Afghanistan post-McChrystal
Just suppose President Obama hadn't fired General Stanley McChrystal this week as his top commander in Afghanistan. What would have been the headlines from the warzone?
Perhaps that this month has seen the highest number of fatalities among foreign troops in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001?
Or that a report from the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said that nine years on, "the overall security situation has not improved"?
(Just one line from the report: "The rise in incidents involving improvised explosive devices constitutes an alarming trend, with the first four months of 2010 recording a 94 per cent increase compared to the same period in 2009.")
Or, as the New York Times reported, that criticism of the Afghanistan strategy is mounting on Capitol Hill, even among President Obama's allies, and that public support for the war is crumbling?
The respected military analyst Anthony Cordesman wrote in a sobering critique this week: "Two critical questions dominate any realistic discussion of the conflict. The first is whether the war is worth fighting. The second is whether it can be won. The answers to both questions are uncertain."
How many times have we been told that the key to success in Afghanistan is not military but political? Over and over again, we've read that bolstering the authority of the Afghan government is every bit as important as defeating the Taliban militarily.
As Fred Kaplan wrote on Slate.com: "Counter-insurgency wars, as has been said countless times, are fought by, with, through, and on behalf of the host country's national government. The idea is to provide security, so the government can bring its people basic services. If the government is incompetent, corrupt, or widely viewed by the people as illegitimate, then a counterinsurgency campaign -- no matter how brilliantly planned or valiantly fought -- is futile."
Which means, I assume, that President Hamid Karzai holds the key. And who was the one senior US official who seemed to be able to get on with Mr Karzai? None other than the now departed General McChrystal.
So here's where we are. General McChrystal has been fired, despite President Karzai's public entreaties that he should be allowed to stay on. The US special envoy Richard Holbrooke stays on, despite President Karzai's refusal to have any more dealings with him.
And President Karzai stays on too, despite the widespread belief that he rigged his election victory last year, and despite Washington's impatience with his apparent inability to get a grip.
What's more, the clock is ticking. In December, President Obama will be given a "strategic review" assessment of where things stand in Afghanistan. And, according to the current plan, in exactly 12 months from now, US troops will begin to withdraw.
The Canadians and the Dutch have already announced that their troops will be going home next year. The British prime minister David Cameron and his defence secretary Liam Fox have both been sounding less than convinced recently that Britain's military contribution should continue for much longer.
After the death of the 300th British serviceman in Afghanistan earlier this week, Mr Cameron said: "We are paying a high price for keeping our country safe, for making our world a safer place, and we should keep asking why we are there and how long we must be there."
That doesn't mean that British troops are about to pull out. But it may be relevant that the new coalition UK government seems to feel much less of a need to cosy up to Washington than did its Labour predecessors (and, to be fair, I think the same could be said in the opposite direction of President Obama when compared to President Bush).
It may also be relevant that Pakistan is reported to view the enforced departure of General McChrystal as an opportunity to step into the gap he leaves behind. One report suggests that Islamabad is now presenting itself as a new "viable partner" for President Karzai, with its army chief General Kayani "personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership."
The new US commander in Afghanistan is General David Petraeus, a man much admired for his perceived achievements in Iraq, and who virtually single-handed wrote the US military manual on how to conduct counter-insurgency operations.
So if anyone can win the war, it's probably General Petraeus. Except, of course, that as his own doctrine acknowledges, counter-insurgency operations can't be won militarily.
And that, I'm afraid, is where we came in.
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~48~RS~)
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Because Afghanistan is very much like Vietnam the US decided to prove that it was not. The Bush/Cheney approach of retribution with no real plan set this failure in motion. An unpopular government, widespread corruption (and that includes contractors from the West)and people who are not provided security, provides little hope. Sometimes it is best to do nothing. Other nations will need to face reality and understand that if that nation becomes a base for terrorist operations it may need to be bombed and missled for an extended period of time. There are two things that motivate populations to change...opportunity and fear.
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I'm sure McChrystal can go back to running SOT death squads as he did in Iraq for many years. They were widely implicated in the torture of prisoners.
"Perhaps that this month has seen the highest number of fatalities among foreign troops in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001?"
It's truly sad that military casualties have such a high media impact compared to civilian casualties. This gulf directly leads to military tactics such as air-strikes, which minimize the risk to soldiers while simultaneously maximizing the risk to civilians.
Not that the Afghans haven't complained. The Afghan government has repeatedly called for an end to air-strikes and yet NATO continues to use them. What must Afghans think about this? There is an occupying force in their country that completely ignores the wishes of their own government. What would you think?
How exactly can we be establishing the authority of the Afghan government when we take absolutely no notice of them? Exactly whose authority are we establishing, the Afghan government's or NATO's?
The more I look at our media reports, the more they look like Pravda reports from the Soviet occupation. They say all the same things. We are there to stop extremists, we're there to help the Afghan government etc. It's same old nonsense, and lack of critical thinking we get from the BBC and other media outlets. Journalists should stop implicitly assuming our benevolence and start treating things much more sceptically. Being sceptical is not being biased despite what the BBC may think.
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#1 GoS
The Afghanistan situation appears a bit more complicated than assuming `opportunity and fear ´will ever be sufficient. Without some form of stability, a missile in the wrong place can easily change local allegiances.
Our `Friends´one day are our ´Enemies´the second -- this is not a unified ´country´ and probably should never be described as such. I have my doubts if bombing into the ground will close the Pandoras´Box -- Instead of ONE war Front we now have TWO and its army is called Homeland Security. On that point I CANNOT see a Vietnam similarity.
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My critique is why was Nato brought into the mess in the first place ?
Nato had a clean vest as seen by the majority of Europeans and could have retained its cleanliness by sending troops under another flag-- even mercenary. Parliaments were forced to lie to its citizens under the call of ´Peace Keeping´until the lies were there for all to see and the body-bags returned.
It is not NATO that has the drones and missiles -- It is America ( and if rumors are correct, being directed at the Afghan AND Pakistani enemies by computer game whizz kids in USA in uniform )
500,000 UDSSR troops could not secure the Afghan-Pakistan border (?) --lets hope the `drone -intelligence´is cost effective, at least more so than the 250,000 bullets calculated necessary to kill one insurgent.
A military should be honored by the politicians NOT sending them to wars --and definitely NOT into Quagmires !
If that is General Petraeus´s orders and belief -- good luck to him and the NATO troops.
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Having had some time to think about it, I've concluded that this is what McChrystal wanted. He did not get the support he needed from the Obama administration. Short on men, short on time, too short to win. He couldn't just quit. This was his way of getting out from being credited with losing the war.
ghost of sechuan chicken this is like Vietnam because the Bush and Obama administrations made it that way. The parallel is striking. An implacable enemy on a messianic mission. Far away from the US in difficult terrain. A perceived threat to America's vital security but....not enough commitment to win at all costs, too much attention paid to American and world public opinion, tied by so called international laws which only apply to one side, a sanctuary granted to the enemy beyond which the US cannot go, fear of large numbers of civilian deaths and the reaction to it, a weak corrupt government we appear to be defending, fear of widening the war, all add up in effect a guarantee of failing. The US has not won a war for exactly these reasons (except possibly for Serbia) since WWII. Had it fought WWII this way it would have lost that too. Success has a thousand parents, failure is an orphan. America is becoming very impatient with this war and with President Obama just as it was frustrated in Iraq with President Bush. Wars cannot be won on the cheap, without massive atrocities against civilians being commited including by your own military, and without a win at all cost mentality. But then anyone who plays chess seriously knows that instinctively. Winning requires a killer instinct. Our Commander-in-Chiefs seem to lack that. Sometimes I wonder if our military doesn't also.
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#5 MarcusAurellius
Both wars are Bush´s and BOTH are quagmires like Vietnam.
Your Shakespearean tragedy is that no matter how many of the enemy or innocents are killed, the seeds of doubt are sown in America itself against its own citizens.
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noisy little acorn not really. There were no doubts until Korea. Even then. But Korea was the first war in which the US did not use all of the means at its disposal to win. There were dissenters in all wars but that is not the same thing. There was no doubt when the US went into either Afghanistan or Iraq. Both were very popular in the US at the time. Anyone who says otherwise is rewriting history. The disappointment and disillusionment came from not winning. Neither war was fought very well. I'm not sure Americans know how to fight a war to win anymore. It seems to be about sending messages and winning hearts and minds, not about finding and destroying the enemy no matter what the consequences. With that kind of mind set, America should not fight any more wars at all. It is stupid to fight if your exit strategy isn't to vanquish the enemy until he is dead dead dead before you leave. This precludes concerning yourself about killing civilians, timetables, so called war crimes, drawing boundary lines behind which the enemy finds sanctuary. There are no clean neat polite wars. Wars fought by the Marquis of Queensbury rules by one side are wars that side will surely lose.
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It is very simple in that in all this time the US has been unable to find the committment within Afghanistan to form a reliable army and police forces. Usually soldiers are trained in a relatively short period of time and nothing like real combat to up the skill levels. The people need security 24 hours a day, not just in the daylight hours. After the US bombed every major city in Japan and followed with atomic bombs on the two remaining large cities one has to wonder about the cry about civilian casualities that are usually in small numbers. There has never been a war without civilian casualities. People think wars can be regulated, it simply is not in the nature of wars and certainly not in the nature of warriors....war is about killing...citizens should know that before they send people off to fight, some will not come home and others will do things that are not acceptable on any moral standard..that is war. These are also long processes when the goal is to restructure the social and governmental relationships within any country. I would think the past 20 years of culture wars in the US is a good example. Other than the example of WEst Germany absorbing East Germany, it is difficult to find a positive example , but of course WEst Germany already had the organization...and the money.
Afghanistan is a place where contractors go to get rich....may also help the people at some point in time. Diplomats and Generals never get along as diplomats tend to be advocates for the contractors and business community and have a different set of priorities...using war resources to benefit private business and bribe local politicians. I don't think the objective of "winning" has every been stated as a goal in Afghanistan and if it has I am not sure what that would mean.
I still contend that sending bankers to Afghanistan would be the best solution as the Taliban have no idea what ruthlessness can be.
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I do not understand fully #8. However the connection between (mercenary) Blackwater and Embassies are again actual.
While for Marcus, the idea of of HONOR is for loosers, a few hours ago a War commentator demonstrated otherwise.
He told the story of an Afghan village with excellent contacts to the American troops. The troops were told of a road bomb, which was neutralized. Later they were told of enemy Taliban holding up in a village house. Troops were sent, who decided to call for air power. The Taliban then placed a civilian woman and child on the roof top. The American troops then tried FRANTICALLY to stop the air-strike.
How would have John Wayne decided ?
#8. Their carbon footprint sending to Afghanistan could be prevented by just using the WALL ?
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quietoaktree asks, "....why was NATO brought into this mess in the first place?" The short answer is Article V, the collective defence pledge of the NATO treaty. If the members unanimously vote that a member state is threatened then NATO is obliged to ask for troops. The case of Iraq is significant in this respect. In contrast to Afghanistan where it was determined that the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center constituted an attack on NATO though only the US was physically attacked and that the attackers were stationed in Afghanistan, Iraq had not at the time of the invasion attacked the US or US forces in the region (notably in Saudi Arabia). Because NATO is planning to expand its theater outside of the N Atlantic region in the future and is actively seeking membership from non-N Atlantic nations (for example in the Pacific region), it behooves potential new members to seriously consider what they are opening their countries foreign involvement to in the future if they joined NATO.
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NATO, to my mind is loosing its respect. With its Cold-War beginnings the Easterly expansion can be accepted but it was not conceived for such military adventures as Afghanistan with the possibility of many more.
The enemy IS Al-Khadia, and they appear to have now moved to Yemen. Not all Taliban supported them and it is doubtful whether Afghanistan should have been considered a state at all in the first place.
With the small numbers of NATO troops (non-American) and with even them wanting to pull out, the Bush ´shooting from the hip´ and ´ If you are not with us, then you are against us ´ --- is proof enough that many did not consider the activation of NATO as justified.
The original deployment of 15,000 Americans for Afghanistan should be compared with the 40,000 (?) in the New York Police Department.
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Visitors to this blog might be interested in the following exchange regarding The World Tonight's journalism; in particular, on Afghanistan. You can decide to what extent the BBC response actually addressed the points put to Alistair Burnett, editor of TWT. Mr Burnett himself did not respond; instead he forwarded the challenge to the BBC complaints department to process on his behalf.
Students of propaganda will note with wry amusement the BBC's assertion that the broadcaster "does not approach the news through an ideological framework".
It might also be of interest to see how long this post remains before being removed: cf. "referred" comment no. 2 on The Editors' Blog after an item by BBC online editor Steve Herrmann. Linking to cool-headed rational criticism of BBC News output is clearly frowned upon in some quarters.
David Cromwell
Co-Editor, Media Lens
==
Sent: 21 June 2010 10:44 PM
To: Alistair.Burnett@bbc.co.uk;
Subject: TWT's partial framing on Afghanistan
Dear Alistair Burnett,
The framing of your discussion tonight on Afghanistan was ideological, and not at all impartial.* The concept of "progress" in Afghanistan obscures the reality: that the West is not there to protect us, despite all the self-serving military and political claims, but for its own strategic and economic interests. This is all well documented and there are informed speakers you could have interviewed. Why does The World Tonight seemingly ignore or marginalise such rational perspectives?
As the Canada-based Russian journalist Nikolai Lanine has pointed out, such media performance as yours echoes the Soviet media's coverage thirty years ago of the Soviet invasion-occupation of Afghanistan:
The invasion was also portrayed as an act of self-defence to prevent a “neighboring country with a shared Soviet-Afghan border... [from turning] into a bridgehead for... [Western] aggression against the Soviet state”. (Izvestiya, January 1, 1980) Soviet intervention was also a response to unprovoked violence by Islamic fundamentalists (described as “freedom fighters“ in the West), who, it was claimed, planned to export their fundamentalist struggle across the region “’under the green banner of Jihad’, to the territory of the Soviet Central-Asian republics”. (Lyahovsky & Zabrodin, p.45) The Soviet public were told they faced a stark choice: either fight the menace abroad, or do nothing and later face a much greater threat on home soil that would, geopolitically, “put the USSR in a very difficult situation”. (Sovetskaya Rossia [Soviet Russia], February 11, 1993)
This theme was endlessly stressed by the Soviet media system - Soviet forces were “not only defending Afghan villages. They keep the peace on the borders of [our] homeland”. (Pravda, April 2, 1987) The goal was "peace and security in the region, and also the security of the southern border of the USSR". (Mezhdunarodnyi Ezhegodnik, 1981, p.224) The unquestioned assumption was that Soviet forces had no option but to act “pre-emptively” in “self-defence”. See:
Invasion - A Comparison of Soviet and Western Media Performance
Can you explain why TWT's output snugly fits within an analagous propaganda framework that takes Western claims of "progress" and a humanitarian and democracy-promoting "mission" at face value?
Regards,
David Cromwell
* BBC Radio 4, The World Tonight, 21 June, 2010
===
From: complaintresponse@bbc.co.uk
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:30:19 +0100
To: David Cromwell
Subject: BBC Complaints
Dear Mr Cromwell,
Thank you for your email to The World Tonight’s Editor which he has forwarded to me. For future reference, if you would like replies in future you need to send any complaints via the webform at www.bbc.co.uk/complaints . The BBC has gone to some trouble to establish procedures that will enable us to be as responsive as possible to complaints from the public at the same time as exercising due regard to the need to use licence fee payers' money efficiently. For this reason, we prefer complaints to be processed and logged centrally and staff, such as Mr Burnett are contacted for the responses as necessary.
You raise a number of points which I have discussed with Mr Burnett. The World Tonight, as a daily news programme, does not approach the news through an ideological framework. What it does is consider the day’s news stories and the issues and questions they raise and decide whether they merit inclusion in the programme. The programme also has to take into consideration its brief which is either to cover stories not covered elsewhere on Radio 4, or ask questions that have not already been asked on The World Tonight's sister programmes, Today, The World at One and PM.
On Monday, the main story of the day was the announcement of the 300th British death since the beginning of the international military intervention in Afghanistan. The programme decided to ask a basic question, namely, how valid is the government's justification for the intervention?
The programme had clips of the Prime Minister, David Cameron, and the senior British officer in Afghanistan, General Parker, saying why the armed forces are there and responding to the question as to whether the mission is worth the deaths.
This was followed by an interview with the Washington Post correspondent, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who had just been in Marjah and said that the highly publicised offensive there had not been a success despite what the Nato forces had said earlier this year. In this interview, he said a key element of the strategy is that the Afghans in an area need to want to be protected by the international forces and that they were not saying this to him.
Given that British policy in Afghanistan is dependent largely on what the United States decides to do, the programme then discussed the implications of this with two American analysts who were selected because they are familiar with both Afghanistan and policy making process in Washington, Malou Innocent and Bruce Reidel.
The presenter, Ritula Shah, asked them whether the stated strategy is working and also asked them whether the stated objective of the mission of preventing terrorist attacks in the UK and US can be effective. The analysts disagreed on this. Ms Innocent described the stated objective as a 'specious argument' while Mr Reidel was more supportive.
The programme was seeking to achieve impartiality by having a variety of viewpoints and also asked a fundamental question about western governments' justification for having military forces in Afghanistan.
If you are a regular listener to The World Tonight, you will know that the programme seeks to reflect a wide variety of views and viewpoints from around the world on a range of issues in international affairs, and this applies as much to Afghanistan as any other story.
I hope that helps to address the points you raise.
Regards
Sean Moss
Complaints Adviser
BBC Complaints
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Quietoaktree:
I always find it interesting that when situations as you paint, the mother and child on the roof of Taliban hideout, that you will blame the US for bombing and not the Taliban for placing them up there. There are moral situations in war that have no right answer unless you are actually on site and can assess the danger and outcomes. Maybe the people would be less willing to protect the Taliban is they died because they were in a protecting posture. War is ugly and brutal and people watch too many movies. It smells and people die and not in nice ways. This process of small groups hiding and attacking and sliping back into the population creates a lot of stress for those on the other side. When you send people off to war people die, soldiers and civilians. The media is full of egotist trying to make a name for themselves and will write these isolated instances that will bring either a tear or outrage to the reader, always out of context and meant to elicit emotion not thought. Your elected representative is a greater danger to your well-being than the Taliban. At least the Taliban are honest about their objectives.
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#13 GoS
My reply was mainly to Marcus-- concerning Honor. It had nothing to do with blame, but rather the necessary symbiosis between military and civilians in this type of war.
My contribution #3 was written before I heard the story (NPR or BBC ?) and I thought it appropriate for the present discussion.
Within the past 3 days both in USA and UK media, many suggestions of talks with the Taliban and the interests of Pakistan have appeared. It is possible that some governments are NOT preparing their citizens for a Victory ?
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Robin:
One of the headlines would've been: Why wasn't McChrystal Dismissed Quicker.....
(d)
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