Afghanistan — VOICES for REASON

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Rolling Stone interview has created a scandal–but the real scandal we should be talking about is his Afghanistan strategy and how it needlessly imperils American lives.

Under his widely acclaimed counterinsurgency strategy, McChrystal “shifted the risks from Afghan civilians to Western combatants,” reports the NYT.  Translation: the rules place the lives and welfare of Afghans —  emphatically including the Islamist warriors we’re supposed to be fighting — ahead of American lives. Consider:

Before the rules were tightened, one Army major who had commanded an infantry company said, “firefights in Afghanistan had a half-life.” By this he meant that skirmishes often were brief, lasting roughly a half-hour. The Taliban would ambush patrols and typically break contact and slip away as patrol leaders organized and escalated Western firepower in response.

Now, with fire support often restricted, or even idled, Taliban fighters seem noticeably less worried about an American response, many soldiers and Marines say. Firefights often drag on, sometimes lasting hours, and costing lives. The United States’ material advantages are not robustly applied; troops are engaged in rifle-on-rifle fights on their enemy’s turf. [emphasis added]

I’ve argued in Winning the Unwinnable War and in talks around the country that this policy is self-crippling and morally perverse. And the policy is still in full-effect, as the experiences of soldiers on the ground can attest to.

Several infantrymen have also said that the rules are so restrictive that pilots are often not allowed to attack fixed targets — say, a building or tree line from which troops are taking fire — unless they can personally see the insurgents doing the firing.

This has lead to situations many soldiers describe as absurd, including decisions by patrol leaders to have fellow soldiers move briefly out into the open to draw fire once aircraft arrive, so the pilots might be cleared to participate in the fight. [emphasis added]

All of which confers an inestimable tactical advantage on Taliban fighters — “making it easier for them to hide to fight, to meet and to store their weapons or assemble their makeshift bombs.” Meanwhile, U.S. troops — with justified indignation — speak of “‘being handcuffed,’ of not being trusted by their bosses and of being asked to battle a canny and vicious insurgency ‘in a fair fight.’” How many more must return home in coffins, because they were purposely hamstrung in combat?

By all means, question McChrystal’s judgment in making derisive comments about his boss, the Commander in Chief. But isn’t it past time to question the propriety of an Afghan strategy that both endorse?

image: wiki commons

Later this week world leaders and diplomats will meet in London to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. In my earlier post I talked about the U.S.-Afghan drive to appease the Taliban; now, in the lead-up to the international conference, the NYT reports:

The leader of the United Nations mission here [Kabul] called on Afghan officials to seek the removal of at least some senior Taliban leaders from the United Nations’ list of terrorists, as a first step toward opening direct negotiations with the insurgent group.

What’s next, a plea-bargain for Osama bin Laden? That’s crazy talk, yes. But on 9/12/01, erasing Taliban fighters from terrorist watch lists would have sounded outlandish, too. Here we are, though, eight-plus years later, currying favor with enemies we have failed to defeat in the hopes they’ll deign to talk to us.

The Afghan government floated a new plan “offering jobs, security, education and other social benefits to Taliban followers who defect” in the hope of quelling, if not crippling, the Taliban-Islamist resurgence seeking to take over the country. The Islamist response? A massive, coordinated suicide attack on the presidential palace, ministry of justice and central bank in Kabul.

It was meant to deliver a message — which the Taliban’s spokesman put into words afterward: “We are ready to fight, and we have the strength to fight, and nobody from the Taliban side is ready to make any kind of deal.”

Horrific scarcely begins to describe the attack, but there was ample reason to expect the baksheesh (bribes) to elicit that kind of response from the Islamists. There are many parallels you could draw, but take just one: the current U.S. approach toward Iran.

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A follow up to my post on Obama’s policy and “just war” doctrine: NPR ran a story Friday that eloquently illustrates how this approach undermines our military, how it (understandably) frustrates our troops, and how it needlessly exposes them to greater risks. The story describes a clear-cut incident where U.S. forces observed insurgents planting a road-side bomb, but under newly tightened, even more restrictive rules of engagement, the soldiers had to let them get away with it.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the report are the comments from Gen. Stanley McChryrstal who champions this approach and believes it will bring us success.

Listen to the audio (4m55s).

image: Flickr/dvids//CC BY 2.0

President Obama is weighing how to deal with the seemingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan, but have the right questions been asked about how we got to this point? In a post that I contributed to the blog of Rowman & Littlefield (the publisher of my book), I suggest that our policymakers (and all Americans) should re-think their assumptions about what went wrong in Afghanistan.

There’s no question that war is always tough on the soldiers who fight it. But in Afghanistan (and Iraq), Washington has made things doubly worse for U.S. troops: it has imposed on them policies and rules of engagement that (I’ve argued) are inimical to our security — and to the lives of our troops. What underlies these rules is the notion that our forces are morally obliged to place the lives and well-being of Afghans ahead of their own — in the name of so called “compassion” — rather than fighting all-out. The results are heart-rending.

Under current policy in Afghanistan, our forces are required to endear themselves to the local population by providing so-called humanitarian aid. How does that affect our soldiers?

[The Times of London reports:] The soldiers are angry that colleagues are losing their lives while trying to help a population that will not help them. “You give them all the humanitarian assistance that they want and they’re still going to lie to you. They’ll tell you there’s no Taleban anywhere in the area and as soon as you roll away, ten feet from their house, you get shot at again,” said Specialist Eric Petty, from Georgia.

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Today the war in Afghanistan reaches its eight-year mark. To put that into perspective, by now a child born on the day the war began would probably be starting his third year of elementary school. Or to put it in a wider context, only the American Revolution (which lasted about 8 years 4 months) and the Vietnam War (8 years 6 months) lasted longer. U.S. involvement in World War II was over in just under four years. The NYT has a chart that illustrates these data in graphic terms. The Afghanistan debacle is on track to drag on longer than any of these. (I disagree with the compilers of this chart that the Iraq war is actually over; the recent bombings around that country suggest otherwise.)

Recall what many people agreed should be our (minimum) objective in Afghanistan eight years ago: the rooting out of the Taliban and its Islamist allies. Today a common view holds that we must resign ourselves to a world in which the Islamist menace remains a fixture of our lives — a threat we might mitigate, but never eliminate. Witness the suggestions by mainstream luminaries in foreign policy that we negotiate some sort of settlement with the Taliban, paying them to put down their arms, at least while we keep doling out cash.

That is not the punchline to a grim joke; it is what some consider to be our best option. The fact that this is taken seriously is a measure of how Americans have been demoralized by the failure of Washington to accomplish even the limited objective of eliminating the Taliban-Al Qaeda forces (to say nothing of dealing with the graver threat from Iran).

image: Flickr/tollaksen

After 20 months in prison on charges of blasphemy, an Afghani journalism student, Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, has been secretly pardoned by President Hamid Karzai and allowed to leave the country for an undisclosed location. For the “crime” of possessing anti-Islamic books, starting un-Islamic debates in class, and downloading and distributing Internet articles saying that the prophet Muhammad ignored women’s rights, Kambaksh had originally been sentenced to death by a council of Islamic mullahs.

Although the pardon is obviously good news for Kambaksh personally, this case is a damning indictment of Afghanistan’s government and of U.S. military intervention there. It was only after an international outcry that Kambaksh’s death sentence was commuted to 20 years. And his release came only because Karzai was desperate to shift the international spotlight away from his government’s unchecked power to dictate religious beliefs and practices. Yet America’s soldiers continue to fight and die for the sake of a nation that is doggedly determined never to let its civil government escape the thrall of the Islamic religion.

Consider just how revolting a spectacle this is.

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It’s sad, but true: the Afghan election is a macabre sideshow. The chatter about voter turnout is beside the point. The country is in flames. What’s needed is to defeat the Taliban, once and for all, by military means–a goal that Washington has given up on: See Barack Obama’s admission on this point. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander there, believes the outlook is horrendous. Summing up his view, the WSJ headlined its story: “Taliban Now Winning.” And things are getting worse. Depressingly, Washington has reconciled itself to allowing the Taliban to remain a major force in the region.

So have politicians in Afghanistan. Read the rest of this entry »

July was the worst month for U.S. casualties in Afghanistan — not just in 2009, but since the war began nearly eight years ago. Keep this awful truth in mind as you read the following observation on that war from our nation’s Commander-in-Chief:

“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.

Obama (echoing Bush) wants you to scale back your expectations: He’s saying, “Don’t expect us to break the enemy’s will and compel it to surrender à la Japan in WWII.” Whatever else America may be doing in Afghanistan, the goal is not to achieve anything like a genuine victory: i.e., the defeat of the Islamist enemy.

But why? Why might Obama and many other people hold this view?

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