The Obama Administration wanted "a fresh look" and General David McKiernan seemed attuned to the wrong sort of campaign.
For the first such change in wartime since Harry Truman replaced General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War in 1951, Barack Obama is replacing General David McKiernan in Afghanistan. Obama is moving both to change a stalemated war in Afghanistan and to scale back expectations there.
In the process, the Obama Administration is signaling that there will be no massive military surge preferred by General David Petraeus, as well as, seemingly, an end to nation-building fantasies and a preference for more special operations while searching for compromise.
McKiernan, the commander of conventional ground forces for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is being replaced by a rather controversial special operations expert, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. As head of Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal oversaw the capture of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the killing of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
McChrystal, a West Pointer who became a Green Beret not long after graduation, following a stint as a platoon leader in the 82nd Airborne Division, is currently director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, the executive staff to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The new deputy commander, filling a new slot, will be Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, the top military aide to Defense Secretary Bob Gates and former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who currently travels with him around the world.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates announced the sacking of McKiernan and designation of McChrystal, as well as his own top aide, Rodriguez, as deputy commander.
The new American commander in Iraq, whose appointment was announced by Gates on Monday, has to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. He doesn't come without a nimbus of controversy.
McChrystal's former outfit, Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which he commanded from 2003 to 2008, has been criticized by some on the left, including journalist Seymour Hersh, as "an executive hit squad." JSOC is a combination of many of the various military service's top special operators, i.e., commandos, including the Delta Force. It was formed in the aftermath of the failed 1980 attempt to rescue hostages from the American embassy in Iran.
Some of McChrystal's troopers have been criticized for using torture during interrogations.
The family of football star-turned-Ranger Pat Tillman, killed by "friendly fire" in Afghanistan, want to know what McChrystal knew and when he knew it.
And the family of Pat Tillman, the football star who became a Ranger after 9/11 and died in a "friendly fire" incident in Afghanistan, criticizes McChrystal for approving Tillman's Silver Star citation for bravery "in the line of devastating enemy fire" just a day before distributing a memo saying that it was "highly possible" the former Arizona Cardinals safety was killed by his own colleagues.
None of which has dissuaded Obama from making McChrystal -- with, perhaps not coincidentally with a president who so values the spoken word, a reputation as an outstanding briefer -- his commander in what is now America's most troubled war.
So why the switch?
Unlike McChrystal, a West Pointer who went airborne, then Special Forces, McKiernan is a College of William & Mary ROTC graduate who went into the armor section of Army, going up the ranks commanding units focused on tanks and other armored vehicles.
Working under the overall commander, General Tommy Franks, McKiernan commanded the conventional ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Which, actually, went very well. Then the trouble, probably predictably, really started with the various Iraq insurgencies emerging.
In Afghanistan, McKiernan, drawing on the lesson that the Iraq force started out far too small to provide stability after Saddam was ousted, has repeatedly insisted on more troops for that mountainous, farflung country.
President Barack Obama made it known before he took office that there would be a new direction for the troubled war in Afghanistan.
General David Petraeus, who oversees Afghanistan as well as Iraq now as head of U.S. Central Command, has also been pushing for more troops for Afghanistan. But Obama, backed by Gates, is delivering about half as many troops as Petraeus and McKiernan wanted.
Putting McChrystal -- whose expertise is in carefully-targeted, highly-lethal, mostly ground force raids on jihadist leaders and cadre -- in command reinforces the message that there will not be the sort of massive surge of American troops into Afghanistan that current commanders wanted. Incidentally, though the exact numbers are classified, McChrystal's vaunted JSOC may number no more than a few thousand.
Under McKiernan's command, American forces in Afghanistan have been increasingly criticized for air strikes that result in many civilian casualties. The administration says that air strikes will continue.
But sources say that the air strikes will be more discriminating and targeted. The probability of civilian casualties goes up in the absence of experienced soldiers on the ground calling in the strikes, something which is a function of the special operations forces McChrystal has served with throughout his career.
Then Vice President-elect Joe Biden met with McKiernan in Kabul on January 10th.
The move from McKiernan to McChrystal also seems to signify an end to nation-building fantasies in Afghanistan.
The Bush/Cheney Administration spoke of building a much more modern nation-state in Afghanistan, which is not nearly as modern as Iraq. Not much was actually accomplished, however, as the fateful Iraq fixation took hold and became the chief enterprise of an entire presidency.
When Obama announced his new strategy for Afghanistan -- and Pakistan, the deterioration of which during the Bush years accelerated into outright crisis -- on March 27th, there were distinct overtones of nation-building.
Not so much now. Oh, they're still moving to stabilize what passes for a central government, do more in the vast rural areas, and provide more economic development aid, as well as real training for the Afghan army and police forces, but it's all with an eye to compromise rather than outright victory.
There've been a variety of apparently desultory talks with the Taliban in the past, with all but ousted former Afhan leader Mullah Omar, now ensconced in Pakistan, seen as being in the ballpark. That was then. Today Reuters reported that former Taliban officials, working with the administration of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, have contacted Mullah Omar and other top Afghan Taliban leaders to set up peace talks.
On the table, among other things, asylum for militants in Saudi Arabia in exchange for withdrawal of foreign forces, as well as negotiation on the shape of a new constitution and government.
Not exactly unconditional surrender.
The Obama Administration seems to be focusing on the original ostensible purpose for going into Afghanistan in the first place after 9/11: To disrupt Al Qaeda and deny it a base in Afghanistan.
You can check things during the day on my site, New West Notes ... www.newwestnotes.com.
David Bromwich: War Fever at the Times: A Five-Day Log
Made nervous by signs that President Obama will not push for a bigger war in Afghanistan, the New York Times is showing what the rest of his time in office will be like if he does not cooperate.
Tom Engelhardt: Going for Broke
Afghan commander General McChystal's mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others.
Huff TV: HuffPost Editor Roy Sekoff Denounces Mission Creep In Afghanistan
HuffPost's Editor Roy Sekoff joined MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan on his show Morning Meeting today to discuss Arianna's blog post calling for Vice President Joe...
SF troops are among the army's elite. They are 10x better trained than your average grunt, but just being better trained doesn't mean that they are more surgical in their strikes. They have been capable of some naughty things in the past. There is a great book Ingalls and Kolhatkar, "Bleeding Afghanistan," on some of the things SF guys have done in the South of Afghanistan to villagers.
But we are doing things "differently" now..... hmm....
Personally, if I were a Pashtun in the border area, this appointment would terrify me. Of course, I'd already be terrified. The change is between having a bunch of rampaging cattle (the conventional forces) and a pack of wolves (SF) loose in your neighborhood.
With every decision Obama loses the moral highground as does this country if polls are to be believed; Obama has cried harry and let loose the dogs of war. The US population feels threatened, and like the favorite family pooch, who is normally lovable, we bite and turn mean.
The problem is Afghan's don't get their news the way we do, they get it basically via the gossip grapevine, and incidents such as Farrah grow in magnitude and eventually you have people in Kunar hearing about the "hundreds" dead in Farrah. The same holds true for SF guys acting with impunity. They harass one old man, and in a couple of weeks the story grows and grows. We have no control over this grapevine, we don't have the skilled personnel, nor an effective means of spreading our side of the story to counteract the anti-American rumors. I'm not sure how we dealt with this problem in Vietnam, or if we even faced a similar problem there.
thank you for your insight. It's really helpful.
Now, would you like to read the piece, including the end?
:)
So what's your big plan on al Qaeda?
1) The geographic isolation of the Taliban-controlled Pashtun lands keeps the Pashtuns backward primitive and fundamentalist, which pre-disposes them to ties with AlQaeda
2) The Taliban were formed to conquer the non-Pashtun lands of northern Afghanistan, which are inhabited by non-Pashtun ethnic groups (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras). Because the Pashtun Taliban were unable to defeat these non-Pashtuns on their own, the Taliban had to turn to AlQaeda for help.
Reunifying the Pashtun lands on both sides of the non-existent Af-Pak border would then eliminate what binds AlQaeda to Taliban.
1) An independent Balochistan could form an easy access corridor to Pashtunistan, bringing in plenty of traffic and influence from the outside world, thus penetrating and dissolving the fundamentalism and isolation of Pashtun culture.
2) With a reunified Pashtunistan no longer part of Afghanistan (just like an independent Kurdistan no longer being part of Iraq), the Pashtuns would no longer feel any desire to conquer northern portions of an Afghanistan they no longer belong to. This then removes any basis for the Pashtuns wanting AlQaeda's assistance.
And do what special ops troops do best - mobility, taking initiative and surprise attacks backed by overwhelming air power.
Oh, right, got it.
Killing civilians is going to radicalize the population and create more "militants" than we eliminate through military action.
Our military is organized, equipped and geared to fighting a completely different adversary - the Red Army. The enemy in Afghanistan has adopted a battle doctrine that nullifies all our technological advantages and exploits our weaknesses as foreign occupiers.
To continue fighting in Afghanistan is folly.
This is the lesson that will be studied at West Point for the rest of the 21st century.
Do you know how big that country is and how few American troops there are there?
Do the people want us there?
Who is responsible for security?
Are you saying we are guests? Tourists?
But you're assuming facts not yet in evidence. I suspect you've always been against involvement in Afghanistan.
As you may know, the Democratic Party position has for years been that AfPak is more important than Iraq, and wrongly addressed. Now we'll see if there is a correct way to address it.
Aside from pulling out ...
One is framed on page 380 of Bob Woodward's book The War Within, in which the author describes a top-secret operation in 2006 that targeted and killed insurgents with such effectiveness that it gave "orgasms" to Derek Harvey, a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus and longtime tracker of Iraqi dissidents. The secret program was led by McChrystal, then a lieutenant commander, using signals intercepts, informants and other tools of what McChrystal calls "collaborative warfare" through Special Access Programs (SAPS) and Special Compartmented Information (SCI.) McChrystal, according to the New York Times, conducted and commanded most of his secret missions at night. These missions were consistent with the proposals of Petraeus's top counterinsurgency adviser at the time, David Kilcullen, to revive the discredited Phoenix Program used in South Vietnam.
Gotta love it!
I doubt that my old friend Tom Hayden would get McChrystal's rank wrong. He's not in the Navy, he's in the Army.
Read this. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rj-eskow/truth-about-tillman-murde_b_58952.html
>>>>McChrystal is the one who cooked up the phony story about Tillmans death ( try to conceal it's friendly fire nature).
>Likewise, the non-Pashtuns of Northern Afghanistan deserve their own state, and showed that even after a ferocious Pakistan-backed Taliban campaign to conquer them, they too could likewise not be conquered by force. The Taliban were not successful in conquering them, and that's why Taliban had to turn to AlQaeda for help in that regard.
Also, the North is a very productive area in terms of taxes. The nasty little truth about Afghanistan is internal Pashtun imperialism and parasitism. Until things completely collapsed in the 1980s, it was standard practice from the 19th century onward for taxes from Tajik and Uzbek peasants to be used for the benefit of the Kabul elite, and given as good-behavior money to border Afghan tribes. I don't think Karzai and co are going to change this.
That President Obama draws attention to McKiernan, and shock and awe in Afghanistan and Pakistan, until public opinion galvanizes around a rapid exit strategy.
That President Obama draws attention to the photos to keep Torture alive in controversy, until a groundswell of opinion forces prosecution.
That President Obama draws attention to banking and autos and Madoff, until public protest turns the focus of bailout and stimuli from Wall Street to Main Street.
That President Obama draws attention to Netanyahu to highlight the folly of separating two implacable enemies with concrete and barbed wire, so the public can galvanize around a One State Solution.
That President Obama draws attention to Swine Flu, until the public demands Single Payer Universal Health Care.
That President Obama draws attention to the War on Drugs, until the public demands decriminalization and an end to prohibition.
President Obama will get us out of Iraq soon.
President Obama will close Guantanamo soon.
When he has time, President Obama will start to address education.
What I am coming to believe:
We have been had once again. We are not going to see much of the Change we were promised. President Obama has sold out to the military industrial complex, big finance, big business, AIPAC, the AMA, and the drug Mafia. He has little interest in the welfare or the opinion of the people of this country and the world.
Sorry to wander off topic.
"He Oversaw a task force that was criticized in 2006 for abusing detainees and harsh interrogation methods at Baghdad's Camp Nama"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html
he ran Dick Cheney's covert operations program, The Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command, which was involved in a wide range of illegal and immoral activities
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/31/seymour_hersh_secret_us_forces_carried
He was censured in March 2007 report by the Pentagon inspector general for his role in covering up the death of Pat Tillman
http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2007-08/01/content_5447088.htm
He was not "censured" for his role in the pat tillman cover-up. The other general was. Instead the wording used for him is:
"McChrystal has been cited for passing on misleading information that led to a Silver Star award to Tillman."
must have missed it