Charlie Rose

REMant  01/12/2010 05:37 PM Report

The Washington Post reported Dec 7: "'What troubled me fairly early on was that those decisions were being interpreted fairly broadly as full-scale nation-building and creating a strong central government in Afghanistan, neither of which was our intent,' Gates told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. The military would now 'focus our resources where the population is most threatened,' he said...The White House has shied away from labeling this phase of the war a counterinsurgency campaign because of concern that it connotes nation-building -- 'counterinsurgency' was conspicuously absent from an administration fact sheet about the strategy issued after Obama's speech. But McChrystal has left little doubt that counterinsurgency is what he intends to do. He used the word multiple times in talking to his troops Wednesday morning in Kabul...'Many of the things we are talking about, we have already started,' said Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, who until last summer oversaw the military reconstruction effort in southern Afghanistan. "We've already begun a more focused approach."...The fundamentals of the Obama administration's approach largely mirror the counterinsurgency effort that was mounted in Iraq in the latter months of the Bush administration. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, senior commanders focused primarily on driving enemy troops from key population centers and then safeguarding the locals in those areas from insurgent attacks. 'Iraq validated our beliefs that we know how to do this stuff,' said a senior general involved in the strategy review. The parallels to Iraq, however, caused unease among some Obama administration officials who had opposed Bush's surge and maintained during the presidential campaign that the sudden drop in violence in 2007 and 2008 was attributable largely to al-Qaeda's campaign of terror, which alienated its Sunni Arab allies in the country. 'The reality is that there is a narrative that emerged during the campaign . . . that we bought off the Sunnis and got lucky,' said one senior military official. 'That is not what happened.'...As an alternative to a soldier-intensive counterinsurgency strategy, he [Biden] advocated using air power and smaller numbers of Special Operations troops to attack Taliban havens. 'The range of choices got progressively narrower as the minimalist options got dropped, until you ended up with something very close to what McChrystal proposed initially,' said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who participated in McChrystal's initial strategy review."

My overall impression of McChrystal after watching this interview and the one he did with Riz Khan earlier, is that he is an ideologue with very limited experience, and probably neurotic. I find it quite astonishing that the general has only an Infantryman's Badge (the big blue thing with the rifle on top of the ribbons) and not a Combat Infantryman's Badge (which would have a wreath around it). This indicates that he has never been an infantryman in combat. He has spent nearly all his career with the Special Forces, i.e., Green Berets, so it is possible that he has seen combat in some manner, but not, most importantly, in a theater of war. He spent only 4 yrs as an LTC and, it appears, has been on a fast track for some time. I suspect this is because of his involvement in counterinsurgency, which was true of many young men with sidewall haircuts who were mowed down in the early years of the Vietnam involvement, but his involvement with the Council on Foreign Relations indicates that he has conservative patrons as well. It is, however, said that he is a recent convert to this religion, and indeed he was involved in the Abu Ghraib and Pat Tillman's scandals, but don't forget it was the Green Berets who were involved in counter-insurgency in Vietnam. Then there are his McNamara-isms, as though the war could be won with statistics, like fantasy football. The amount of time he has spent overseas (each bar on his sleeve indicates 6 mos in a theater of war) along with the morning runs and other asceticisms suggest he is a true believer of some sort, but West Point is free you know, and easily accessible to a general's son, esp if his father was also a graduate (in 1945). His father, himself son of an Army officer, commanded a battalion of the 1st Div in Vietnam from Jan to July 1966, but retired from the service only six years later, in 1972, as a Maj Gen, and all five of his sons went into the Army. Married, but one wonders what kind of home life he has. In any case, his understanding of Vietnam and the NLF is non-existent, because there is little or no difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam at this early stage. Graham Greene portrayed these "quiet Americans" well in the 1950s. What he told Khan indicates he certainly believes in "self-determination" or, in other words, in market society, with all the ambiguity that implies.

The goal of counter-insurgency is not to protect the ppl from the bad guys, or even to be nice to them, but to attach them to us, civilize them, and form them into cadres to fight the bad guys for themselves, in other words, to make them over in our image and build a state. If it weren't we could just leave them alone. The general's August report, an expurgated, unclassified version of which I understand was given to Woodward, is on the Post website (http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/Assessment_Redacted_092109.pdf) This is comprehensive and shows they do appreciate many aspects of the situation that ppl have complained about, such as Sen Webb. But, in essence, the idea that if we don't protect the ppl the Taliban will win, suggests that those ppl are all innocent babes and also that by protection he means making them dependent on us. The mistake is to see this as a contest of who loves the ppl best, which equates in our minds to democracy. The idea that the Taliban could ever be best for the country or welcomed by the ppl is out of the question. Whether it is or is not a classic counter-insurgency strategy, it is a classic American mis-perception, which he might have avoided if he were twenty years older, and hadn't listened to a generation of Vietnam war pundits who've grown up, like the neo-Keynesians, ignoring the facts that would prove them wrong. In this group I'm afraid I have to place our current and last two presidents. The youth of America IMHO would be wiser from now on to vote for their grandparents and not their parents. Quite frankly I have to hope that, as in Vietnam, we lose, and the faster the better, for our own good, and of the ppl of Afghanistan's.