Recently I was reading some articles on the change in command for the troops in Afghanistan and I came across an interesting piece written by Patrick Martin…..
There is every indication that the change in command is the result of growing dissatisfaction with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency methods, which have failed to dislodge the Taliban-led guerrilla forces that control the bulk of southern and eastern Afghanistan. It presages a drastic increase in the level of US military violence, and especially the scale of civilian casualties among the Afghan population. Their “crime” is to sympathize with and support the anti-US insurgency.
Petraeus is already, according to one media report, preparing to modify the rules of engagement to allow for greater use of force.
According to a report Sunday in the British Independent, McChrystal had grown increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for success, particularly after he was compelled to postpone the planned offensive into the key southern city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. He reportedly briefed NATO defense ministers earlier this month “and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months.”
According to this schema, McChrystal had chosen the second and third goals, with the resulting spike in US-NATO casualties and increasing dissatisfaction among the rank-and-file soldiers ordered to take greater risks to avoid civilian casualties. The alternative, the author writes, is to focus on the first and third goals instead: “A state can protect its armed forces while destroying insurgents, but only by indiscriminately killing civilians as the Ottomans, Italians, and Nazis did in the Balkans, Libya, and Eastern Europe, respectively.”
This choice, what the author later calls “a policy of barbarism,” could perhaps be described as “the Hitler option.” (excerpts from “The Hitler Option”)
I truly hate it when people use thew “Nazi” comparison, it usually turns me off when it is used, but in this case it could well be used in a proper way. My next question is, just how accurate is this analysis? The answer will be in the news of the future……watch the happenings in Afghanistan and see how accurate the prediction or analysis is…..
It may well be right (as I said in my post, McChrystal was trying hard to work WITH the Afghans, or one section of them at least).
The difficulties experienced by all our forces over there do in part appear to stem from the hypocrisy of the West. We ARE an invading force whatever the politicians want to call it and the generally accepted rule for such an invasion is that, whilst every effort is made not to kill innocents, if you get in the way (or we THINK you’re in the way), expect to get shot – it’s WAR for chrissake, not a couple of police patrol cars in downtown Manhattan!
I’m not sure I agree with the new approach you quote. It is of course one way (maybe the only way), but the time to have behaved like that was when we went in at the beginning. We should have gone in hard, big (VASTLY bigger than we did) with huge power and overkill. We could have erradicated the Taliban at the start and there would by now be little of no counter insurgency since the majority of htem would have been wiped out.
Incidentally, if we’d done that, there would be far less terrorism in Pakistan OR Iraq right now.
I don’t see war as an answer to most problems, but if you’re going to do it at all, do it BIG, hard and fast – do it like you mean it in fact! In reality, it costs less time, money and above all lives on all sides in the longer run.
Rules of engagement are fine – rules of war are just a ridiculous contradiction in terms. How can you possibly make rules about killing people… especially when anyone, man woman or child, may be about to attack you and ALL the opposing army are civillians in one sense of the word???!!!
Regardless of the “rules” the US will be in Afghanistan for a long time at the cost of many good programs back home……this fixation on the timeline for withdrawal is just plain silly…there is NO indication that we will leave Afghanistan any time soon……I agree with your analysis about the early days of the war……..The biggest prob in the US is that NO one can say what the final outcome should be…..all they give are some vague political slogans and nothing that is based in reality….
Yeah, well, that’s pretty much what they do about everything – waffle!
Here on the Coast we call it “crawfishing”…but it is the same thing……pure bullsh*t