The Afghan PipeDream

By Pepe Escobar
August 20, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

PARIS

- America's convoluted, Alice-in-Wonderland interpretation of this summer's top political show - the "free expression of the people" in the Afghanistan election - reads like an opium dream. In fact, it is actually a pipe dream - as in Pipelineistan. With the added twist that no one's saying a word about the pipe that's delivering the opium dream.

As in an opium dream, delusion reigns. The chances of United States President Barack Obama actually elaborating what his AfPak strategy really is are as likely as having his super-envoy Richard Holbrooke share a pipe with explosive uber-guerrilla warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Obama says "success in Afghanistan" involves "diplomacy, development and good governance" - but all dazed and confused world public opinion sees are packs of extra marines being deployed to "fight the Taliban".

Former Waziristan jihad master Baitullah Mehsud, a "Pak", not an "Af" Taliban, may have been done in by a clever US Predator drone. But one Osama bin Laden - as in an opium dream - still ghostly roams across the Hindu Kush, eight years after the 9/11 fact. A vision or a waking dream, he may be playing Return of the Living Dead in "Pak", not "Af" - so why all these extra marines frantically canvassing Afghan lands?

Or should we believe Pakistan Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira, who said there "is no evidence that Osama bin Laden is present in Pakistan" and that "those making claims of his presence in the country should provide valid proof of it"?

Furthermore, the US notion that a motley crew of Pashtun peasants, angry young religious men, gangsters, highway robbers and anti-government rabble-rousers sprinkled around Pashtun country in Afghanistan would suddenly start welcoming shady al-Qaeda new breeders bent on destroying Western civilization as we know it is, well, no less than an opium dream.

As for the sham election, who cares who's the winner - Pashtun President Hamid Karzai, aka "the kebab seller", Tajik Abdullah Abdullah or anyone else? Afghanistan will be ruled by Barack Hussein Obama anyway. "The Taliban" - this ghostly, immaterial entity - may start getting less cash from their former Pakistani intelligence masters; but pious, Salafi Persian Gulf potentates will still make sure they more than balance their budget - unlike certain Western powers. They couldn't care less about super-envoy Holbrooke's recently announced campaign to freeze wire transfers to "the Taliban".

Unable to fire Karzai, Washington watches impotently as he drafts psycho killer Uzbek General Rashid Dostum to campaign for him - as if sporting Tajik commander Muhammad Fahim as his running mate was not enough. It's Do the Warlord Dance in Kabul - and the prize is buckets of drug money for everybody so funding for private militias remains as free as a full supply of opium to the world economy.

And in the end, the warlords will find a shortcut to get rid of Karzai anyway.

Just ask the perennial Hekmatyar - who is fighting not only Karzai but the US and coalition troops (as if he's reading too much recent Iraq history, he insists on a timetable for Western troop withdrawal). Incidentally, good ol' friend of Saudi Arabia Hekmatyar is not a "Taliban" - but a Pashtun nationalist.

As for installed-by-George W Bush Karzai, he may be an Americanized aristocrat from the minor Popolzai tribe who knows his Pashtunwali - the inflexible Pashtun tribal code; but he's also a no-holds-barred opportunist who studied in India, so he's betting on India to counter Pakistani influence over Afghanistan. He wants no "Pak" dominating "Af", while for Washington everything is now "AfPak". He knows that "the Taliban" control the day and virtually all the night in over half of Afghanistan. He knows he's got to do something to try to stop Westerners killing Pashtuns in droves. Yet another American puppet turns against his masters.

Ich bin ein Talibanistaner

And what to make of the McChrystal, Gates and Mullen show - worthy of the Marx Brothers? To amuse the galleries, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen did a two-on-one and faced down commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan General Stanley McChyrstal's inimitable Dr Strangelove impersonation by asking him to take it easy and submit his new Afghan report to Obama only after the Afghan election.

Iron Gates wants an orgy of new troops; super-envoy Holbrooke, for his part, wants a massive nation-building squad - he's building his own (doomed), counterinsurgency-heavy, Afghan shadow government. The bottom line is that, mired in the opium dream that all Afghans love the concept of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) occupying their country, the Pentagon wants a star-studded AfPak show running for decades.

McChrystal first said the Taliban are winning. Then he said they're not. Then he asked for - what else - more troops and more help on the civilian side. There will be 68,000 US troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2009. At the moment there are 96,500 US plus NATO troops on the ground – including 4,050 Germans, 485 Norwegians, 470 Bulgarians and 2,378 from "other nations".

The extrapolations into ridicule boggle the mind. The 4,050 members of the Bundeswehr fighting "Taliban" in northern Afghanistan near Kunduz now have to shout out a trilingual warning before getting down to the nitty gritty. First, in English, it's "United Nations - stop, or I will fire!" Then comes the Pashto remix - "Melgaero Mellatuna-Dreesch, ka ne se dasee kawum!" And then the Dari remix. Forget about the cool and crisp Achtung! Sounds more like a Monty Python sketch about the European Commission in Brussels. Even German top commander General Wolfgang Schneiderhahn is embarrassed.

While all this funky charade goes on, virtually nobody - apart from Canadian energy economist John Foster, in an op-ed published by The Star newspaper - is talking about the (real) Afghan pipe dream. Once again, since the late 1990s, it all comes back to TAPI - the Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/Pakistan/India gas pipeline, the key reason Afghanistan (as an energy transit corridor) is of any strategic importance to the US, apart from being deployed as an aircraft carrier stationed right at the borders of geopolitical competitors China and Russia. TAPI, financed by the Asian Development Bank, should in theory start to be built in 2010.

Both Russia and Iran, accomplished chess masters, are honing their moves to make TAPI unworkable. Until then, the AfPak theater basically boils down to the US and NATO at war against nationalist Pashtuns. Washington hysteria will continue to rule - as in "the Taliban" about to take over Islamabad's nukes and convert the US into TalibanUStan. And last but not least, please save the last bowl of opium for that oh-so-savvy wild bunch - the warlords.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)

It's A Mystery How Long We'll Stay

By LARA JAKES and ANNE GEARAN
08/14/09 01:53 AM
Courtesy Of The Huffington Post

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon presented a grim portrait of the Afghanistan war Thursday, offering no assurances about how long Americans will be fighting there or how many U.S. combat troops it will take to win.

Defeating the Taliban and al-Qaida will take "a few years," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, with success on a larger scale in the desperately poor country a much longer proposition. He acknowledged that the Taliban has a firm hold on parts of the country President Barack Obama has called vital to U.S. security.

Congress wants answers to what lawmakers described as basic questions to soothe a war-weary American public.

"In the intelligence business, we always used to categorize information in two ways, secrets and mysteries," Gates, a former CIA director, told a Pentagon news conference.

He added: "Mysteries were those where there were too many variables to predict. And I think that how long U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan is in that area."

With 62,000 U.S. troops already in the country, and another 6,000 headed there by the end of the year, Gates suggested there is little appetite in Washington to add many more.

He said his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, is free to ask for whatever he needs, but Gates said when the general submits a revised war plan in the coming weeks it will not contain a request to expand the U.S. fighting force.

McChrystal is expected to identify shortfalls that could be filled by U.S. forces, but a formal request would come only later. The White House has made no secret of its skepticism about further troop additions in Afghanistan, and Gates said Thursday he still was worried that too many American forces could turn Afghans against those trying to help them.

The Man With The Plan For Bananastan

By Jeff Huber,
August 11, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

The Bananastans, the banana republic-style tar pits in Central Asia that we’ve stumbled into, have rapidly become a bigger cluster bomb than Iraq ever was.

At his Senate confirmation hearing, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the "measure of effectiveness" in Afghanistan "will not be enemy killed. It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence."

Shortly after his confirmation, the New York Times reported that McChrystal had been given "carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates" as he carries out "an ambitious new strategy" of "stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks."

McChrystal then re-reversed himself and announced that he would restrict the use of air strikes in Afghanistan in order to avoid civilian casualties. He said that if an air strike was intended "just to defeat the enemy, then we are not going to do it." Throughout my decades as an air operations planner and in all my studies of air power history, I never heard of such a thing as an air strike that wasn’t intended to defeat the enemy.

Days after his announcement, an air strike in Kandahar killed four civilians. Since then, air strikes have killed and wounded civilians time and time and time and time again. Over in Pakistan, U.S. officials think a drone air strike"probably" killed Baitullah Mehsud, a senior Taliban leader. That’s according to the best intelligence the U.S. officials have, which in that part of the world amounts to bribing or beating people into telling us what we want to hear or believing the lies that Pakistani intelligence tells us.

Even if it’s true that Mehsud is dead, so what? We’ve killed senior evildoers before, and evil still exists and the global war on it continues. For every senior evildoer we kill, 10 junior evil doers scramble to take his place and 20 new evildoers rise up to avenge the deaths of their mothers and sisters and brothers that we caused in the course of killing the senior evildoer.

Soon after assuming command, McChrystal ordered the Marines to conduct a major offensive to clear Taliban havens in south Afghanistan. The Marines met less resistance than expected, but the Taliban executed effective strikes in other parts of the country. McChrystal said he was surprised by that turn of events.

The signature warfare style of guerilla insurgents is to refuse battle with superior forces and to strike weaker forces unexpectedly. During McChrystal’s confirmation period, the Pentagon hyped him as a "counterinsurgency expert." It’s funny how a counterinsurgency expert could be surprised when the insurgents he’s fighting behave the way they’re supposed to.

Why am I finding it easier and easier to believe that McChrystal just eats one meal a day and only sleeps a few hours a night?

The latest member of the dream team McChrystal has been given carte blanche to handpick is counterinsurgency guru David Kilcullen, a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, who is now head of U.S. Central Command and McChrystal’s boss. In a recent appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Kilcullen predicted that the U.S. will see about two more years of heavy fighting then either turn things over to Afghan forces or “lose and go home.” He outlined a “best-case scenario” for a decade of further U.S. and NATO entanglement in Afghanistan. These counterinsurgency wonks have an odd sense of time. Maybe that’s why counterinsurgencies go on forever. The people in charge of them start having so much fun that they lose track.

Kilcullen also has an odd sense of why Afghanistan is worth a 10-year commitment. We have "compelling reasons" to continue the fight, he says, but counterterrorism isn’t "at the top of my list." To the casual observer, it would seem that counterterrorism is the only reason to be in Afghanistan, but Kilcullen is a cut above "casual."

One of his main reasons for staying the course in Afghanistan is that it may be the only way to preserve the NATO alliance. See, NATO was formed to fight a different kind of war than the one in Afghanistan against a different kind of enemy than the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but that war and that enemy doesn’t exist anymore. NATO needs a new kind of war and enemy to fight, and if Afghanistan and the Taliban aren’t it, then there’s no reason for NATO to exist anymore. If maintaining NATO’s meaningless existence isn’t enough to justify a war, we revert to our double-secret fallback position, which is that the U.S. Army needs a phony baloney job to justify its existence.

In March 2009, the Washington Post said that Kilcullen’s "theories are revolutionizing military thinking throughout the West." Yeah. He’s revolutionizing military thinking the way the Hindenburg revolutionized the dirigible.

McChrystal is putting together what aides describe as a "blunt summing up" of the situation in the Bananastans. The report is due out in a couple of weeks and will probably ask for yet another troop escalation.

The Associated Press reports that in anticipation of the assessment, the Pentagon has set up a new command center in an "ultra-secure war room" where people from different services and disciplines can "sit together."

In a separate effort, the Obama administration is developing new measures of success in the Bananastans, something it promised Congress months ago. It’s bad enough that we sent additional troops over there without telling them what they needed to do to be successful. What’s worse is that in order to have accurate measures of success you need to have coherent objectives, and we have nothing of the sort. The "realistic and achievable" objectives baked up by the White House strategy team in March are certifiable. We’ll never create stable governments in the Bananastans or train reliable Afghan and Pakistani security forces, and according to Kilcullen, the only reason to have "international community" involvement is to resurrect an extinct military alliance. Disrupting terror networks in the Bananastans won’t "degrade any ability they have to plan and launch international terrorist attacks." With handheld access to the information highway, terrorists can conduct business from the gallery of the Knesset chamber if they feel like it.

Ah! So that’s why Kilcullen doesn’t think counterterrorism is an important reason to be in the Bananastans.

It all makes sense now. For a minute there I thought we were just spinning our wheels like a battalion of Chinese fire trucks.

Read more by Jeff Huber

• Wham Bam Bananastan – August 3rd, 2009
• Middle East Show of Farce – July 27th, 2009
• Cheney’s Inferno – July 21st, 2009
• The Persian Ploy – July 13th, 2009
• Bull Pulpit – July 6th, 2009

Droning On

Remote-Controlled Mayhem Does Not Win Wars.

By William S. Lind
September 01, 2009 Issue
Courtesy Of The American Conservative Magazine

When TAC asked me for a piece on military drones, I had to consider which variety of drone was most important: the drone aircraft, the drones who operate the aircraft, or the drones back in the Pentagon who think drive-by shootings can win wars.

Drone aircraft are simply model airplanes. It would be easy enough to construct one from parts picked up at a toy store. Kitbash a small video camera that can broadcast an image—some model trains now have one in the engine cab—onto a remote-controlled model aircraft big enough to carry it, and you have a useful military drone. (Paintballers take note.) In fact, you have the most useful type of military drone, a reconnaissance drone. For millennia, commanders have wanted nothing quite so much as an ability to see over the next hill. A simple drone can do that nicely.

In the Pentagon, “simple” is a bad word because it implies cheap. The Pentagon is not a military headquarters; it is a bank. Its main mission is to add to the money flow. Simple systems do that poorly. Therefore, American military drones have grown rapidly in complexity and cost, far beyond what a company or battalion commander needs to see over the next hill. The Predator is perhaps the most famous of a growing family of drone aircraft. Not only does it take pictures, it also carries air-to-ground missiles it can shoot with great precision out of the night sky at gatherings of Taliban fighters, compounds serving as IED factories, and Afghan wedding parties.

What’s wrong with that? Yes, we have to say “sorry” when a Predator turns a wedding into multiple funerals. But who would not want to be able to strike enemy targets swiftly and silently with no risk to an American pilot? Is this not military technology at its best?

To answer these questions, we must grasp a basic fact about war that the American military cannot understand, namely that there is more to it than putting firepower on targets. American military doctrine—with the exception of the Marine Corps—is Second Generation doctrine, sometimes called firepower/attrition warfare. Derived from French Army doctrine of the interwar years, it reduces war to putting fire on targets in a contest of mutual attrition: think Verdun. The French summarized it as “the firepower conquers, the infantry occupies.” Seen from the perspective of that doctrine, Predators firing missiles are entirely a plus. Other than those pesky wedding parties, they have no negatives. Remember, high cost is another benefit.

The problem, as the French discovered in 1940 when they faced a Third Generation German army with a doctrine of maneuver warfare, is that Second Generation doctrine is deeply flawed. War is the most complex of all human endeavors. It can seldom be reduced to a mere contest in mutual attrition. Col. John Boyd, USAF, America’s greatest military theorist, observed:

When I was a young officer, I was told that if you have land superiority, air superiority, and sea superiority, you win. Well, in Vietnam, we had land, air, and sea superiority, and we lost. So there is obviously something more to it.

Boyd went on to explore and explain what that “more” is. He posited that war is fought on three levels: physical, mental, and moral. The physical level, where Second Generation focuses, is the weakest. The moral level, on which guerrilla war centers, is the most powerful. And the mental level, the basis of maneuver warfare, lies somewhere in between.

The primacy of the moral level carries over from classical guerrilla warfare into Fourth Generation war, the type of war we are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, thanks to those wonderful Predators, in Pakistan. The defining characteristic of Fourth Generation is that it is multi-sided and many of the parties are not states. Some nonstate entities may fight for political goals, but many do not. Instead, their goals may range from martyrdom to loot to impressing the local girls. In the Fourth Generation, war moves beyond Clausewitz’s politics carried on by other means. For many of the entities waging such wars, the moral level replaces the political. It is power on the moral level that brings recruits, money, good press, and, perhaps, victory.

In Fourth Generation wars, one of the most important factors on the moral level is what Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld calls the power of weakness. A state, especially a major power such as the United States, is incomparably stronger physically than its Fourth Generation enemies. The U.S. military has the fanciest weapons in the world, including the Predator. The Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the like are armed mostly with light weapons of World War II design. Our troops have the latest body armor, excellent medical care if they are wounded, and base camps with all the comforts of home. Our opponents fight in bathrobes and flipflops, usually die or are captured if wounded, and live the life of scavengers.

To themselves and onlookers, they are David and the U.S. is Goliath. In the 3,000 or so years that the biblical story has been told, how many listeners have identified with the giant?

Here we begin to see why Osama should have on his cave wall a picture of the Predator with the line under it, “Our best weapon.” Maybe he does. Perhaps no other weapon so well represents the conflict between al-Qaeda’s David and the American Goliath. The Predator strikes in the night with no warning. Its missiles can instantly pulverize an entire mud-brick compound. There is no defense against it other than hiding. If by a miracle our opponents shoot one down, they do us no injury. The drone operator sits in air-conditioned comfort in Tampa or some similar garden spot. With the Predator and with airstrikes generally, Americans fight from a safe distance. Like the Trojan hero Paris, who was an archer, we appear to be cowards.

Seen from John Boyd’s physical/ mental/moral vantage point, the Predator is a stunning success physically. It may terrify our enemies mentally. But on the moral level, it is a boomerang. Those on the receiving end say, “I’m going to get back at the murdering cowards no matter what it costs.” Their families, friends, fellow tribesmen, and co-religionists around the world have the same reaction. The Predator calls forth its low-tech, Fourth Generation counterpart and nemesis, the suicide bomber.

Here we see the broader failing in the American military, an error that had its origin in the idea that war is a firepower-based attrition contest, but has since taken on a life of its own. That is the assumption, usually unstated but now so widespread that it underlies everything the Pentagon does, that wars’ outcomes are determined by technology. The fact that complex technology is a great justifier of higher budgets may not be irrelevant to this notion’s popularity.

Van Creveld’s book Technology and War, a historical survey, concludes that very few wars have been decided by technology. Boyd sums up the reason: “Weapons don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.”

One consequence of this fact is that most high-tech weapons systems have simple, low-tech counters. A classic example comes from the “McNamara Line” in the Vietnam War, a collection of high-tech sensors in the jungles that was supposed to pick up any Viet Cong movements. One sophisticated sensor was designed to detect human odors. The VC countered it by hanging buckets of urine in trees.

The Taliban’s most successful counter to the Predator is of similar simplicity. They make sure that when they gather and thus provide a good target, they have plenty of women and children around. In effect, they say, “Go ahead, make my day.”

Because complex weapons are expensive, they are usually in service for a long time, sometimes decades. Soon after their introduction, most if not all of their operating characteristics are known, especially in the age of the Internet. Our opponents can invent and deploy generations of simple countermeasures during the lifetime of one high-tech system. They are “outcycling us,” in Boydian terms: they can go through many cycles of observing, orienting, deciding, and acting against our systems while the systems go through only a single cycle. Boyd argued that there are few more certain prescriptions for defeat.

In contrast, simple systems, such as those our Fourth Generation opponents rely on, can go through many Boyd cycles in a comparatively short time. We see this face on display in Iraq and Afghanistan with the deadly weapon we face, the Improvised Explosive Device. Our opponents continually and rapidly invent and deploy new generations of IED, with new warhead designs, triggering mechanisms, and camouflage techniques. The U.S. has a multibillion-dollar top-priority program to counter them, most of it focused on high-tech solutions. (Again, think budget justification.) It has had small successes, but if you ask many of our troops what their mission is, they reply, “Driving around and waiting to get blown up.”

The disadvantageous time factor—no factor is more critical in war; Napoleon said, “I may lose a battle, but I will never lose a minute”—is compounded in hi-tech systems by the fact that their designers are engineers, few of whom have any understanding of war. War and engineering are not merely different, they are opposite in nature. A river cannot think how to counter an engineer who is building a bridge across it. War, in contrast, is continually shaped in unexpected ways by what soldiers call “the independent, hostile will of the enemy.” That means the other guy keeps doing things you never imagined. Complex weapons systems cannot deal with situations not envisioned by their designers. A striking example of their problem surfaced shortly after a U.S. Aegis cruiser shot down an Iranian passenger aircraft over the Persian Gulf. Aegis,a shipboard anti-aircraft and anti-missile system, is one of the most expensive weapons systems in the American military inventory. We have spent, and continue to spend, tens of billions of dollars for ships that carry Aegis as their main armament. A designer of the Aegis system wrote to the Naval Institute Proceedings to exculpate his creation, saying, “Of course, it was never designed to deal with ambiguity.” The independent, hostile will of the enemy means that ambiguity is a constant companion in war.

Ambiguity, deception, surprise, camouflage, and ambush have characterized war since its prehistoric beginnings and always will. Complex, high-technology weapons systems have trouble with all of them. They work best in clean, simple environments, like the carefully contrived “tests” the Pentagon uses to convince Congress to keep the money flowing.

Air and sea warfare are comparatively clean and simple, and high technology plays an important role there. The land warfare environment, in contrast, is vastly “dirtier.” Nowhere is it more so than in Fourth Generation wars, where the line between military and civilian is blurred to the vanishing point. In that endlessly complex setting, high-technology systems often trip over their own numerous feet even before the enemy has had a go at them. Just ask one of our company or battalion commanders what he thinks of our wonderful, computerized command and control system. One told me that it required him to submit more than 100 reports per day. Several years ago, I was in a meeting in which a retired general extolled the contribution his part of that system had made to “victory” in Iraq. The commander of the famous “Thunder Run” into downtown Baghdad said the first thing he did was turn it off.

The Pentagon’s financially self-serving belief that technology wins wars has come to grief in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, just as it did in Vietnam. In the early days of that war, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was interviewed by the French journalist Régis Debray, who asked him what the French experience in Vietnam meant for the Americans. McNamara replied that what had happened to the French could never happen to the Americans. It was not a matter of bravery, he said, but of technology.

In contrast, John Boyd argued that for winning wars, people are most important, ideas come second, and hardware comes third. The Pentagon stints our people to feed its hardware programs, while the pursuit of technological solutions to every problem stifles creative thinking about tactics and doctrine. The American military promotion system washes out the combat leaders, who tend to have rough edges, in favor of bureaucrats and managers who can run big weapons programs and testify smoothly before Congress. In pursuit of the foxfire of victory through technology, America has forgotten the basics of war.

While the Predator and other drones in the air are killing Taliban, the drones in the Pentagon are killing us.
__________________________________________

William S. Lind is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Killing Them Softly

By Jeff Huber,
June 30, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

It ran in the Los Angeles Times, so it’s official: the key to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s success in the Bananastans will be a “civilian surge.” The thinking apparently goes that if McChrystal stops killing as many Afghans as he used to when he was head of the secret Joint Special Operations Command, they’ll flock to his arms in gratitude.

It’s clear that no one in the national security establishment is serious about “winning” in the Bananastans, but they’re certainly serious about their war propaganda. In the old days, four-star generals like David Petraeus had personal public affairs colonels. McChrystal is so important he’s snagged himself a public affairs admiral: Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith. Like all military reporting now, the LAT piece, titled “U.S. to limit air strikes in Afghanistan to help reduce civilian deaths,” is a poorly camouflaged piece of stenography, and it’s clear that Smith did the dictating.

Smith told the LAT that the civilian surge strategy will be outlined in a “tactical directive” that will order “new operational standards.” McChrystal, Smith says, will limit the use of air strikes in order to “help cut down” on civilian casualties. This new direction came about as a result of the “listening tour” of Afghanistan that McChrystal took upon his arrival. “Listening tour” is a euphemism for the rounds a new boss makes to ensure everyone knows he doesn’t give a flying tackle what they think.

The LAT (i.e., Smith) reports that part of McChrystal’s plan to improve relationships with Afghans involves efforts to “speed up and sharpen the military’s message in so-called information operations.” The real crux of his plan, however, involves information operations aimed at the American public.

The air strike mantra is covering smoke. According to a UN report, air strikes accounted for 64 percent of civilians killed by U.S. or Afghan forces in Afghanistan last year. Those civilians could just as easily have been killed by artillery or other heavy ground-based weapons. Supporting fires are supporting fires, whether they come from land, sea, or sky. A 19-year-old private can kill just as many civilians with a grenade launcher as the 42-year-old pilot of an F/A-18 Hornet can.

What’s more, a “staff member” told the LAT that “the directive does not mean that use of air power will be sharply reduced – only that the emphasis is on protecting civilians rather than killing insurgents.” If the emphasis is on protecting civilians, why not stop air strikes altogether? In my 20 years as an air operations planner, I never once designed a strike for the primary purpose of saving lives. In fact, why not halt air and ground-based offensive actions completely? As best we can tell, we’ve killed about as many civilians as the Taliban have. Shoot, we can cut civilian deaths in half just by packing up and climbing on a plane for home.

McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David D. McKiernan, issued orders last year that required commanders to “minimize the need to resort to deadly force.” How is this new directive on protecting civilians any different from the old orders on protecting civilians? According to the LAT/Smith/unnamed Smith underling, “McChrystal’s directive appears to be more emphatic and specific.”

Ah!

But the new directive emphatically and specifically does not expect commanders to let their troops become sitting ducks. The LAT says that Smith says that McChrystal “made it very clear that if our troops find themselves in a situation where they are receiving fire from a location, if their lives are in danger, they’ll have to address the problem as best they can, either with ground forces or close air support.”

They’ll “address the problem” by blowing the location in question to smithereens. They have no other choice. Nothing in any superior’s orders overrides a commander’s authority and obligation to use all necessary means available [.pdf] to defend his unit, and no unit commander worth the market value of his precious bodily fluids is going to let a single troop in his charge be harmed in a firefight as the result of a pulled punch.

The LAT also says that Smith says that McChrystal says, “If it’s a situation where clearly [hostile] individuals are in a structure or move into a structure … where you do not know precisely whether or not civilians are … in those structures and you can move away safely, you should do so.”

Again, why bother going after “hostile” individuals at all if you’re going to withdraw the second you think there may be civilians in the vicinity? In the Bananastans, civilians will almost always be in the vicinity. McChrystal’s notion of separating the civilian population from the Taliban is the kind of lunacy you’d expect from a guy who only sleeps three hours a night. What he’s talking about is the precise equivalent of wading into Miami to separate Hispanics from Latinos.

Well, not the precise equivalent: in the Miami scenario, we would have a fair number of reliable Spanish speakers to provide us with good intelligence. We’ll never develop good intelligence in the Bananastans. Ever.

All the “change” hoopla attending Stan McChrystal’s arrival in Afghanistan is cynical hogwash, designed to sucker the American public into turning yet another corner, and sitting patiently through another Friedman unit, and listening to Thomas E. Ricks tell David Gregory or some other bobble-head that sure, what we’re doing is immoral, but it would be even more immoral not to do the immoral thing we’re doing.

The most immoral part of this travesty is that our military chain of command, right up to the commander in chief, continues to put our troops in a deplorable situation – to kill innocents or be killed themselves – for reasons that have nothing to do with national security whatsoever.

New US Drone Fleet For Pakistan

Inside the Pentagon's New Plan for Drones That Don't Piss Off Pakistan

By Erik Sofge
June 17, 2009, 11:43 AM
Courtesy Of Esquire

Chronicling Civilian Slaughter In Afghanistan

Courtesy Of "Information Clearing House"

The footage you are about to see is poignant, heart-wrenching, and often a direct result of U.S. foreign policy. We must help the refugees whose lives have been shattered by U.S. foreign policy and military attacks. Support the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, an organization dedicated to helping women and children, human rights issues, and social justice. Then, become a Peacemaker. Receive up-to-the-minute information through our new mobile alert system whenever there are Afghan civilian casualties from this war, and take immediate action by calling Congress. http://rethinkafghanistan.com/ - Warning - Viewer discretion advised. Posted June 18, 2009

"Normalising" War On Muslims

When Did We Stop Caring About Civilian Deaths During WarTime?

The mere monitoring of bloody conflict assumes precedence over human suffering

By Robert Fisk
Saturday, 31 January, 2009
Courtesy Of The Independent

I wonder if we are "normalising" war. It's not just that Israel has yet again got away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza.

And after its own foreign minister said that Israel's army had been allowed to "go wild" there, it seems to bear out my own contention that the Israeli "Defence Force" is as much a rabble as all the other armies in the region. But we seem to have lost the sense of immorality that should accompany conflict and violence.

The BBC's refusal to handle an advertisement for Palestinian aid was highly instructive. It was the BBC's "impartiality" that might be called into question. In other words, the protection of an institution was more important than the lives of children. War was a spectator sport whose careful monitoring – rather like a football match, even though the Middle East is a bloody tragedy – assumed precedence over human suffering.

I'm not sure where all this started. No one doubts that the Second World War was a bloodbath of titanic proportions, but after that conflict we put in place all kinds of laws to protect human beings. The International Red Cross protocols, the United Nations – along with the all-powerful Security Council and the much ridiculed General Assembly – and the European Union were created to end large-scale conflict. And yes, I know there was Korea (under a UN flag!) and then there was Vietnam, but after the US withdrawal from Saigon, there was a sense that "we" didn't do wars any more. Foreigners could commit atrocities en masse – Cambodia comes to mind – but we superior Westerners were exempt. We didn't behave like that. Low-intensity warfare in Northern Ireland, perhaps. And the Israeli-Arab conflict would grind away. But there was a feeling that My Lai had been put behind us. Civilians were once again sacred in the West.

I'm not sure when the change came. Was it Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the Sabra and Chatila massacre by Israel's allies of 1,700 Palestinian civilians? (Gaza just missed that record.) Israel claimed (as usual) to be fighting "our" "war against terror" but the Israeli army is not what it's cracked up to be and massacres (Qana comes to mind in 1996 and the children of Marwahine in 2006) seem to come attached to it. And of course, there's the little matter of the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988 which we enthusiastically supported with weapons to both sides, and the Syrian slaughter of thousands of civilians at Hama and...

No, I rather think it was the 1991 Gulf War. Our television lads and lasses played it for all it was worth – it was the first war that had "theme" music to go with the pictures – and when US troops simply smothered alive thousands of Iraqi troops in their trenches, we learned about it later and didn't care much, and even when the Americans ignored Red Cross rules to mark mass graves, they got away with it. There were women in some of these graves – I saw British soldiers burying them. And I remember driving up to Mutla ridge to show a Red Cross delegate where I had seen a mass grave dug by the Americans, and he looked at the plastic poppy an American had presumably left there and said: "Something has happened."

He meant that something had happened to international law, to the rules of war. They had been flouted. Then came Kosovo – where our dear Lord Blair first exercised his talents for warmaking – and another ream of slaughter. Of course, Milosevic was the bad guy (even though most of the Kosovars were still in their homes when the war began – their return home after their brutal expulsion by the Serbs then became the war aim). But here again, we broke some extra rules and got away with it. Remember the passenger train we bombed on the Surdulica bridge – and the famous speeding up of the film by Jamie Shea to show that the bomber had no time to hold his fire? (Actually, the pilot came back for another bombing run on the train when it was already burning, but that was excluded from the film.) Then the attack on the Belgrade radio station. And the civilian roads. Then the attack on a large country hospital. "Military target," said Jamie. And he was right. There were soldiers hiding in the hospital along with the patients. The soldiers all survived. The patients all died.

Then there was Afghanistan and all that "collateral damage" and whole villages wiped out and then there was Iraq in 2003 and the tens of thousands – or half a million or a million – Iraqi civilians killed. Once more, at the very start, we were back to our old tricks, bombing bridges and radio stations and at least one civilian estate in Baghdad where "we" believed Saddam was hiding. We knew it was packed with civilians (Christians, by chance) but the Americans called it a "high risk" operation – meaning that they risked not hitting Saddam – and 22 civilians were killed. I saw the last body, that of a baby, dug from the rubble.

And we don't seem to care. We fight in Iraq and now we're going back to fight in Afghanistan again and all the human rights and protections appear to have vanished once more. We will destroy villages and we will find that the Afghans hate us and we will form more criminal militias – as we did in Iraq – to fight for us. The Israelis organised a similar militia in their occupation zone in southern Lebanon, run by a crackpot Lebanese army major. But now their own troops "go wild". And the BBC is worried about its "impartiality"?