ISAF must restore confidence in the near-term through renewed commitment, intellectual energy and visible progress.

Sounds like bureaucratic bullshit to me.

Here is an interesting instance of ‘crux’.

I think short of turning AfPakistan into a sea of glass and putting up a Wal-Mart, our chances of effecting change to satisfy the Oil Companies is zero. Were Sun Tzu to advise the DoD today, first I think he’d wonder what our goals are, how we let the military situation deteriorate at all, starting 7 years ago, then state “get the hell out now”.

We live in a sea of lies, of intellectual dishonesty, of no accountability, and of craven greed.

American exceptionalism at work.

Spencer cites: “new resources are not the crux.”

Or as McChrystal writes on page 8:

“Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it.”

Translation: Give me what I want even though I’m not promising I will succeed because if you don’t I’ll dump the blame on you.

This is not strategy. It is CYA.

The U.S. goals seem fairly clear to me: support the MIC and get promotions for military muckety mucks.

I’d urge everyone to read through the entire document. I do not believe it is CYA. It may be *wrong* — that’s debatable — but I get no indication that it’s written just to ensure a predetermined conclusion. Or rather, a predetermined conclusion that we just need more troops because we need more troops because we need more troops. If there are any fixed ideas, it’s that the Army focuses way too much on killing people than it does on giving them reasons to support the government.

Ann Jones does an effective take-down on the goal of training Afghans to become self-sufficient Mini-Me Marines.

After eight years of training at a cost of over $10 billion, it should be evident to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that this is an exercise in strategic futility.

Well if you are going to invoke Sun Tzu, there is this:

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.

It’s the army’s job to kill people. They’re not good at anything else. So they shouldn’t even bother trying.

And can you please tell me why the U.S. is losing? The Soviets won until the U.S. supplied the stingers, and the U.S. now has more troops in Afghanistan than the Soviets did (counting contractors). How incompetent is the U.S. that it is falling so far short of what the Soviets accomplished?

I get no indication that it’s written just to ensure a predetermined conclusion. Or rather, a predetermined conclusion that we just need more troops because we need more troops because we need more troops

Yes well, however you slice it, McChrystal does want more troops, both Afghan and American.

As I typed on an earlier thread, um, well, like, ya know, where is the U.S. military going to find these multilingual, culturally sensitive 18 year olds?

“The Fraud of Afghanistan” from today’s DailyKos.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/…..fghanistan

“…a new approach — with a significant magnitude of change…”

Change we can believe in. Clearly, victory is in sight.

Please, we are turning a corner, now that the CIA post in Kabul is being staffed at levels similar to Saigon, aka Ho Chi Minh City. (Must be the Poppy concession)

McChrystal needs to be cashiered. This is a transparent attempt to extort more troops, toys and money from Washington to meet McChrystal’s (and Petraeus’) goals, without regard to Washington’s goals (or lack thereof). Until he actually has a goal, he’s just expending the lives of our people in uniform and playing with big-boy toys.

The reason we are loosing in Afghanistan is the same as it almost always is when our military is loosing: We are trying to use the military to achieve an undefined diplomatic goal (the other part is trying to achieve an undefined military goal). When the goal is clear, the military achieves it quite easily. It is only when the goal is some squishy B.S. that they fail.

Are we there to prop up Kharzai (or any other government), or do we actually have a goal (one involving Taliban, perhaps)?

The same problem pervades our occupation of Iraq.

In both cases, the goals were, or have become, unclear, and so the killing & dying goes on & on.

The only “strategy” that matters to me is the one which will stop this multi hundred billion dollar game of bloody risk.

We need to either mow the people of Afghanistan down once and for all and build those pipelines.. or get the hell out.

It’s a matter of whether or not we want to admit our intentions, change them or not, and conduct ourselves like we did when taking the native Americans out of the picture… or act like somewhat decent people, come home, provide health care and education to all our brethren while pursuing green energy with all due haste.

Seriously, flatten Afghanistan like a pancake or get the F out.

yes, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel

Victory is two Friedman units (=1 Woodward unit) down the road.

That should work out well.

Probably just an oncoming train…

I left a response to that comment at the end of that thread.

There are all kinds of weird things in this report. The policy is stated as keeping Afghanistan from becoming again “a base for terrorism,” but jumps from there to talking about nothing but counterinsurgency. These are not the same thing. We have a policy goal and a strategy that is irrelevant to the achieving of that goal.

McChyrstal says that the population is the objective. But then he goes on to say that it must be protected essentially from both the Taliban (insurgents) and the central government (crooks). He mentions ethnicity and tribalism briefly but never really explains how the national security forces can be configured in a way that does not represent these same divisions. Or how at the same time they are supposed to protect the people that they are robbing.

It is all a dreadful mishmash once you scratch the surface of the report.

cue the obligatory ‘Gulf of Kyber Incident’ in 3 . . . 2 . . .1

Check out what former NY Times foreign correspondent Stephen Kinzer author of “All the Shah’s Men” and “Overthrow: A Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq” says about Afghanistan in our interview with him on our Saturday radio show. Stephen Kinzer on Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Israel

That’s the problem when the military try to do something other than kill people. They get a few briefings on several parts of the problem, assume (because they’re generals) that they now understand the problem, and put all the incoherent pieces together in the mish mash you describe.

As far as terrorism bases are concerned, they don’t need a lot of space or resources so it’s ridiculous to occupy an entire country for that reason.

ISAF must restore confidence in the near-term through renewed commitment, intellectual energy and visible progress.

Sounds like bureaucratic bullshit to me.

Hmmmmm. Sounds more like campaign rhetoric to me.

Saved that to listen to later. Luvvvvv the website, but I’m really biased.

Progressive radio in Montana. Cool.

Jesus, really? We either commit a genocide or we do nothing?

I thought it’s Petreaus who’s gonna run for prez, not McChrystal.

Well, all those other nongenocidal actions by the U.S. worked out so well. Yeah, let’s repeat one of those. Take your pick of one of the 14 in Overthrow.

Since we’re getting friendly with the Russians once again maybe we can talk them into taking over the war in Afghanistan. They have experience on their side.
We could offer them a cash bonus if they catch bin Laden.

The Soviets only had 2 more years experience than the U.S. now has.

Leaving is doing something.. and it happens to be the right thing to do.

Did the Afghans use up all the Stingers we gave them to fight the Russians? If they took out one of our drones with one that would certainly change the military perspective

Don’t drink the coin whisky.

yea, we’d put more arc lights on em.

Oh, lordy, I wouldn’t wish that on Shrub/Cheney/McSFB.

Are you agreeing with ES that we need to either nuke Afghanistan or leave?

Spencer thanks for the link to your update. If, socio-econoic development was the first priority, then I would agree with some of the strategy in terms of humanitarian aid.

You quote:

“First is the ISAF mission statement: “ISAF, in support of the [Afghan government], conducts operations in Afghanistan to reduce the capability and will of the insurgency, support the growth in capacity and capabilities of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and facilitate improvement in governance and socio-economic development, in order to provide a secure environment for sustainable security that is observable to the population.”

I do not think you grow the National Security Forces first. Additionally, the difficulty in selling increase capacity and capabilities is that, with our domestic economy in the tank, we sure could use some more capacity and capabilities here at home. None the less, capacity and capabilities are socio-economic growth in most respects.

I also think efforts such as this are not helping.

Do we know how many “missionaries” are doing socio-economic work with a disregard for the regional culture and actually causing outrage met with violence?

In some ways, one could interpret McCrystal’s strategy as a veiled call for more missionaries.

Program Management 101 states that the first question to ask is: “What is your objective?”

When I ask what is the US objective in Afghanistan, the answer is BTSOOM (another old PM term).

Again, PM 101 states that if you don’t know what your objective is, you are doomed to failure.

My conclusion for a long time is – Get the Hell out – NOW.

I just published a diary here with some quotes by Kinzer. His really interesting analysis of Afghanistan starts 15 minutes into the 20 minute interview. And his idea of a stable Middle East is to make our allies Turkey and Iran, who have a long history of democracy as opposed to our cold war allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

To be clear I only advocate leaving. Otherwise those folks should do what they intend to do quickly, instead of pretending they have no mission while conducting slow genocide and oppression over many years. If we can’t stop ourselves.. then finish it.

We should not pretend it’s not what they are already doing and that McCryObama planners aren’t already considering… the slow pancake.

It’s not like the neo libs are about to turn coin into a Three Cups of Tea approach. Quit pretending.

We can agree to disagree about leaving, but I don’t understand how you can conclude we’re perpetrating a “slow genocide” in Afghanistan.

Well, it’s no Three Cups of Tea… it’s certainly no picnic.. or anything resembling good intentions on our part in terms of the health and welfare of the people in the region.

One need look no further than who McCry really is.
At the sham of the government we propped up all along.. and rigged an election assuring they remain today.
What Obama wanted during his campaign.
The profit involved and for whom.
And the only motivation which makes any sense.. war cash and potential pipeline routes.

There simply is nothing good which has or will come of this. We don’t have a military or leadership who are capable of good at this point in history.

8 years in a nation which… excluding their 30b drug business has a GDP of less than a billion… and we import extremely expensive contractors rather than put those people to work. And now the only thing we propose is arming them and training them in more armed tactics! Nothing else in any sincerity seems to be considered.

And flesh is and has been tortured and burning for many years, has it not? Without any other clear mission or plan.. why on earth are you considering this is not the plan? WHy isn’t it considered anything other than slow genocide?

Because there’s no slow genocide. (What does that even mean?) There’s no rounding Afghans up and putting them anywhere and exterminating them. Perhaps one of the more damning things that can be said about the U.S. over the past eight years is that the U.S. hasn’t given a shit about the well-being or the deaths of Afghan civilians, and that’s something that McChrystal is very clearly focused on changing. But it surely means that no one has devoted even the attention necessary for any sort of genocide.

War is war. War is awful and wretched and to be avoided at all times whenever possible. But not every war is a genocide, slow or otherwise. I see nothing that describes or explains the Afghanistan war through use of this phrase.

Let the cia pay the taliban to slap preditor homing devices on the Al Quida turbins, then let Karazai, the tallyhos, and the warlords, get on with raising their poppy plants. Meanwhile regional issues can be gradually dialed back without a cabal of oil slurpin, torturing loving , wannabe cowboys in the White House.
Just Sayin.

I do not understand why we can allegedly put homing devices on al-Qaeda figures in the Pakistani tribal areas and not on the al-Qaeda affiliates who concern us in Afghanistan, a far more permissive area of operation.

Hugh@5 nails it:

“This is not strategy; this is CYA.”

Boy, is it evermore. It’s also covering george bush and the GOP’s ass.

One of the very first things that Obama needed to do was send the warbot brass off to shuffle papers in Fort Bumfuck, Alaska, while putting in some generals who don’t think that the our troops and our money should be used to try to sustain the perpetual-warfare-state worldview of george bush and the Fortune 500, for another 10 or 15 we’re-about-to-start-to-begin-to-commence-to-win-the-war-on-terrr” “Friedmans”.

As with so many other things, that he didn’t do that is now coming back to bite him in the ass, as the brass whom bush handpicked to stay the course of the petroleum crusades are presenting Obama with a basically unified front to go deeper into Deathroll Swamp, and don’t worry about the 14 foot salties already hanging on his ass.

This is why I think O. has a 50-50 chance of being a one-term preznint.
There were TONS of enthusiasm for his candidacy last year. The next time around, it looks like he’s going to be just another pol who talked the good fight for progressive government, but in the crunch, sold us out to the same people who have profited so handsomely from bush’s bloody, inept, policies. By 2012, he could be so vulnerable that Hillary finds the prospect of another shot at triangulating her way to the white house, that she might resign as SecState to run against him. As a former supporter of hers who came to loathe her, and who switched to Obama, it will be hard to find enthusiasm OR sympathy for him, this time around.

There’s been a move to put more CIA (I presume) intelligence folks into Afghanistan to help the military find the enemy and determine force levels.

I wonder if they came out of Pakistan (where there have been many eyes)? If not it would seem the time for their movement has arrived.

Soon we might not be needed in Pakistan. And, if McChrystal can’t find the Taliban, then we might not have political support for wasting resources and lives in Afghanistan either.

Wouldn’t it be weird if we were out of Afghanistan & Pakistan before we had completely left Iraq. The world brings us many surprises.

Again, PM 101 states that if you don’t know what your objective is, you are doomed to failure.

The way I generally put it is that if you’re not doing something to win then you’re just wasting time waiting to die. That’s not the road you want to go down.