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McChrystal's Support for Raids Belies New Image
WASHINGTON - Gen. Stanley McChrystal has recently acquired the image of a master strategist of the population-sensitive counterinsurgency, reducing civilian casualties from airstrikes and insisting that troops avoid firing when civilians might be hit during the recent offensive in Helmand Province. One recent press story even referred to a "McChrystal Doctrine" that focuses on "winning over civilians rather than killing insurgents."
Since he took over as top commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal has not only refused to curb night raids on private homes but has increased them dramatically.
(AP Photo/Jim WATSON, Pool) But there is a glaring contradiction between McChrystal's new counterinsurgency credentials and his actual policy toward the politically explosive issue of night raids on private homes by Special Operations Forces (SOF) units targeting suspected Taliban.
Since he took over as top commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal has not only refused to curb those raids but has increased them dramatically. And even after they triggered a new round of angry protests from villagers, students and Afghan President Hamid Karzai himself, he has given no signal of reducing his support for them.
Two moves by McChrystal last year reveal his strong commitment to night raids as a tactic. After becoming commander of NATO and U.S. forces last May, he approved a more than fourfold increase in those operations, from 20 in May to 90 in November, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times Dec. 16. One of McChrystal's spokesmen, Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, acknowledged to IPS that the level of night raids during that period has reflected McChrystal's guidance.
Then McChrystal deliberately protected night raids from political pressures to reduce or even stop them altogether. In his "initial assessment" last August, he devoted an entire annex to the subject of civilian casualties and collateral damage, but made no mention night raids as a problem in that regard.
As a result of McChrystal's decisions, civilian deaths from night raids have spiked, even as those from air strikes were being reduced. According to United Nations and Afghan government estimates, night raids caused more than half of the nearly 600 civilian deaths attributable to coalition forces in 2009.
Those raids, which also violate the sanctity of the Afghan home, have become the primary Afghan grievance against the U.S. military. As long ago as May 2007, Carlotta Gall and David Sanger described in the New York Times how night raids had provoked an entire village in Herat province to become so angry with the U.S. military that men began carrying out military operations against it.
By 2008, the targets of the SOF raids had shifted from higher-level and mid-level al Qaeda and Taliban officials to low-level insurgents, especially those working on manufacturing and planting IEDs, the organization's main form of attack against foreign military personnel. That shift accelerated as the number of raids ballooned under McChrystal.
The inevitable botched raids killing large numbers of civilians brought a new wave of protests. After a December 2009 raid killed at least 12 civilians in Laghman province, according to an investigation by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, students at Nangarhar University blocked the highway between Jalalabad and Kabul for several hours.
In late January, a new directive was announced to the press addressing the night raids issue. The text of the directive has not been released in full, but excerpts released Mar. 5 include an acknowledgment by McChrystal that "nearly every Afghan I talk to mentions them as the single greatest irritant."
But the January directive fell well short of forcing changes in the way the raids were carried out to stop civilian deaths. Instead, it called for putting Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in the lead on all night raids, and notifying Afghan government officials, ANSF and "local elders" in advance of any raid - "wherever possible" and "whenever possible", respectively.
SOF commanders are supposed to justify any operation that does not apply these standards, according to Sholtis. But those commanders have long argued that telling village elders about such raids in advance would result in their targets being tipped off.
It is unlikely that they would be denied permission after invoking that risk.
As for putting an Afghan face on the raids, Afghan Special Forces and other Afghan military personnel have been accompanying SOF for years, but that has not prevented the continued killing of civilians. In a report issued last year, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission documented cases of raids involving Afghan Special Forces in which civilians were killed in September 2007, January 2008 and April 2008.
Another night raid on Feb. 12, soon after the new directive had been issued, showed clearly that the directive had not changed anything. The raid, obviously carried out without informing local officials, not only blundered into a family celebration and killed two pregnant women and a teenage girl, but also provoked others in the vicinity to come out of their houses with guns to see who had intruded on their neighbors.
The SOF community had long asserted that anyone who comes out of their house during a raid must be an insurgent and can therefore be killed. But as former Marine officer Tim Lynch, who has lived in Afghanistan since 2003, observed after an errant raid in January 2009 killed 13 civilians, coming to the aid of a neighbor is expected of male Pashtuns under the "code of Pashtunwali".
McChrystal's directive expressed regret about such killing of bystanders during raids but did not forbid it.
Why would McChrystal continue to tolerate a tactic that is so clearly at odds with the population-centric approach to counterinsurgency that he has publicly embraced?
McChrystal has only a brief period before President Barack Obama's exit strategy comes into play in mid-2011. He desperately needs to be able to convince the U.S. public during that period that he is making progress.
Like Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-08, he needs to be able to cite statistical trends, such as a reduction in Taliban IED attacks, that would demonstrate such progress to Congress and the news media.
He evidently hopes that night raids, by weakening of the Taliban military organization, might influence those statistical trends. Reducing the level of Afghan hatred of Americans by eliminating night raids wouldn't figure in those statistics.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
24 Comments so far
Show AllObomba's failure to ditch McChrystal reveals his complicity.
Like everything else in the Obama Administration it is all about image and not substance. Rule via marketing schema.
This whole war business is a murderous scam. Stanley McDeathsquad knows that. So do the GIs.
McChrystal is a trained military commander. Which also makes him a teacher of warfare and the art of killing. He trains his soldiers how to kill and expects them to carry out his orders to kill. Military commanders, especially those who have had combat experience, know how to kill. They are an exceptional breed of man that exists no where else other than the military.(police forces?) They are adapted to exercise new tactics,such as the night raids on private homes in Afghanistan, to kill. To kill SUSPECTED terrorists. No warrant(?)and many times no warning. Innocent civilians have been murdered for no reason other than the house they were in housed SUSPECTED terrorists. This article listed two pregnant women murdered in one such raid. And McChrystal? He will feel no regret;his conscience is clear and he probably slept like a baby that night knowing that his troops had carried out their orders;to kill.
How many innocent deaths is he and previous commanders responsible for?? Many thousands, surely. And what has all this murder accomplished? More hatred directed toward us and our country;more poverty inflicted on the already poor population;the destruction of what was left of the country and causing decades of an attempted recovery of the country.
Every commanding general and all their staffs,since this war had started,should be tried as war criminals. But we know that wont happen. "I was only following orders". When have we heard that before??..............and the beat goes on.
Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petreaus best enjoy their popularity while they can because as the Afghanistan War drags on and on their popularity back home is going to tank, along with that of their Commander-In-Chief. That's what happens when a supposedly sure thing turns into an ignominious defeat. The best example of such an outcome in modern times was the 1982 Falkland Islands War in which Argentina was soundly defeated, after which the fascist military junta that had gotten Argentina into that war not only was overthrown and democracy restored, but the leaders of said dictatorship ended up in jail. Not that this will happen to Generals McChrystal and Petreaus, unless, of course, they along with their Commander-In-Chief are charged with and convicted of crimes against humanity, perhaps for having allowed these drone attacks which already have killed scores of civilians, mostly women and children.
According to Gareth Porter, "McChrystal has only a brief period before President Barack Obama's exit strategy comes into play in mid-2011. He desperately needs to convince the US public during that period that he is making progress. Like General David Petraeus in Iraq in 2007-2008, he needs to be able to cite statistical trends, such as a reduction in Taliban IED attacks, that would demonstrate such progress to Congress and the news media."
If Porter is correct, and logic like this is what's passing for strategic thinking by the best and brightest at the top of the Pentagon command heirarchy, then surely the patients are running the asylum over in Afghanistan.
Okay, we no longer do body counts. Instead, we're going to do IED attack counts. This statistical hocus pocus will convince the American public, Congress, and the stateside news media that General McChrystal is making progress, just like General Petraeus's legendary surge made great, great progress in Iraq (right in time for the 2008 presidential campaign season kick off).
This is absolutely crazy.
Would you send your son or daughter off to kill or be killed in order to make the world safer from Taliban IED attacks? If you were an Afghan civilian, would you expect an escalation of foreign troop presence in your neighborhood to increase or decrease the likelihood that an IED might go off near you?
If the great upcoming US assault upon Kandahar causes an upsurge in Taliban IED attacks, will General McChrystal be forever branded a failure as a result, his counterinsurgency strategy exposed as a fraud? For some reason, I just don't think the spin would spin that way.
And remember, that "success of the surge" propaganda didn't get John McCain much traction with American voters in the fall of 2008.
After nine years of US/NATO military presence in Afghanistan, in 2010-2011 is it all now just about appearances and perceptions? Are we really fighting there in the months immediately ahead to statistically convince people, in the narrow window of opportunity left, that McChrystal's shlong is as manly as that of the mighty Petraeus?
Bill from Saginaw
I brand our entire presence in the Middle East as an abject FAILURE!!! A failure in treating other human beings as something more than just a number in a "body count."
When will we wake up and retire our military to its posts here in the U.S. and keep it from murdering innocent civilians, including women and children, in countries that have no intention of bringing war to our country?
Our MIC is crushing our economy and our National reputation!!! We have DEFINITELY NOT heeded Eisenhower's warning about the MIC. To the contrary, we have gone to the opposite extreme!!!
My perception in all this, pardon the pun, is that the technology drives the strategy. They have the night vision stuff, so they use it to "advantage" . Except that it isn't working, but "damn, we're gonna own the night this time". Sigh.
"Military madness is killing my country" Graham Nash
Mc whatever is a pig / puppet/ mass murderer for the fascist amerikan empire- ruled by fear- the more they slaughter the more more they control/ the harder will by the fall...... Iraq, Afpak, ... the empire is all crumbling now !
mcchrystal is a known killer. he assisted the shia death squads in their ethnic cleansing of baghdad. why is their peace in baghdad on some nights? only because about 2 million of its inhabitants, mostly sunni, had to leave the country to flee to other parts of iraq. nearly half a million others were killed. read woodard's book where he talks about the "salvadorean option" employed by killer mcchrystal in iraq. nightime raids, mass imprisonment, and sudden banishment took place there during the surge. macchrystal learned his lesson at the knee of the good ol' boy equivalent of heinrich himmler, and that would be one david patraeus. he's taken those iraqi tactics and transplanted them into afghanistan.
The USA has so often, as She does today, proven the Chinese correct that Power does come from the barrel of the gun.
Last week I met a recently retired lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Army Special Forces. He had just returned from Afghanistan. A friend of mine, who has a landscaping business, is landscaping their survivalist style home in the Nevada desert.
As the lieutenant and his wife and my friend and I sat for a couple of hours in my friend's studio we chatted about various things. I am a photographer and spent some time recently in the tribal areas of Pakistan doing mountain photography.
The Army Ranger's wife told me that her husband thinks that what is needed in Afghanistan is a "mass killing" and that they need to "start over."
Also, in what sounded like a quote from General Westmoreland, the McCrystal of the Viet Nam war, she calimed that "life is cheap over there. The Asians don't value life like we do over here in the West."
The advocacy of mass human slaughter expressed by one of the leaders on the ground doing the killing probably expressed more accurately the true nature of the McCrystal strategy than the public statements of attempts to reduce civilian casualties.
I believe we are actually seeing a repeat of the war crime of the Phoenix program in Viet Nam in the desert plains of southern Afghanistan.
As someone who has studied the geography of Afghanistan for many years it is very telling to me that our forces, after all these years, are still battling for control of the southern deserts, the most accessible and "easy" areas of the Afghani terrain. It is the mountainous regions bordering Pakistan that are always described as the difficult part of the country in which it is nearly impossible for foreigners to survive.
I have trekked through some of the high mountains of central Asia. Those regions will never be conquered by our army or any foreign force. We are throwing our national treasure down a rat hole that is very profitable for contractors who bribe our congress into continuation of this ruinous, murderous war criminal folly.
Good post, thank you.
Joe
Cripes, her dear husband VALUES life so kills things he values as a job or is she claiming that because "They Value Life" less then her fellow citizens it means more of them can be killed before it seen as wrong?
"lets see Afghanis "Value life" 100 times LESS then Americans so we can kill 100 of them for every one of OUR more valued people dies"
The moral values of some folk are beyond my comprehension.
What am I reading here? Protests by President Karzai? Afhan grievances against the U. S. Military? Who's F******
country do they think this is anyway?
I saw a figure here that had to do with 600 civilian deaths in 2009 whereas I don't hear any numbers for the years 2001-2008. Whatever it is, I'm sure that it's a far cry from the over 80,000 civilian deaths attributed directly or indirectly to our occupation of Iraq, so McChrystle's got a long way to go before he can begin to compete with Patreas' record.
What really gets me is that while we're using terrorism to fight terrorism, if and when we get another attack on our soil, similar to or even worse than 9/11, there'll be hordes of people wondering "Now I wonder why that happened?"
Yes, the loss of over 3000 civilian lives on 9/11 was a tragedy but how many times does that figure have to be multiplied before our government has satisfied itself that vengeance has been completed?
I have no idea who it should be, but we really need a Republican to be elected president in 2012. That way he can moan about the mess that he inherited from Obama as he has been doing with reference to Bush. Then we can elect a Democrat in 2016 and the process can begin all over again.
It should be apparent to all that we are the biggest war-mongers on the face of the earth, and changing presidents and the party they represent is never going to change that.
PURE MURDER! OBOMBER sucks the same demon's seamen as Mcasshole--and you fools are doomed by your apathy and greed.This threat will not be ended by anything we amerikans do--we don't have the balls to stand up against the evil forces--the most we can do is jabber on about it.So keep on killing women and babies for your ignoble cause--when it's all over we will share the same fate that the German populace suffered--but if I should live long enough to see the sponsors of this inhuman slaughter executed I will die in peace.
The night raids are part of a conscious strategy of terror by the US military.
"Winning hearts and minds" is a term that was coined back in the Vietnam War, and the strategy then, as now, was to terrorize the people--in the Vietnam instance, the peasantry--so that they would be afraid to hide, support or tolerate the presence of enemy fighters in their midst.
The hope of US military strategists is that by terrifying the local citizenry, they will drive a wedge between them and the enemy, in this case the Taliban.
It didn't work in Vietnam, and it will almost certainly fail in Afghanistan, but along the way, many thousands of Afghan citizens will die or be injured.
The whole thing is an obscenity, and violates the Geneva Convention against deliberately harming civilians in war.
If another country were doing this, we'd be calling its military and civilian leaders war criminals. And that is exactly what Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and ultimately Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama are: war criminals.
Visit Dave Lindorff's website at www.thiscantbehappening.net
Another mass murderer being exalted.
“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,”
-- Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/asia/27afghan.html
A good Afghan is a dead Afghan, to paraphrase an old expression concerning American Indians.
BEST way to avoid Civilian Casualties , get the HELL out of their country and end the occupation .
The Obama/McChrystal strategy PROPAGANDA TALK IS DESIGNED to placate U.S. citizens and extend the occupation until all resistance is squashed and Americans except and PAY FOR the continuation of such occupations .
As in Iraq with help from the complicit media doing their kabuki dance rambling about troops leaving , troops leaving while MERCENARIES are replacing troops leaving , unreported by complicit media. Bottom line is the occupations of both IRAQ & Afghanistan will continue and the gullible and ignorant public will see some troop withdrawal as light at end of tunnel . The goal has ALWAYS been to occupy region and you can start with OBAMA Foreign policy ADVISER Brzezinski writings in the "Grand Chessboard " where he wrote NO other country should dominate EURASIA other than the U.S. - " control of Eurasia will lead to subjugation of Africa " " 3/5ths of worlds OIL & GAS is in Eurasia " .
Remember the Taliban were invited guests to UNOCAL HQ in late 90s in Houston, Texas, learning OIL trade and being coddled for OIL DEAL , that fell through , still making it easy to lump all together as "terrorists" even many are simply resistance to foreign occupation .
There is no evidence that US military tactics are not designed to keep the insurgency stirred up. McC's words are for the US public. The troops are trained to destroy armies, not to function in a civilian environment. Since it is 8 1/2 years later, we can presume it is deliberate.