) whenever we killed an insurgent
or two. The 'insurgency' was that of natives at home defending against aloof,
wealthy killers spending money on defense items like drunken sailors-maybe to
find Bin Laden, who was probably allowed to escape from Torah Borah to Pakistan
years before.
No comments:
Post a Comment