This article from www.stratfor.com makes my point very well.
Afghanistan, A Key U.S. Decision Point
September 22, 2009 2046 GMT
DAVID FURST/AFP
Summary
U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration appears to be inching toward a seminal decision on strategy in Afghanistan. It is becoming clear that a shift in strategy is looming, but the nature and extent of that shift — as well as the implications for troop levels in Afghanistan — remain to be seen. Nevertheless, the decisions made by the White House now could well shape the Afghan war for the rest of Obama’s presidency.
Analysis
Related Links
Afghanistan: The Nature of the Insurgency
Strategic Divergence: The War Against the Taliban and the War Against Al Qaeda
Geopolitical Diary: U.S. Limitations in Afghanistan
Geopolitical Diary: Differing Expectations for Afghanistan
U.S. President Barack Obama is approaching a key decision point in his presidency: how to proceed with the campaign in Afghanistan. The initial assessment of the senior commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was leaked to the Washington Post and published late Sept. 20. The classified report (the published version had redactions for operational security) was clearly intentionally leaked and done for maximum publicity. But the report — both explicitly and implicitly — expresses a great deal more than a simple call for more troops. In fact, it highlights the far-reaching implications of the strategic discussion currently under way within the administration.
Since Obama took office, key figures within the administration, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have been making public statements attempting to moderate popular expectations for the war in Afghanistan and discussing the need to shift away from a broad and wholesale exercise in nation-building to more focused and achievable goals like counter-terrorism and hunting al Qaeda specifically. And even with a small surge in troops, important changes to rules of engagement under McChrystal’s command and an offensive well under way in Helmand province, the situation in Afghanistan was slipping from bad to worse even before Obama took the oath of office. Matters have only deteriorated since. As a consequence, the strategic situation has continued to evolve and the administration has yet to make a definitive choice on the nature of the mission and the commitment of forces to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.
That decision appears to be coming soon. There are two key historical examples to consider, the first of which is when U.S. President Lyndon Johnson escalated the Vietnam conflict in 1963. When U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, there were 16,000 American advisers in South Vietnam. When Johnson took the oath of office, a space race with the Soviets was in full swing and civil rights issues were heating up domestically. Few would have imagined that the war in Vietnam would come to define his presidency. But Johnson almost immediately committed to Vietnam, and by the end of his presidency the U.S. military was directly involved in front-line combat operations across Vietnam and there were more than half a million troops in country. The war and the failed American effort there have come to define his presidency.
In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan made the opposite decision in Lebanon. Following the loss of nearly 250 U.S. servicemen in the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23 of that year; the situation on the ground began to worsen. But instead of doubling down and committing more forces, he made the decision to withdraw on Feb. 7, 1984, less than four months after the barracks bombing. Reagan did not inherit this problem, but he was presented with it early in his presidency. As the situation worsened, he chose to cut his losses and leave rather than become tangled up in Lebanon. Though criticized by some at the time, Reagan was re-elected and the Lebanon issue hardly registers in the popular memory of his presidency.
The point here is not to debate the finer points of history or second-guess decisions, but rather to highlight the importance of the compatibility between military strategy and the commitment of military forces — both quantitatively and over time — to that strategy. The common theme in these two examples is a deeply intractable and complex political-military problem and the American reaction to it. In the first case, the decision was made to commit. But this commitment was made without an achievable strategy compatible with the forces the U.S. was willing to dedicate to it at the time. Indeed, at the time of Kennedy’s death, some 1,000 American advisers were slated to be withdrawn from Vietnam (this decision was secret at the time). Kennedy had concluded that committing additional U.S. forces could not solve the conflict in Vietnam. Johnson thought otherwise. Reagan recognized this same incompatibility in Lebanon. The objective of stabilizing Lebanon was a complex and dubious one at best, but in any event, it required far more troops than he was willing to commit to the problem. In other words, he did not have a strategy he thought could succeed with the commitment he was willing to make to the problem. He withdrew.
The Obama administration is now facing a similar problem. The commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has advised the White House that the current strategy is not achievable even with more troops. McChrystal’s assessment postulates a new counterinsurgency strategy but (at least the redacted version) makes no statement about how many troops would be required to execute that strategy or how long a commitment is necessary to achieve it (though these are undoubtedly figures that are part of the current internal debate within the administration).
The administration is struggling with a spectrum of problems:
The fundamental challenges of Afghanistan — rugged geography, highly localized loyalties, traditions of governance, warlordism and poor infrastructure — that defeated the Soviets, the British and Alexander the Great alike;
More recent developments that are compounding matters further: a resurgent and strengthening Taliban insurgency, the interrelated problem of Pakistan’s insurgency (though Pakistani security efforts have intensified significantly) and a political crisis following the disputed Afghan presidential election;
The ebbing of allied support and the looming withdrawal of NATO forces currently committed to the campaign (in the near future, the United States will have to commit additional forces to Afghanistan merely to keep overall troop levels constant); and
The ebbing of domestic support for the campaign and the lack of support even from Obama’s own party to put additional troops in Afghanistan.
In other words, in addition to the top-level constraints on the number of troops the U.S. can commit to and sustain in Afghanistan due to current U.S. Army and Marine deployment practices, troop commitments in Iraq and logistical considerations, Obama faces further other, domestic constraints on what is possible and sustainable. (The Soviets failed in Afghanistan with nearly 120,000 troops; it seems unlikely that the United States will be able to match that commitment.)
It is clear that some shift in strategy is necessary. To our eye, the key questions to consider in this shift are:
What will the new strategy be, and will it be obtainable?
Will the troops and resources committed to the new strategy be sufficient to achieve its objectives?
Can the commitment of troops and resources be sustained long enough to achieve the objectives?
It is too soon to assume that Obama will double down in Afghanistan, or that the strategy McChrystal has laid out can be properly resourced even if the White House chooses to pursue it. Whether such a strategy can be achieved on a timetable compatible with the already wavering will of the American people is certainly questionable.
Whether the Afghan campaign comes to be a defining part of Obama’s presidency remains to be seen. But it is increasingly clear that the impending decision regarding the strategy for the campaign and the troops committed to it will be critical to shaping the remainder of Obama’s time in the White House.
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For Publication in Letters to STRATFOR
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
New nulear site in Iran
How come if we know there is a site at Qom, Iran that we don't bomb the crap out of it? If we don't have the cajones, then why don't we hire the Israelis to do it? They have one made of brass and the other made of steel--and you know the rest. One small tacticl nuke bomb should do the trick. Diplomacy is not the answer--POWER is the answer and always has been in this case.
Can you remember when?
Can you remember the last time we won a war? I mean a real war. I’m not talking about the little dust ups in places like Grenada, Panama, Bosnia-Herzegovina , Mogadishu or even the Bay of Pigs. I mean something where we really got it on. Well, if you were born anytime after September 1, 1945, you have not witnessed a single “win” on our part.
In less than half a decade after V-J Day (September 1, 1945), we became embroiled in a war with North Korea. After three years of intense fighting that cost the U. S. more than 54,000 killed, the war ground to a halt and an “armistice” was signed on July 27, 1953. Notice that I did NOT say a “peace agreement” was signed. And of this writing, there still is not formally declared peace.
Not only did we lose 54,000 killed, more than 103,000 were wounded, some 8,100 were Missing In Action, over a million Koreans and Chinese were killed and one of our greatest generals, Douglas MacArthur was fired for wanting to win the war. This is the same cantankerous, vain, self-aggrandizing general that led this Nation to victory in our war against Japan during World War II.
When it was all said and done, the division between North and South Korea ended where it began, at the 38th Parallel where Korea was divided after World War II. More than 28,000 U. S. forces are staring at an unknown number of North Korean forces across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) established in 1953. Interestingly enough, on both sides, these are more than likely the grandchildren of the folks who were there over a half century ago. And that includes me!!! An interesting side note—several years ago, I went to Russia on a mission to the Russian Military Medical Academy, which is the oldest military medical school on this planet. I met a physician whose grandfather had been a USSR advisor to the North Koreans during the period I was there. We both wondered if we had ever stared at each other across the DMS and we drank a few vodkas to celebrate!
But before the little “dust up” in Mogadishu where we got our collective asses kicked, we engaged in the first Gulf War (aka Desert Storm/Desert Shield). On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq, launched an attack against Kuwait. Kuwait was quickly overrun and Saddam challenged the world to do something about it saying that this was, “The Mother of all Battles.” We quickly rose to the bait. The U.N. Security Council immediately instituted economic sanctions against Iraq and some twelve states joined us in sending naval forces and eight countries sent troops in varying numbers. We sent seventeen heavy and six light brigades of the U.S. Army and nine Marine regiments, with their large support and service forces. Four countries had sent combat aircraft, joining the local air forces of Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the U.S. Air Force. The goal of all this firepower was to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and back to Iraq. Well, we did that and then we signed an agreement to cease fighting, but we allowed Iraq to keep some armored helicopters, which were eventually used to brutally suppress Shiite and Kurdish uprising. The U.N. mandate had not allowed coalition forces to pursue Iraqi forces into Iraq to put an end to Saddam Hussein in 1991 so what was there for us to do but pick up our toys, lick our wounds and go home. Little did we realize that just over a decade later our Nation would be devastated by the events of September 11, 2001. And what we also did not realize was that members of the Bush 41 administration didn’t forget what they considered unfinished business with Saddam Hussein.
Oh, and by the way—we had a big victory parade in Washington, D.C. to celebrate our ”victory” and to make up for the ones we didn’t have after Korea and Vietnam.
Now we are engaged in two major “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. We claim that we are winning in Iraq and it seems to have fallen off the front page of most newspapers but that is because our current brushfire is in Afghanistan. Depending on what you read and who wrote what you read, we seem to be in very deep trouble in Afghanistan and General Stanley A. McChrystal says that if he doesn’t get more troops immediately, there is a very good possibility that we could once again get our collective butts kicked by the Taliban and al Qaeda. Or, if McChrystal is correct that his new strategy can turn the whole thing around in an unknown number of years (or decades perhaps), then the American people have to decide what price are they willing to pay in blood to see if McChrystal’s plan will actually work.
There is much tug and haul going on between the civilians in the administration and the military professionals in the Pentagon and on the battlefield. Vice president Joe Biden and Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee don’t want to put any more troops in Afghanistan, but want to strengthen the Afghan Army and police. Senator John McCain, the Ranking Member of the same committee sides with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General McChrystal in pushing for 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan to implement McChrystal’s new strategy.
What is this new strategy? Perhaps that will become more clear in the coming weeks.
In less than half a decade after V-J Day (September 1, 1945), we became embroiled in a war with North Korea. After three years of intense fighting that cost the U. S. more than 54,000 killed, the war ground to a halt and an “armistice” was signed on July 27, 1953. Notice that I did NOT say a “peace agreement” was signed. And of this writing, there still is not formally declared peace.
Not only did we lose 54,000 killed, more than 103,000 were wounded, some 8,100 were Missing In Action, over a million Koreans and Chinese were killed and one of our greatest generals, Douglas MacArthur was fired for wanting to win the war. This is the same cantankerous, vain, self-aggrandizing general that led this Nation to victory in our war against Japan during World War II.
When it was all said and done, the division between North and South Korea ended where it began, at the 38th Parallel where Korea was divided after World War II. More than 28,000 U. S. forces are staring at an unknown number of North Korean forces across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) established in 1953. Interestingly enough, on both sides, these are more than likely the grandchildren of the folks who were there over a half century ago. And that includes me!!! An interesting side note—several years ago, I went to Russia on a mission to the Russian Military Medical Academy, which is the oldest military medical school on this planet. I met a physician whose grandfather had been a USSR advisor to the North Koreans during the period I was there. We both wondered if we had ever stared at each other across the DMS and we drank a few vodkas to celebrate!
But before the little “dust up” in Mogadishu where we got our collective asses kicked, we engaged in the first Gulf War (aka Desert Storm/Desert Shield). On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq, launched an attack against Kuwait. Kuwait was quickly overrun and Saddam challenged the world to do something about it saying that this was, “The Mother of all Battles.” We quickly rose to the bait. The U.N. Security Council immediately instituted economic sanctions against Iraq and some twelve states joined us in sending naval forces and eight countries sent troops in varying numbers. We sent seventeen heavy and six light brigades of the U.S. Army and nine Marine regiments, with their large support and service forces. Four countries had sent combat aircraft, joining the local air forces of Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, as well as the U.S. Air Force. The goal of all this firepower was to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and back to Iraq. Well, we did that and then we signed an agreement to cease fighting, but we allowed Iraq to keep some armored helicopters, which were eventually used to brutally suppress Shiite and Kurdish uprising. The U.N. mandate had not allowed coalition forces to pursue Iraqi forces into Iraq to put an end to Saddam Hussein in 1991 so what was there for us to do but pick up our toys, lick our wounds and go home. Little did we realize that just over a decade later our Nation would be devastated by the events of September 11, 2001. And what we also did not realize was that members of the Bush 41 administration didn’t forget what they considered unfinished business with Saddam Hussein.
Oh, and by the way—we had a big victory parade in Washington, D.C. to celebrate our ”victory” and to make up for the ones we didn’t have after Korea and Vietnam.
Now we are engaged in two major “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan. We claim that we are winning in Iraq and it seems to have fallen off the front page of most newspapers but that is because our current brushfire is in Afghanistan. Depending on what you read and who wrote what you read, we seem to be in very deep trouble in Afghanistan and General Stanley A. McChrystal says that if he doesn’t get more troops immediately, there is a very good possibility that we could once again get our collective butts kicked by the Taliban and al Qaeda. Or, if McChrystal is correct that his new strategy can turn the whole thing around in an unknown number of years (or decades perhaps), then the American people have to decide what price are they willing to pay in blood to see if McChrystal’s plan will actually work.
There is much tug and haul going on between the civilians in the administration and the military professionals in the Pentagon and on the battlefield. Vice president Joe Biden and Senator Carl Levin, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee don’t want to put any more troops in Afghanistan, but want to strengthen the Afghan Army and police. Senator John McCain, the Ranking Member of the same committee sides with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General McChrystal in pushing for 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan to implement McChrystal’s new strategy.
What is this new strategy? Perhaps that will become more clear in the coming weeks.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
General McChrystal denies rift with administration
This article was in yesterday's New York Times. It is very interesting to see what happens when the military/civilian interface doesn't fit. This could be an instance where some senior leaders will resign if their endorsement of General McChrystal planned strategy and inevitable request for additional troops is not fulfilled by the Obama administration. You may recall that some two decades ago, then Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb resigned because he did not agree with the Secretary of Defense about the size and role of the Navy.
It is very natural for the military to successfully complete the mission--that is what we are trained to do. Realizing or admitting defeat is anathema. During much of my nearly 40 year career, we got our lunch handed to us in Korea and Vietnam. You may not agree with me about Korea, but North Korea still exists and is a far bigger threat today than it was 50+ years ago. As for Vietnam--well the communists are still in charge and we have 58,000+ names on a black marble wall to remind us of how badly we handled that war.
If we know Taliban and al Qaeda leaders are hiding in Pakistan, why aren't we sending in Special Forces hunter-killer teams to get these guys. Seems to me if you cut off the head of the snake, it dies. If Pakistan gets all bent out of shape, then so be it--making a glass covered parking lot out of Karachi sounds like a plan.
My question is, "How many names will we have to carve on another monument?"
Top General Denies Rift With Obama on Afghan War
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 23, 2009
WASHINGTON — The senior American commander in Afghanistan on Wednesday rejected any suggestion that his grim assessment of the war had driven a wedge between the military and the Obama administration, but he warned against taking too long to settle on a final strategy.
The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said in an interview that he welcomed the fierce debate that had emerged this week over how to carry out the war.
“A policy debate is warranted,” General McChrystal said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Kabul.
“We should not have any ambiguities, as a nation or a coalition,” he added. “At the end of the day, we’re putting young people in harm’s way.”
President Obama’s top advisers are rethinking the strategy that Mr. Obama unveiled in March, amid a growing political divide in the United States over how to proceed and confusion among allies that have fighting forces in Afghanistan.
General McChrystal would not address how many additional combat troops he would seek in a request he is preparing to send to the Defense Department. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Wednesday that the commander’s request would be submitted this week, even though no decisions would be made until the administration had finished its newest review of Afghanistan policy.
In his confidential assessment delivered on Aug. 30, General McChrystal warned that he needed more troops within the next year or else the conflict most likely would result in failure.
“I had absolute freedom to put in a candid assessment, and I did that,” he said in the interview, his first since submitting his 66-page classified report. “I have not been limited in any way in identifying resources that might be required.”
General McChrystal said he agreed to speak to The New York Times on Wednesday after he became increasingly concerned about reports of rifts between the military and the civilian leadership, and about rumors he was considering resigning if his assessment was not accepted.
The general denied that he had discussed — or even considered — resigning his command, as had been whispered about at the Pentagon, saying that he was committed to carrying out whatever mission Mr. Obama approved.
“I believe success is achievable,” he said. “I can tell you unequivocally that I have not considered resigning at all.”
The general said that after submitting his report, he had been directed to provide more information and respond to several questions, including on perhaps the thorniest issue: the impact of the flawed Afghan presidential election. Allegations of widespread ballot fraud have raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai as a partner in the counterinsurgency campaign.
“We are doing an assessment almost on a constant basis,” General McChrystal said, speaking of both the twists and turns of the military mission and the political developments in Afghanistan.
He would not address various proposals for reshaping the mission that differ from his, including an approach supported by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back the military operation in Afghanistan to focus instead on terrorists seeking haven in Pakistan.
The commander said that he welcomed alternative proposals for how to stabilize Afghanistan and stressed that he did not feel that his analysis had been diminished in the view of senior administration officials because of its blunt tone.
“This is the right kind of process, and the way I see duty,” he said. “I have been given the opportunity to provide my inputs to the decision. Then it is my duty to execute that decision.”
General McChrystal, who assumed command of the American and NATO operations in Afghanistan in June, said that he had not spoken directly to Mr. Obama since he submitted his assessment, but that he expected he would after the president and his advisers had time to digest it.
Separately, at a conference in Washington, Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in the Middle East, said that both he and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had endorsed General McChrystal’s broad assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.
Asked to evaluate the impact of possible delays on endorsing a new strategy and considering troops requests, General McChrystal said, “Obviously, from a strictly military standpoint, time is always important, but it also is relative in this case.”
The general said he never was told to delay his troop request because of political concerns in Washington.
“My prognosis probably did exactly what it should have done: It got people to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s look at the basic premise,’ ” he said. “To me, there’s no rift. There’s no boxing anybody in.”
Even in advance of any decisions by the Obama administration, General McChrystal said he was taking steps to reshape the war effort in Afghanistan, including changing the way coalition forces develop Afghanistan’s own security forces.
While there are a range of opinions in Congress on whether to send more combat troops, there is broad support for making a priority of building up Afghanistan’s army and police force.
General McChrystal said he had ordered allied forces working with Afghan soldiers and police officers to go beyond organizing, training and equipping local forces; American and NATO units now try to build “a full-time partnership” with local forces, expanding the relationship to include living side by side, combining their planning efforts and going out on operations together.
It is very natural for the military to successfully complete the mission--that is what we are trained to do. Realizing or admitting defeat is anathema. During much of my nearly 40 year career, we got our lunch handed to us in Korea and Vietnam. You may not agree with me about Korea, but North Korea still exists and is a far bigger threat today than it was 50+ years ago. As for Vietnam--well the communists are still in charge and we have 58,000+ names on a black marble wall to remind us of how badly we handled that war.
If we know Taliban and al Qaeda leaders are hiding in Pakistan, why aren't we sending in Special Forces hunter-killer teams to get these guys. Seems to me if you cut off the head of the snake, it dies. If Pakistan gets all bent out of shape, then so be it--making a glass covered parking lot out of Karachi sounds like a plan.
My question is, "How many names will we have to carve on another monument?"
Top General Denies Rift With Obama on Afghan War
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: September 23, 2009
WASHINGTON — The senior American commander in Afghanistan on Wednesday rejected any suggestion that his grim assessment of the war had driven a wedge between the military and the Obama administration, but he warned against taking too long to settle on a final strategy.
The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said in an interview that he welcomed the fierce debate that had emerged this week over how to carry out the war.
“A policy debate is warranted,” General McChrystal said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Kabul.
“We should not have any ambiguities, as a nation or a coalition,” he added. “At the end of the day, we’re putting young people in harm’s way.”
President Obama’s top advisers are rethinking the strategy that Mr. Obama unveiled in March, amid a growing political divide in the United States over how to proceed and confusion among allies that have fighting forces in Afghanistan.
General McChrystal would not address how many additional combat troops he would seek in a request he is preparing to send to the Defense Department. Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said Wednesday that the commander’s request would be submitted this week, even though no decisions would be made until the administration had finished its newest review of Afghanistan policy.
In his confidential assessment delivered on Aug. 30, General McChrystal warned that he needed more troops within the next year or else the conflict most likely would result in failure.
“I had absolute freedom to put in a candid assessment, and I did that,” he said in the interview, his first since submitting his 66-page classified report. “I have not been limited in any way in identifying resources that might be required.”
General McChrystal said he agreed to speak to The New York Times on Wednesday after he became increasingly concerned about reports of rifts between the military and the civilian leadership, and about rumors he was considering resigning if his assessment was not accepted.
The general denied that he had discussed — or even considered — resigning his command, as had been whispered about at the Pentagon, saying that he was committed to carrying out whatever mission Mr. Obama approved.
“I believe success is achievable,” he said. “I can tell you unequivocally that I have not considered resigning at all.”
The general said that after submitting his report, he had been directed to provide more information and respond to several questions, including on perhaps the thorniest issue: the impact of the flawed Afghan presidential election. Allegations of widespread ballot fraud have raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai as a partner in the counterinsurgency campaign.
“We are doing an assessment almost on a constant basis,” General McChrystal said, speaking of both the twists and turns of the military mission and the political developments in Afghanistan.
He would not address various proposals for reshaping the mission that differ from his, including an approach supported by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back the military operation in Afghanistan to focus instead on terrorists seeking haven in Pakistan.
The commander said that he welcomed alternative proposals for how to stabilize Afghanistan and stressed that he did not feel that his analysis had been diminished in the view of senior administration officials because of its blunt tone.
“This is the right kind of process, and the way I see duty,” he said. “I have been given the opportunity to provide my inputs to the decision. Then it is my duty to execute that decision.”
General McChrystal, who assumed command of the American and NATO operations in Afghanistan in June, said that he had not spoken directly to Mr. Obama since he submitted his assessment, but that he expected he would after the president and his advisers had time to digest it.
Separately, at a conference in Washington, Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of American forces in the Middle East, said that both he and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had endorsed General McChrystal’s broad assessment of the situation in Afghanistan.
Asked to evaluate the impact of possible delays on endorsing a new strategy and considering troops requests, General McChrystal said, “Obviously, from a strictly military standpoint, time is always important, but it also is relative in this case.”
The general said he never was told to delay his troop request because of political concerns in Washington.
“My prognosis probably did exactly what it should have done: It got people to stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s look at the basic premise,’ ” he said. “To me, there’s no rift. There’s no boxing anybody in.”
Even in advance of any decisions by the Obama administration, General McChrystal said he was taking steps to reshape the war effort in Afghanistan, including changing the way coalition forces develop Afghanistan’s own security forces.
While there are a range of opinions in Congress on whether to send more combat troops, there is broad support for making a priority of building up Afghanistan’s army and police force.
General McChrystal said he had ordered allied forces working with Afghan soldiers and police officers to go beyond organizing, training and equipping local forces; American and NATO units now try to build “a full-time partnership” with local forces, expanding the relationship to include living side by side, combining their planning efforts and going out on operations together.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
OBAMA IS CONSIDEREING STRATEGY SHIFT IN AFGHAN WAR
It seems to me that this "change in strategy" is a day late and a dollar short. When President Bush decided that Iraq was more important than Afghanistan, he made certain that we more than likely would lose the war in Afghanistan. We are damned if we do and damned if we don't--If we decide to protect the people in the urban areas, then a large portion of the population that lives in small isolated towns and villages will fall victim to the Taliban once again. If we try to defend the people in the small towns and villages as well as the urban areas, we will die the death of a thousand pecks since we don't have enough troops, equipment or staying power to do this. If we try to defend the small towns and villages, we lose the urban areas since apparently the Afghan army and police are so weak and so corrupt that they can't defend them.
The last line of this article is a very telling one.
NEW YORK TIMES
Obama Is Considering Strategy Shift in Afghan War
By PETER BAKER and ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: September 22, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.
Kevin Wolf/Associated Press
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who spoke Tuesday in National Harbor, Md., wants to scale back troops in Afghanistan.
The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said.
The sweeping reassessment has been prompted by deteriorating conditions on the ground, the messy and still unsettled outcome of the Afghan elections and a dire report by Mr. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. Aides said the president wanted to examine whether the strategy he unveiled in March was still the best approach and whether it could work with the extra combat forces General McChrystal wants.
In looking at other options, aides said, Mr. Obama might just be testing assumptions — and assuring liberals in his own party that he was not rushing into a further expansion of the war — before ultimately agreeing to the anticipated troop request from General McChrystal. But the review suggests the president is having second thoughts about how deeply to engage in an intractable eight-year conflict that is not going well.
Although Mr. Obama has said that a stable Afghanistan is central to the security of the United States, some advisers said he was also wary of becoming trapped in an overseas quagmire. Some Pentagon officials say they worry that he is having what they called “buyer’s remorse” after ordering an extra 21,000 troops there within weeks of taking office before even settling on a strategy.
Mr. Obama met in the Situation Room with his top advisers on Sept. 13 to begin chewing over the problem, said officials involved in the debate. Among those on hand were Mr. Biden; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; James L. Jones, the national security adviser; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They reached no consensus, so three or four more such meetings are being scheduled. “There are a lot of competing views,” said one official who, like others in this article, requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.
Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden’s suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.
The Americans would accelerate training of Afghan forces and provide support as they took the lead against the Taliban. But the emphasis would shift to Pakistan. Mr. Biden has often said that the United States spends something like $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 in Pakistan, even though in his view the main threat to American national security interests is in Pakistan.
Mr. Obama rejected Mr. Biden’s approach in March, and it is not clear that it has more traction this time. But the fact that it is on the table again speaks to the breadth of the administration’s review and the evolving views inside the White House of what has worked in the region and what has not. In recent days, officials have expressed satisfaction with the results of their cooperation with Pakistan in hunting down Qaeda figures in the unforgiving border lands.
A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration’s current theory on its head. The strategy Mr. Obama adopted in March concluded that to defeat Al Qaeda, the United States needed to keep the Taliban from returning to power in Afghanistan and making it a haven once again for Osama bin Laden’s network. Mr. Biden’s position questions that assumption.
Mrs. Clinton, who opposed Mr. Biden in March, appeared to refer to this debate in an interview on Monday night on PBS. “Some people say, ‘Well, Al Qaeda’s no longer in Afghanistan,’ ” she said. “If Afghanistan were taken over by the Taliban, I can’t tell you how fast Al Qaeda would be back in Afghanistan.”
At the time he announced his new approach, Mr. Obama described it as “a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy,” and said “to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you.” The administration then fired the commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, and replaced him with General McChrystal, empowering him to carry out the new strategy.
But the Afghan presidential election, widely marred by allegations of fraud, undermined the administration’s confidence that it had a reliable partner in President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden already had raised doubts about Mr. Karzai, which were only exacerbated by the fear that even if he emerges from a runoff election, he will have little credibility with his own people.
“A counterinsurgency strategy can only work if you have a credible and legitimate Afghan partner. That’s in doubt now,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who led the administration’s strategy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year. “Part of the reason you are seeing a hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election.”
Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent Mr. Obama a six-page letter arguing the case for more troops for General McChrystal. “There is no strategy short of a properly resourced counterinsurgency campaign that is likely to provide lasting security,” he wrote.
Mr. Obama now has to reconcile past statements and policy with his current situation.
“The problem for President Obama is he has made the case in the past that we took our eye off the ball and we should have stayed in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. But now that he is in charge of the war, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Obama is discovering “he doesn’t have much in the way of options” and time is of the essence.
Mr. Cohen added, “The longer you wait, the harder it will be to reverse it.”
Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting
The last line of this article is a very telling one.
NEW YORK TIMES
Obama Is Considering Strategy Shift in Afghan War
By PETER BAKER and ELISABETH BUMILLER
Published: September 22, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama is exploring alternatives to a major troop increase in Afghanistan, including a plan advocated by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to scale back American forces and focus more on rooting out Al Qaeda there and in Pakistan, officials said Tuesday.
Kevin Wolf/Associated Press
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who spoke Tuesday in National Harbor, Md., wants to scale back troops in Afghanistan.
The options under review are part of what administration officials described as a wholesale reconsideration of a strategy the president announced with fanfare just six months ago. Two new intelligence reports are being conducted to evaluate Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said.
The sweeping reassessment has been prompted by deteriorating conditions on the ground, the messy and still unsettled outcome of the Afghan elections and a dire report by Mr. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. Aides said the president wanted to examine whether the strategy he unveiled in March was still the best approach and whether it could work with the extra combat forces General McChrystal wants.
In looking at other options, aides said, Mr. Obama might just be testing assumptions — and assuring liberals in his own party that he was not rushing into a further expansion of the war — before ultimately agreeing to the anticipated troop request from General McChrystal. But the review suggests the president is having second thoughts about how deeply to engage in an intractable eight-year conflict that is not going well.
Although Mr. Obama has said that a stable Afghanistan is central to the security of the United States, some advisers said he was also wary of becoming trapped in an overseas quagmire. Some Pentagon officials say they worry that he is having what they called “buyer’s remorse” after ordering an extra 21,000 troops there within weeks of taking office before even settling on a strategy.
Mr. Obama met in the Situation Room with his top advisers on Sept. 13 to begin chewing over the problem, said officials involved in the debate. Among those on hand were Mr. Biden; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; James L. Jones, the national security adviser; and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
They reached no consensus, so three or four more such meetings are being scheduled. “There are a lot of competing views,” said one official who, like others in this article, requested anonymity to discuss internal administration deliberations.
Among the alternatives being presented to Mr. Obama is Mr. Biden’s suggestion to revamp the strategy altogether. Instead of increasing troops, officials said, Mr. Biden proposed scaling back the overall American military presence. Rather than trying to protect the Afghan population from the Taliban, American forces would concentrate on strikes against Qaeda cells, primarily in Pakistan, using special forces, Predator missile attacks and other surgical tactics.
The Americans would accelerate training of Afghan forces and provide support as they took the lead against the Taliban. But the emphasis would shift to Pakistan. Mr. Biden has often said that the United States spends something like $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 in Pakistan, even though in his view the main threat to American national security interests is in Pakistan.
Mr. Obama rejected Mr. Biden’s approach in March, and it is not clear that it has more traction this time. But the fact that it is on the table again speaks to the breadth of the administration’s review and the evolving views inside the White House of what has worked in the region and what has not. In recent days, officials have expressed satisfaction with the results of their cooperation with Pakistan in hunting down Qaeda figures in the unforgiving border lands.
A shift from a counterinsurgency strategy to a focus on counterterrorism would turn the administration’s current theory on its head. The strategy Mr. Obama adopted in March concluded that to defeat Al Qaeda, the United States needed to keep the Taliban from returning to power in Afghanistan and making it a haven once again for Osama bin Laden’s network. Mr. Biden’s position questions that assumption.
Mrs. Clinton, who opposed Mr. Biden in March, appeared to refer to this debate in an interview on Monday night on PBS. “Some people say, ‘Well, Al Qaeda’s no longer in Afghanistan,’ ” she said. “If Afghanistan were taken over by the Taliban, I can’t tell you how fast Al Qaeda would be back in Afghanistan.”
At the time he announced his new approach, Mr. Obama described it as “a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy,” and said “to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: We will defeat you.” The administration then fired the commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, and replaced him with General McChrystal, empowering him to carry out the new strategy.
But the Afghan presidential election, widely marred by allegations of fraud, undermined the administration’s confidence that it had a reliable partner in President Hamid Karzai. Mr. Obama and Mr. Biden already had raised doubts about Mr. Karzai, which were only exacerbated by the fear that even if he emerges from a runoff election, he will have little credibility with his own people.
“A counterinsurgency strategy can only work if you have a credible and legitimate Afghan partner. That’s in doubt now,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who led the administration’s strategy review of Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year. “Part of the reason you are seeing a hesitancy to jump deeper into the pool is that they are looking to see if they can make lemonade out of the lemons we got from the Afghan election.”
Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, sent Mr. Obama a six-page letter arguing the case for more troops for General McChrystal. “There is no strategy short of a properly resourced counterinsurgency campaign that is likely to provide lasting security,” he wrote.
Mr. Obama now has to reconcile past statements and policy with his current situation.
“The problem for President Obama is he has made the case in the past that we took our eye off the ball and we should have stayed in Afghanistan,” said former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. But now that he is in charge of the war, Mr. Cohen said, Mr. Obama is discovering “he doesn’t have much in the way of options” and time is of the essence.
Mr. Cohen added, “The longer you wait, the harder it will be to reverse it.”
Thom Shanker, Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting
Monday, September 21, 2009
Afghan lessons from Iraq 'success'
A fellow veteran sent this to me--the theme is about the same--why are we in Afghanistan?
Afghan lessons from Iraq 'success'
By Andrew North BBC News, Baghdad
The rising deaths among US, British and other foreign troops in Afghanistan are the unavoidable result, commanders and politicians say, of the renewed effort to turn things round in what was the original post 9/11 war.
The language has all changed. Now, Afghanistan is called the "war of necessity", Iraq "the war of choice".
There has been lots of talk of new policies and tactics, and learning from "successes" in Iraq.
It is a well-established pattern, of ideas being recycled between the two wars, going back to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
But are the lessons from Iraq so positive for Afghanistan now?
Even some of those fighting there today are unsure of the reasons why.
"The Iraq war was different from this war," a US marine in Afghanistan's Helmand province told a BBC reporter recently.
“ In larger and more rural Afghanistan, it is that much harder to control territory and influence the mood ”
"That was definitely a war on terrorism. Here I don't know. No-one even mentions 9/11 any more. That's why I went to Iraq."
Yet there is hope the Taliban in Afghanistan will be beaten by another Iraq-style "surge" of US and foreign troops - although American commanders are shy of the comparison to Iraq.
With more boots on the ground, US and Nato forces, goes the thinking, will be better able to hold ground and protect the population.
US President Barack Obama may order thousands more troops in later this year, so the Afghan surge could turn out to be even larger than the 30,000 reinforcements President George W Bush sent to Iraq in 2007.
Mood change
Yet there has been plenty of misunderstanding about what happened in Iraq two years ago.
Even many US officers now admit that the importance of the surge was as much symbolic as military, demonstrating to insurgents that the Americans were not about to leave.
“ Although many Americans may want to call it a success, few Iraqis use that term ”
That was significant, but the key change was what happened before the surge was even announced - the decision by many Sunni Iraqis to turn against al-Qaeda.
Without that transformation, the war in Iraq could have got even worse.
So far, there is no sign of that kind of change in mood in the Taliban's heartland areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Commanders may answer that is because they still need more troops to be able to keep insurgents from returning to areas they have taken.
But 30,000 extra troops was very little for a country the size of Iraq, and one with better roads and more people living in towns and cities. If the mood had still been against them, it is unlikely that would have been a sufficient force.
In larger and more rural Afghanistan, it is that much harder to control territory and influence
the mood - as the Russians found in the 1980s, with many more soldiers.
Casualties rise
What is more, although many Americans may want to call it a success, few Iraqis use that term to describe the state of their country two years after the Bush surge.
There may be less bloodshed than before, but there are still attacks in Iraq every day.
In the first six months of this year, more than 2,000 Iraqi civilians died in violence, over double the number in Afghanistan in the same period.
And the casualty rate in Iraq has risen again in recent weeks because of an increase in attacks since the US pullout from the cities.
More than 100 people were killed in mass bombings in central Baghdad last week.
The US-trained Iraqi security forces now in charge in Baghdad are taking much of the blame for allowing the bombers to get through.
That is the plan in Afghanistan too, that Afghan security forces will take over from foreign troops.
But the end result may be a lot messier and unhappy than anyone wants to admit.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/8221265.stmPublished: 2009/08/25 18:43:32 GMT
Afghan lessons from Iraq 'success'
By Andrew North BBC News, Baghdad
The rising deaths among US, British and other foreign troops in Afghanistan are the unavoidable result, commanders and politicians say, of the renewed effort to turn things round in what was the original post 9/11 war.
The language has all changed. Now, Afghanistan is called the "war of necessity", Iraq "the war of choice".
There has been lots of talk of new policies and tactics, and learning from "successes" in Iraq.
It is a well-established pattern, of ideas being recycled between the two wars, going back to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
But are the lessons from Iraq so positive for Afghanistan now?
Even some of those fighting there today are unsure of the reasons why.
"The Iraq war was different from this war," a US marine in Afghanistan's Helmand province told a BBC reporter recently.
“ In larger and more rural Afghanistan, it is that much harder to control territory and influence the mood ”
"That was definitely a war on terrorism. Here I don't know. No-one even mentions 9/11 any more. That's why I went to Iraq."
Yet there is hope the Taliban in Afghanistan will be beaten by another Iraq-style "surge" of US and foreign troops - although American commanders are shy of the comparison to Iraq.
With more boots on the ground, US and Nato forces, goes the thinking, will be better able to hold ground and protect the population.
US President Barack Obama may order thousands more troops in later this year, so the Afghan surge could turn out to be even larger than the 30,000 reinforcements President George W Bush sent to Iraq in 2007.
Mood change
Yet there has been plenty of misunderstanding about what happened in Iraq two years ago.
Even many US officers now admit that the importance of the surge was as much symbolic as military, demonstrating to insurgents that the Americans were not about to leave.
“ Although many Americans may want to call it a success, few Iraqis use that term ”
That was significant, but the key change was what happened before the surge was even announced - the decision by many Sunni Iraqis to turn against al-Qaeda.
Without that transformation, the war in Iraq could have got even worse.
So far, there is no sign of that kind of change in mood in the Taliban's heartland areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Commanders may answer that is because they still need more troops to be able to keep insurgents from returning to areas they have taken.
But 30,000 extra troops was very little for a country the size of Iraq, and one with better roads and more people living in towns and cities. If the mood had still been against them, it is unlikely that would have been a sufficient force.
In larger and more rural Afghanistan, it is that much harder to control territory and influence
the mood - as the Russians found in the 1980s, with many more soldiers.
Casualties rise
What is more, although many Americans may want to call it a success, few Iraqis use that term to describe the state of their country two years after the Bush surge.
There may be less bloodshed than before, but there are still attacks in Iraq every day.
In the first six months of this year, more than 2,000 Iraqi civilians died in violence, over double the number in Afghanistan in the same period.
And the casualty rate in Iraq has risen again in recent weeks because of an increase in attacks since the US pullout from the cities.
More than 100 people were killed in mass bombings in central Baghdad last week.
The US-trained Iraqi security forces now in charge in Baghdad are taking much of the blame for allowing the bombers to get through.
That is the plan in Afghanistan too, that Afghan security forces will take over from foreign troops.
But the end result may be a lot messier and unhappy than anyone wants to admit.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/8221265.stmPublished: 2009/08/25 18:43:32 GMT
Friday, September 18, 2009
Deadly Afghan Ambush
I hope you will read this and that you will be as angry as I am. It is long, but tells a tale that is not a pretty one.
As I read this piece, my anger increased with each line. We are alowing our young men and women to be sacrificed while at the same time we are planning on sending more into the maw. It simply does not make sense. The White House has allegedly developed eight general metrics that supposedly will be used to measure our success in Afghanistan, but I can tell you as a Total Quality Management/Quality Improvement individual, the "metrics" are practically useless. They are so general in nature as to be unmeasureable. There does not appear to be any who, when, how much identified in them. The first rule of a good metric is to have something that is measureable with some stated period for its completion.
We have over extended ourselves militarily and cannot figure out how to get out of this mess. We do not have enough, troops, enough support, and too damned many rules that only serve to defeat our purpose and get our people killed. One Marine Corporal had it right when he said, "We basically screwed our guys over." You will see more of what he had to say below. His anger and frustration are the types of things that eat away at the fighting spirit of our personnel. If they can't trust the leadership to give them the support they need, their will to fight will shrivel like a raisin in the sun.
Deadly Afghan ambush shows perils of ill-supplied deployment
By Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers
GANJGAL, Afghanistan — Manning a machine gun on a ridge overlooking this remote Afghan village, U.S. Marine Cpl. Steven Norman tried desperately to lay down covering fire for some 90 Afghan security forces and U.S. military trainers who were trapped in an ambush in the valley below.
Each time he'd raise his head to let loose a burst, however, the insurgents in the encircling mountains and the fortress-like hamlet itself would drive Norman down, drenching his position with cascades of machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire.
"I was pinned down hard core," recalled the slight 21-year-old from Moultrie, Ga., part of a team from the Okinawa-based 3rd Marine Division based in the nearby town of Sarkani. "I'd look where they were shooting, and I would shoot back. But I was pinned down."
Norman and other combat veterans who were caught in the Sept. 8 ambush that killed three U.S. Marines, a Navy corpsman and nine Afghans said it was the deadliest, most intense combat they'd faced in Afghanistan or Iraq. The insurgents never ran out of ammunition, they recalled, and some even wore helmets, flak jackets and military-style magazine pouches.
"They were firing from every direction. They were well placed. We could hardly see them," Norman said. "They were very coordinated in their fire. When we'd suppress that fire, they'd hit us from somewhere else."
The ambush and the nearly nine-hour battle in the rugged mountains of eastern Kunar province illustrated many of the toughest challenges inherited by the Obama administration and U.S. commanders and their soldiers, who're scrambling to regain the upper hand in an eight-year-old guerrilla war that's growing bloodier and more unpopular in both countries by the day.
Intelligence is inadequate. The Afghans and their U.S. trainers expected to face no more than a dozen insurgents in Ganjgal on their mission to sweep the village for arms and meet with the elders to discuss implementing an agreement to accept the local government's authority.
Instead, the contingent of 80 Afghan troops and border police and about a dozen U.S. military trainers walked into a three-sided storm of fire from automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and at least one recoilless rifle.
The lack of timely air support — it took about 80 minutes by a reporter's watch for helicopters to arrive, despite assurances that they'd be five minutes away — was a consequence of the manpower and equipment shortages bequeathed by the Bush administration's failure to secure Afghanistan against a resurgence of the Taliban, al Qaida and allied groups before turning to invade Iraq.
There are a limited number of U.S. helicopters in Kunar, a stretch of craggy mountains and serpentine valleys bordering Pakistan where airpower gives a vital edge to overstretched U.S. troops fighting guerrillas who know every nook and trail of the area. Unbeknownst to those trapped in the Ganjgal kill zone, however, the available aircraft were tied up in the Shiryak Valley to the north in a battle in which two pilots were wounded, U.S. commanders said.
The denial of heavy artillery fire to those trapped in Ganjgal also has roots in the Bush administration's decision to divert resources to Iraq and the resulting stress on the U.S. military.
New rules limiting the use of artillery imposed by U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal after he took command of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan this summer are intended to curb civilian casualties caused in part by his contingent's reliance on artillery barrages and air strikes to compensate for their shortage of ground troops.
The rising toll has enraged ordinary Afghans, whose support is key to the U.S. goal of marginalizing the hardest core insurgents. It's also provided the Taliban with recruits and a propaganda bonanza and allowed Afghan President Hamid Karzai to score domestic political points by deflecting blame for the deepening crisis onto his American and European patrons.
The worst single loss of U.S. military trainers of the war brought out the deep bitterness with which many soldiers view the new rules. They feel unfairly handcuffed, especially in the case of Ganjgal, where women and children were seen running ammunition and weapons to gunmen firing from inside the hilltop hamlet.
There are circumstances — and Ganjgal was one — when the rulebook should be tossed out, they said.
"We basically screwed our guys over," said Marine Cpl. Dakota Meyer, 21, of Greensburg, Ky., who braved enemy fire to retrieve the bodies of his fallen comrades from outside the village. "They expect us to bring stuff to the fight, and (U.S. commanders) didn't give it to us."
That anger was magnified by a realization that the insurgents in Ganjgal had somehow learned of the operation in advance and were waiting for the contingent to enter the valley as the sun rose.
"We walked right into it," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, of Louisville, Ky., the trainers' commander, said ruefully as he nursed a wounded forearm.
Their Afghan counterparts, who arrested two of nearly 30 suspects rounded up in the village after the insurgents withdrew, shared the Americans' frustration.
Col. Mohammad Avzal, the commander of the Afghan army unit the Marines are training, said the insurgents were waiting in dense groves and villages nearby to return to Ganjgal after Afghan and U.S. forces departed again. That means another battle and more casualties are in the offing.
"We are angry that we pulled out," said Avzal, who walked the same trails and hid in the same caves when he fought as a guerrilla against the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a day after the ambush. "But we would have had to continue the mission in that valley for at least three days."
As they waited to infiltrate back into the village, the guerrillas were heard discussing on their radios "everything that happened, about their guys who got killed and how their (duffel) bags are still left inside Ganjgal," said Marine Lt. Ademola Fabayo, 28, of New York City, who helped lead the operation.
The failed operation drove home other problems and complexities that U.S.-led forces are grappling with as they pursue President Barack Obama's counterinsurgency policy of redoubling underfunded civilian aid programs and transferring greater responsibility to the Afghans for running their own affairs.
Ganjgal and villages farther into the mountains are way stations on a traditional smuggling route that insurgents use to move men and weapons into Afghanistan from Pakistan, unhindered by Pakistani security forces, according to U.S. and Afghan officers.
Insurgents also use the area around the hamlet to fire rockets and mortars into U.S. Forward Operating Base Joyce with such frequency that the stronghold where the U.S. trainers and the Afghan troops live has been christened "Rocket City."
So when Afghan Border Police commanders developed an idea to extend the government's writ to the area, U.S. officers jumped at it, despite the contingent's reputation as the most corrupt of Afghanistan's security organizations.
Not only might such an operation smother the rocket fire on the U.S. base, but it also could kick-start reconstruction projects and help build cooperation between the two Afghan forces, which the U.S. trainers said is essential to weaning them from their dependency on the U.S. military.
The border police proposed that the Afghans and their U.S. trainers mount a patrol into Damdara, an insurgent-controlled village near Ganjgal, to convince the area's elders that they'd receive protection against the insurgents and U.S.-funded aid projects if they accepted the authority of the local government.
Avzal's officers agreed to participate, but in return they demanded the border police's commitment to stage a similar operation into Ganjgal, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
The plan initially succeeded. The operation earlier this month into Damdara — which ended with the insurgents turning loose some desultory Kalashnikov rifle fire and a rocket-propelled grenade that caused no casualties as the Afghans and Americans exited the area — appeared to convince the elders in Ganjgal to renounce the Taliban.
They broadcast a renunciation and their willingness to accept the local government's writ over the local radio after negotiations with Afghan and U.S. officials.
Afghan army officers drew up a plan for a weapons search and a meeting with the Ganjgal elders to discuss the establishment of Afghan police patrols. U.S. officers refined the plan.
Then things began to go wrong.
The operation was first set for Sept. 7. A day earlier, Marine Lt. Fabayo; Army Capt. William Swenson, of Seattle, a border police trainer; and Capt. Talib, the Afghan army officer who developed the plan, met with Lt. Mohammad Nader, the border police operations officer, to finalize his unit's participation. A reporter sat in on the meeting.
"I'm not ready for this mission," Nader said. "The group that you are trying to get for this mission is (committed to) escorting a supply convoy."
The others were stunned. They worried that a delay would give the insurgents time to take revenge on the elders or force them to renege. Swenson asked to speak to Nader's superior. He was resting and refused to leave his room.
"Let's do the mission concept at least," Swenson told Nader. "We can do the timeline and the concept, but just not what day we will do this. We can let this slip to another day."
"All's I'm saying is that I have to get ready for the escort mission," Nader replied. "We will be talking about a plan without the approval of the commanders."
The effort to hammer out a compromise was further hampered by the need to translate between English and Nader's Pashtu, one of Afghanistan's two main languages, and also by translations between Nader and Talib, who speaks only Dari, the country's other major tongue.
Meeting later with staff officers from the 10th Mountain Division's "Task Force Chosin," Fabayo and Swenson discussed alternatives to delaying the operation, including using ordinary Afghan police to replace the border unit. They rejected the idea, reasoning that ordinary cops were no substitute for border officers, who're trained and equipped as light infantry.
Moreover, the pair worried that they'd compromise their goal of building trust and cooperation between the border police and the army.
The meeting ended with a decision to delay the operation by a day while the border police commander, who was on leave in Kabul, was contacted and persuaded to order his unit to participate, even though that meant losing the helicopter cover that had been reserved for the operation on Sept. 7.
It was then that the "Task Force Chosin" delegation assured Fabayo and Swenson that if they were needed, helicopters would "be five minutes away."
At the same meeting, a warning that Nader sounded to mission planners became the epitaph of the mission.
"The Ganjgal people have an expression," he said: "It's up to you to come into the valley, but it's up to us to let you out."
As I read this piece, my anger increased with each line. We are alowing our young men and women to be sacrificed while at the same time we are planning on sending more into the maw. It simply does not make sense. The White House has allegedly developed eight general metrics that supposedly will be used to measure our success in Afghanistan, but I can tell you as a Total Quality Management/Quality Improvement individual, the "metrics" are practically useless. They are so general in nature as to be unmeasureable. There does not appear to be any who, when, how much identified in them. The first rule of a good metric is to have something that is measureable with some stated period for its completion.
We have over extended ourselves militarily and cannot figure out how to get out of this mess. We do not have enough, troops, enough support, and too damned many rules that only serve to defeat our purpose and get our people killed. One Marine Corporal had it right when he said, "We basically screwed our guys over." You will see more of what he had to say below. His anger and frustration are the types of things that eat away at the fighting spirit of our personnel. If they can't trust the leadership to give them the support they need, their will to fight will shrivel like a raisin in the sun.
Deadly Afghan ambush shows perils of ill-supplied deployment
By Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers
GANJGAL, Afghanistan — Manning a machine gun on a ridge overlooking this remote Afghan village, U.S. Marine Cpl. Steven Norman tried desperately to lay down covering fire for some 90 Afghan security forces and U.S. military trainers who were trapped in an ambush in the valley below.
Each time he'd raise his head to let loose a burst, however, the insurgents in the encircling mountains and the fortress-like hamlet itself would drive Norman down, drenching his position with cascades of machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire.
"I was pinned down hard core," recalled the slight 21-year-old from Moultrie, Ga., part of a team from the Okinawa-based 3rd Marine Division based in the nearby town of Sarkani. "I'd look where they were shooting, and I would shoot back. But I was pinned down."
Norman and other combat veterans who were caught in the Sept. 8 ambush that killed three U.S. Marines, a Navy corpsman and nine Afghans said it was the deadliest, most intense combat they'd faced in Afghanistan or Iraq. The insurgents never ran out of ammunition, they recalled, and some even wore helmets, flak jackets and military-style magazine pouches.
"They were firing from every direction. They were well placed. We could hardly see them," Norman said. "They were very coordinated in their fire. When we'd suppress that fire, they'd hit us from somewhere else."
The ambush and the nearly nine-hour battle in the rugged mountains of eastern Kunar province illustrated many of the toughest challenges inherited by the Obama administration and U.S. commanders and their soldiers, who're scrambling to regain the upper hand in an eight-year-old guerrilla war that's growing bloodier and more unpopular in both countries by the day.
Intelligence is inadequate. The Afghans and their U.S. trainers expected to face no more than a dozen insurgents in Ganjgal on their mission to sweep the village for arms and meet with the elders to discuss implementing an agreement to accept the local government's authority.
Instead, the contingent of 80 Afghan troops and border police and about a dozen U.S. military trainers walked into a three-sided storm of fire from automatic weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and at least one recoilless rifle.
The lack of timely air support — it took about 80 minutes by a reporter's watch for helicopters to arrive, despite assurances that they'd be five minutes away — was a consequence of the manpower and equipment shortages bequeathed by the Bush administration's failure to secure Afghanistan against a resurgence of the Taliban, al Qaida and allied groups before turning to invade Iraq.
There are a limited number of U.S. helicopters in Kunar, a stretch of craggy mountains and serpentine valleys bordering Pakistan where airpower gives a vital edge to overstretched U.S. troops fighting guerrillas who know every nook and trail of the area. Unbeknownst to those trapped in the Ganjgal kill zone, however, the available aircraft were tied up in the Shiryak Valley to the north in a battle in which two pilots were wounded, U.S. commanders said.
The denial of heavy artillery fire to those trapped in Ganjgal also has roots in the Bush administration's decision to divert resources to Iraq and the resulting stress on the U.S. military.
New rules limiting the use of artillery imposed by U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal after he took command of the U.S.-led international force in Afghanistan this summer are intended to curb civilian casualties caused in part by his contingent's reliance on artillery barrages and air strikes to compensate for their shortage of ground troops.
The rising toll has enraged ordinary Afghans, whose support is key to the U.S. goal of marginalizing the hardest core insurgents. It's also provided the Taliban with recruits and a propaganda bonanza and allowed Afghan President Hamid Karzai to score domestic political points by deflecting blame for the deepening crisis onto his American and European patrons.
The worst single loss of U.S. military trainers of the war brought out the deep bitterness with which many soldiers view the new rules. They feel unfairly handcuffed, especially in the case of Ganjgal, where women and children were seen running ammunition and weapons to gunmen firing from inside the hilltop hamlet.
There are circumstances — and Ganjgal was one — when the rulebook should be tossed out, they said.
"We basically screwed our guys over," said Marine Cpl. Dakota Meyer, 21, of Greensburg, Ky., who braved enemy fire to retrieve the bodies of his fallen comrades from outside the village. "They expect us to bring stuff to the fight, and (U.S. commanders) didn't give it to us."
That anger was magnified by a realization that the insurgents in Ganjgal had somehow learned of the operation in advance and were waiting for the contingent to enter the valley as the sun rose.
"We walked right into it," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, of Louisville, Ky., the trainers' commander, said ruefully as he nursed a wounded forearm.
Their Afghan counterparts, who arrested two of nearly 30 suspects rounded up in the village after the insurgents withdrew, shared the Americans' frustration.
Col. Mohammad Avzal, the commander of the Afghan army unit the Marines are training, said the insurgents were waiting in dense groves and villages nearby to return to Ganjgal after Afghan and U.S. forces departed again. That means another battle and more casualties are in the offing.
"We are angry that we pulled out," said Avzal, who walked the same trails and hid in the same caves when he fought as a guerrilla against the 1979-89 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, a day after the ambush. "But we would have had to continue the mission in that valley for at least three days."
As they waited to infiltrate back into the village, the guerrillas were heard discussing on their radios "everything that happened, about their guys who got killed and how their (duffel) bags are still left inside Ganjgal," said Marine Lt. Ademola Fabayo, 28, of New York City, who helped lead the operation.
The failed operation drove home other problems and complexities that U.S.-led forces are grappling with as they pursue President Barack Obama's counterinsurgency policy of redoubling underfunded civilian aid programs and transferring greater responsibility to the Afghans for running their own affairs.
Ganjgal and villages farther into the mountains are way stations on a traditional smuggling route that insurgents use to move men and weapons into Afghanistan from Pakistan, unhindered by Pakistani security forces, according to U.S. and Afghan officers.
Insurgents also use the area around the hamlet to fire rockets and mortars into U.S. Forward Operating Base Joyce with such frequency that the stronghold where the U.S. trainers and the Afghan troops live has been christened "Rocket City."
So when Afghan Border Police commanders developed an idea to extend the government's writ to the area, U.S. officers jumped at it, despite the contingent's reputation as the most corrupt of Afghanistan's security organizations.
Not only might such an operation smother the rocket fire on the U.S. base, but it also could kick-start reconstruction projects and help build cooperation between the two Afghan forces, which the U.S. trainers said is essential to weaning them from their dependency on the U.S. military.
The border police proposed that the Afghans and their U.S. trainers mount a patrol into Damdara, an insurgent-controlled village near Ganjgal, to convince the area's elders that they'd receive protection against the insurgents and U.S.-funded aid projects if they accepted the authority of the local government.
Avzal's officers agreed to participate, but in return they demanded the border police's commitment to stage a similar operation into Ganjgal, U.S. and Afghan officials said.
The plan initially succeeded. The operation earlier this month into Damdara — which ended with the insurgents turning loose some desultory Kalashnikov rifle fire and a rocket-propelled grenade that caused no casualties as the Afghans and Americans exited the area — appeared to convince the elders in Ganjgal to renounce the Taliban.
They broadcast a renunciation and their willingness to accept the local government's writ over the local radio after negotiations with Afghan and U.S. officials.
Afghan army officers drew up a plan for a weapons search and a meeting with the Ganjgal elders to discuss the establishment of Afghan police patrols. U.S. officers refined the plan.
Then things began to go wrong.
The operation was first set for Sept. 7. A day earlier, Marine Lt. Fabayo; Army Capt. William Swenson, of Seattle, a border police trainer; and Capt. Talib, the Afghan army officer who developed the plan, met with Lt. Mohammad Nader, the border police operations officer, to finalize his unit's participation. A reporter sat in on the meeting.
"I'm not ready for this mission," Nader said. "The group that you are trying to get for this mission is (committed to) escorting a supply convoy."
The others were stunned. They worried that a delay would give the insurgents time to take revenge on the elders or force them to renege. Swenson asked to speak to Nader's superior. He was resting and refused to leave his room.
"Let's do the mission concept at least," Swenson told Nader. "We can do the timeline and the concept, but just not what day we will do this. We can let this slip to another day."
"All's I'm saying is that I have to get ready for the escort mission," Nader replied. "We will be talking about a plan without the approval of the commanders."
The effort to hammer out a compromise was further hampered by the need to translate between English and Nader's Pashtu, one of Afghanistan's two main languages, and also by translations between Nader and Talib, who speaks only Dari, the country's other major tongue.
Meeting later with staff officers from the 10th Mountain Division's "Task Force Chosin," Fabayo and Swenson discussed alternatives to delaying the operation, including using ordinary Afghan police to replace the border unit. They rejected the idea, reasoning that ordinary cops were no substitute for border officers, who're trained and equipped as light infantry.
Moreover, the pair worried that they'd compromise their goal of building trust and cooperation between the border police and the army.
The meeting ended with a decision to delay the operation by a day while the border police commander, who was on leave in Kabul, was contacted and persuaded to order his unit to participate, even though that meant losing the helicopter cover that had been reserved for the operation on Sept. 7.
It was then that the "Task Force Chosin" delegation assured Fabayo and Swenson that if they were needed, helicopters would "be five minutes away."
At the same meeting, a warning that Nader sounded to mission planners became the epitaph of the mission.
"The Ganjgal people have an expression," he said: "It's up to you to come into the valley, but it's up to us to let you out."
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Medal of Honor
This website contains the citation and pictures of Staff Sergeant Jared Monti, U. S. Army, the latest Medal of Honor winner.
The irony of Staff Sergeant Monti's efforts to save one of "his soldiers' life" is that the soldier was not killed by the enemy but by a fall when the winch on the helicopter failed and the soldier and the Army Medic going after him were killed in the fall.
http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/monti/citation.html
Perhaps even more ironic, there were not enough helicopters available when the request to extract the patrol was made.
We send our military folks into harm's way and then we don't provide them the support they need--an absolutely inexcusable failure of leadership.
The irony of Staff Sergeant Monti's efforts to save one of "his soldiers' life" is that the soldier was not killed by the enemy but by a fall when the winch on the helicopter failed and the soldier and the Army Medic going after him were killed in the fall.
http://www.army.mil/medalofhonor/monti/citation.html
Perhaps even more ironic, there were not enough helicopters available when the request to extract the patrol was made.
We send our military folks into harm's way and then we don't provide them the support they need--an absolutely inexcusable failure of leadership.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Lest We Forget
I am guilty of it and I am sure that others are also. We tend to forget that there are other nations involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other families in other lands suffer the loss of sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, wives and husbands.The pain that we feel is felt by others whose languages and mores are strange to us, but sorrow and tears know no geographical or social boundaries. Mothers around the world clutch their breasts when they are told that someone who is flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood has been killed or terribly maimed for life. How do I know this? I once was one of those individuals who had the duty of notifying families of their losses. The most difficult duty I ever had.
The following article is from the New York Times their story.
JUDY DEMPSEY and IAN AUSTEN
Published: September 16, 2009
BERLIN — For most Germans, it was a rare — even shocking — scene. There, on television, were coffins holding the bodies of three soldiers, all in their early 20s, all killed in Afghanistan, all draped with the national flag.
Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
A memorial service for three fallen German soldiers in Bad Salzungen in July.
The soldiers, Martin Brunn, 23; Oleg Meiling, 21; and Alexander Schleiernick, 23, were memorialized July 2 at a service in Bad Salzungen, in the eastern state of Thuringia, where their armored infantry battalion has its headquarters. The three were killed in the Kunduz region, where most of Germany’s 4,000 troops are based, bringing to nearly three dozen the number of German soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
For many Germans, the most recent deaths again underscored their discomfort with the deployment in Afghanistan, where they had expected troops that were focusing on peacekeeping and reconstruction to be mostly safe. Franz Josef Jung, the defense minister, who was present at the memorial service, said the deaths of the three “showed what a high price we pay to live in peace and freedom in Germany.”
Much of the attention on the war in Afghanistan has been concentrated on the losses by the United States and Britain; 830 United States troops and 214 British troops have been killed, according to icasualties.org, a Web site. But 22 other countries that have sent forces to Afghanistan have suffered deaths among their troops, with Canada bearing the next greatest burden.
In many of those countries, as in Germany, the sight of military funerals is having a significant impact on public opinion, with some sharing a growing sense that their losses are being overshadowed.
“Somehow when a country like Denmark, which has 700 troops in Afghanistan — which per capita, is one of the highest of the contributors — suffers casualties, it slips under the radar because it is the bigger countries that tend to get noticed,” said Klaus Carsten Pedersen, director of the Danish Foreign Policy Society. His country has lost 24 soldiers.
In Germany, the deaths of Germans, and a controversial airstrike ordered by German commanders on Sept. 4, have forced the issue into the parliamentary election campaign, leading political parties for the first time to talk about a timetable for bringing the troops home. The NATO airstrike, directed at two tanker trucks carrying alliance fuel that had been hijacked by the Taliban, killed scores of people; the number of dead civilians remains unclear.
Today, there are more than 108,000 troops serving in Afghanistan: 64,500 from the United States, 9,000 from Britain and 34,500 from other nations. In all, 1,386 troops have been killed.
From Canada, the nation with the largest number of deaths after the United States and Britain, 130 soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. Other countries that have lost service members include the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, Germany, South Korea, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Sweden, Poland and Spain.
In Canada, the public ritual is sadly well established. The bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan are flown to a sprawling air base southwest of Ottawa. After their coffins are met by a military band, politicians and family members, a rolling police roadblock clears Canada’s busiest expressway for the two-hour drive to the coroner’s office in Toronto. Along the way, small groups gather on overpasses with flags to salute.
On Wednesday, this ritual is expected to be repeated for Pvt. Patrick Lormand, the 130th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002. He was killed Sunday after a roadside bomb detonated when he was traveling in an armored vehicle near Kandahar, the city where the base of Canadian operations is located. Four other Canadian soldiers were wounded. A member of a regiment based north of Quebec City, Private Lormand, 21, was a native of Chute-Ã -Blondeau, Ontario, a primarily French-speaking farm village east of Ottawa.
Canada has had relatively few military deaths since the Korean War, which amplifies the impact there, compounded by the country’s comparatively small population of roughly 33 million, about half that of Britain and about one-tenth that of the United States. Announcements of each death usually lead news broadcasts.
The deaths have provoked a variety of reactions, along with resentment that many other NATO countries have sent their troops only under terms that keep them away from combat and out of harm’s way.
Writing in “A Military History of Canada,” Desmond Morton, one of the country’s leading military historians, concluded that Canada’s economic and military ties with the United States left it with little choice but to join the Afghan war. But, he added, “Many countries echoed that pledge; few had Canada’s practical obligation to respect it.”
Canadians’ support for the mission remains mixed.
Although several Canadian ministers have regularly visited Afghanistan to show support for the military and the NATO mission in Afghanistan, they show little enthusiasm for prolonging the country’s combat role.
When Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general of NATO, suggested in August that Canada should stay on after 2011, the expiration date for Canada’s combat role set by Parliament last year, he received a frosty response.
Peter MacKay, the defense minister, later said the United States should expect the same sort of answer if it comes looking for a longer combat presence.
“There are many countries in line before Canada that should be approached before they would come knocking on our door, I would suggest to you,” he said at a news conference at a military base in Quebec in August.
The Dutch, with 1,770 solders in Afghanistan, have yet to decide whether they will pull out in 2010 or redeploy from the country’s perilous south.
A debate is also under way in France, which has 3,160 troops in Afghanistan.
The forces are concentrated in Kapisa, in the northeast, and in the eastern region of Surobi, where 10 French soldiers died in an ambush and firefight with insurgents in August 2008.
The French also hold the Kabul regional command, but they are scheduled to hand over control to the Afghans in November.
As Capt. Christophe Prazuck, spokesman for the French chief of staff, pointed out, French soldiers are “involved in exchanges with insurgents every day.”
This month, the death of Sgt. Thomas Rousselle, 30, of the Third Vannes Marine Infantry Regiment, in an improvised explosive device attack, on a road in the Showkhi region, brought the total number of French killed in the war to 31.
President Nicolas Sarkozy attended a memorial service in Vannes, on France’s west coast, for Sergeant Rousselle and a colleague, Cpl. Johan Naguin, 24, who died in the same attack. Mr. Sarkozy reaffirmed the country’s pledge to remain in the country until a viable Afghan state was built.
But the French public is skeptical.
Despite the toll, officials in a number of countries have also vowed to stay, reiterating the view that NATO is committed to preventing Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist haven again.
Poland, which has 2,000 troops deployed, seems determined to keep them there despite the sour mood back home. Poland’s defense minister, Bogdan Klich, who visited Afghanistan last week, said the mission was about bringing security, but also about “strengthening the alliance.”
Thirteen Poles have been killed, the most recent, Piotr Marciniak, just last week.
Judy Dempsey reported from Berlin, and Ian Austen from Ottawa. Matthew Saltmarsh contributed reporting from Paris.
The following article is from the New York Times their story.
JUDY DEMPSEY and IAN AUSTEN
Published: September 16, 2009
BERLIN — For most Germans, it was a rare — even shocking — scene. There, on television, were coffins holding the bodies of three soldiers, all in their early 20s, all killed in Afghanistan, all draped with the national flag.
Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters
A memorial service for three fallen German soldiers in Bad Salzungen in July.
The soldiers, Martin Brunn, 23; Oleg Meiling, 21; and Alexander Schleiernick, 23, were memorialized July 2 at a service in Bad Salzungen, in the eastern state of Thuringia, where their armored infantry battalion has its headquarters. The three were killed in the Kunduz region, where most of Germany’s 4,000 troops are based, bringing to nearly three dozen the number of German soldiers killed in Afghanistan.
For many Germans, the most recent deaths again underscored their discomfort with the deployment in Afghanistan, where they had expected troops that were focusing on peacekeeping and reconstruction to be mostly safe. Franz Josef Jung, the defense minister, who was present at the memorial service, said the deaths of the three “showed what a high price we pay to live in peace and freedom in Germany.”
Much of the attention on the war in Afghanistan has been concentrated on the losses by the United States and Britain; 830 United States troops and 214 British troops have been killed, according to icasualties.org, a Web site. But 22 other countries that have sent forces to Afghanistan have suffered deaths among their troops, with Canada bearing the next greatest burden.
In many of those countries, as in Germany, the sight of military funerals is having a significant impact on public opinion, with some sharing a growing sense that their losses are being overshadowed.
“Somehow when a country like Denmark, which has 700 troops in Afghanistan — which per capita, is one of the highest of the contributors — suffers casualties, it slips under the radar because it is the bigger countries that tend to get noticed,” said Klaus Carsten Pedersen, director of the Danish Foreign Policy Society. His country has lost 24 soldiers.
In Germany, the deaths of Germans, and a controversial airstrike ordered by German commanders on Sept. 4, have forced the issue into the parliamentary election campaign, leading political parties for the first time to talk about a timetable for bringing the troops home. The NATO airstrike, directed at two tanker trucks carrying alliance fuel that had been hijacked by the Taliban, killed scores of people; the number of dead civilians remains unclear.
Today, there are more than 108,000 troops serving in Afghanistan: 64,500 from the United States, 9,000 from Britain and 34,500 from other nations. In all, 1,386 troops have been killed.
From Canada, the nation with the largest number of deaths after the United States and Britain, 130 soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan. Other countries that have lost service members include the Netherlands, Australia, Estonia, Germany, South Korea, Italy, Romania, Turkey, Sweden, Poland and Spain.
In Canada, the public ritual is sadly well established. The bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan are flown to a sprawling air base southwest of Ottawa. After their coffins are met by a military band, politicians and family members, a rolling police roadblock clears Canada’s busiest expressway for the two-hour drive to the coroner’s office in Toronto. Along the way, small groups gather on overpasses with flags to salute.
On Wednesday, this ritual is expected to be repeated for Pvt. Patrick Lormand, the 130th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan since 2002. He was killed Sunday after a roadside bomb detonated when he was traveling in an armored vehicle near Kandahar, the city where the base of Canadian operations is located. Four other Canadian soldiers were wounded. A member of a regiment based north of Quebec City, Private Lormand, 21, was a native of Chute-Ã -Blondeau, Ontario, a primarily French-speaking farm village east of Ottawa.
Canada has had relatively few military deaths since the Korean War, which amplifies the impact there, compounded by the country’s comparatively small population of roughly 33 million, about half that of Britain and about one-tenth that of the United States. Announcements of each death usually lead news broadcasts.
The deaths have provoked a variety of reactions, along with resentment that many other NATO countries have sent their troops only under terms that keep them away from combat and out of harm’s way.
Writing in “A Military History of Canada,” Desmond Morton, one of the country’s leading military historians, concluded that Canada’s economic and military ties with the United States left it with little choice but to join the Afghan war. But, he added, “Many countries echoed that pledge; few had Canada’s practical obligation to respect it.”
Canadians’ support for the mission remains mixed.
Although several Canadian ministers have regularly visited Afghanistan to show support for the military and the NATO mission in Afghanistan, they show little enthusiasm for prolonging the country’s combat role.
When Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general of NATO, suggested in August that Canada should stay on after 2011, the expiration date for Canada’s combat role set by Parliament last year, he received a frosty response.
Peter MacKay, the defense minister, later said the United States should expect the same sort of answer if it comes looking for a longer combat presence.
“There are many countries in line before Canada that should be approached before they would come knocking on our door, I would suggest to you,” he said at a news conference at a military base in Quebec in August.
The Dutch, with 1,770 solders in Afghanistan, have yet to decide whether they will pull out in 2010 or redeploy from the country’s perilous south.
A debate is also under way in France, which has 3,160 troops in Afghanistan.
The forces are concentrated in Kapisa, in the northeast, and in the eastern region of Surobi, where 10 French soldiers died in an ambush and firefight with insurgents in August 2008.
The French also hold the Kabul regional command, but they are scheduled to hand over control to the Afghans in November.
As Capt. Christophe Prazuck, spokesman for the French chief of staff, pointed out, French soldiers are “involved in exchanges with insurgents every day.”
This month, the death of Sgt. Thomas Rousselle, 30, of the Third Vannes Marine Infantry Regiment, in an improvised explosive device attack, on a road in the Showkhi region, brought the total number of French killed in the war to 31.
President Nicolas Sarkozy attended a memorial service in Vannes, on France’s west coast, for Sergeant Rousselle and a colleague, Cpl. Johan Naguin, 24, who died in the same attack. Mr. Sarkozy reaffirmed the country’s pledge to remain in the country until a viable Afghan state was built.
But the French public is skeptical.
Despite the toll, officials in a number of countries have also vowed to stay, reiterating the view that NATO is committed to preventing Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist haven again.
Poland, which has 2,000 troops deployed, seems determined to keep them there despite the sour mood back home. Poland’s defense minister, Bogdan Klich, who visited Afghanistan last week, said the mission was about bringing security, but also about “strengthening the alliance.”
Thirteen Poles have been killed, the most recent, Piotr Marciniak, just last week.
Judy Dempsey reported from Berlin, and Ian Austen from Ottawa. Matthew Saltmarsh contributed reporting from Paris.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
State Building????
This is what ""State Building" is supposed to change. "State Building" is about getting state agencies/institutions to act in a way that is beneficial to the citizens of the state. The same kind of incidents by the Army and police are occuring in Afghanistan along with rampant corruption. The recent and still unsettled national presidential election is another excellent example. Yet we persist in remaining there while our you men and women are being killed and maimed. This mornings Washington Post had an article about a young man and his father who were told by the Taliban that if the young man went to work for a local U.N. agency that something might happen to him. The son was so intimidated that he called and resigned from his prospective job.
New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAHT
Published: September 14, 2009
MINGORA, Pakistan — Two months after the Pakistani Army wrested control of the Swat Valley from Taliban militants, a new campaign of fear has taken hold, with scores, perhaps hundreds, of bodies dumped on the streets in what human rights advocates and local residents say is the work of the military.
Michael Kamber for The New York Times
The New York Times
Pakistan’s army wrested control of Swat from the Taliban.
In some cases, people may simply have been seeking revenge against the ruthless Taliban, in a society that tends to accept tit-for-tat reprisals, local politicians said.
But the scale of the retaliation, the similarities in the way that many of the victims have been tortured and the systematic nature of the deaths and disappearances in areas that the military firmly controls have led local residents, human rights workers and some Pakistani officials to conclude that the military has had a role in the campaign.
The Pakistani Army, which is supported by the United States and in the absence of effective political leadership is running much of Swat with an iron hand, has strenuously denied any involvement in the killings. The army has acknowledged that bodies have turned up, but its spokesmen assert that the killings are the result of civilians settling scores.
“There are no extrajudicial killings in our system,” said Col. Akhtar Abbas, the army spokesman in Swat. “If something happens, we have a foolproof accountability system.”
But neighbors of the victims and Swat residents say there is something more going on than revenge killings by civilians.
A senior politician from the region and a former interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, said he was worried about the army’s involvement in the killings. “There have been reports of extrajudicial killings by the military that are of concern,” he said. “This will not help bring peace.”
Pakistan’s military operations against the Taliban in Swat, begun in May under public pressure from the United States, has been hailed by Washington as a showcase effort of the army’s newfound resolve to defeat the militants. The American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, visited Mingora, the biggest town in Swat, last week, becoming the first senior American official to go to Swat since the army took over.
Now, concerns over the army’s methods in the area threaten to further taint Washington’s association with the military, cooperation that has been questioned in Congress and has been politically unpopular in Pakistan.
The number of killings suggests that the military is seeking to silence any enthusiasm for the Taliban and to settle accounts for heavy army casualties, said a senior provincial official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprimand by the army.
A sullen, uncertain atmosphere prevails in Mingora, where people interviewed last week in shops, homes and government institutions nervously complained of the arbitrary and unpredictable army rule.
Bodies, some with torture marks and some with limbs tied and a bullet in the neck or head, have been found on the roads of Mingora and in rural areas that were militant strongholds.
Reports on Sept. 1 in two national daily newspapers, Dawn and The News, said the bodies of 251 people had been found dumped in Swat.
The Human Rights Commission, a nongovernmental organization, disputed that all the victims had been killed by civilians, saying last month that there were credible reports of retaliatory killings by the military. It said that witnesses had seen mass graves and that in some cases, the bodies appeared to be those of militants.
The exact number of alleged killings was impossible to calculate because the presence of human rights monitors was limited by the authorities, the commission said. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which investigates illegal killings, was ordered by the military to leave Swat last month over matters unrelated to the killings, a senior Pakistani government official and the Red Cross said.
In one case, a family filed a petition with the army command last week describing the alleged killing of their son while in military Colonel Abbas said the army did not acknowledge that Akhtar Ali had been in military custody. If the inquiry found that a member of the army was guilty of the death, he would be disciplined, he said, “whatever the rank.”
According to the family’s account, family members went to army headquarters in Mingora the day after his arrest. “We were assured he would be released,” the petition said. A day or two later they were told he would be home the next day.
Instead, at 6 a.m. on Sept. 5, security forces dropped his body on the doorstep, the statement said. “There was no place on his body not tortured,” the petition said. Nails were “hammered into his body, and cigarettes burned into the skin.”
The petition said Mr. Ali had no relationship with the Taliban.
In another alleged retaliatory killing, a man in his mid-20s, also called Akhtar Ali, was arrested in Mingora on July 22, shortly after the army declared the city safe.
His father, Aziz Ullah, said Mr. Ali had been taken away by soldiers near the family home. The next morning, Mr. Ali’s body was found on the street not far from where he had been picked up, Mr. Ullah said.
“He had spoken in the mosque in favor of the Taliban, but he never picked up a gun,” he said.
The Human Rights Commission report said residents also described mass graves in Kukarai village and in an area between the villages of Daulai and Shah Dheri. Witnesses said some of the bodies in the graves appeared to be those of Taliban militants, the report said. The army has rejected any suggestion that soldiers were involved.
The chief spokesman for the military, Gen. Athar Abbas, said the graves were the result of the Taliban killing their wounded as they retreated and dumping the bodies. The military was dealing with arrested militants through the courts and was seeking changes in the law of evidence to ensure more convictions, General Abbas said.
About 250 to 300 people told the commission of suspected retaliatory killings, a commission official said. In some cases, five people told the group about the same single episode, he said.
A well-to-do landlord, Sher Shah Khan, who had criticized what he termed the army’s early reluctance to confront the militants, said he was not worried about the reports. “If the security services kill in the same manner as the Taliban killed, people have no problem.”
But the principal of a girls’ school, Ziauddin Yousafzi, said the military was making examples of the wrong people.
“The state cannot be barbaric,” he said. “If people see the bodies of the top leaders of the Taliban rather than the body of people like Akhtar Ali, they will be jubilantcustody. The army has initiated an inquiry, Colonel Abbas, the military spokesman in Swat, said.
The family of the man, Akhtar Ali, 28, said he was arrested at his electrical shop in Mingora in the early evening of Sept. 1 by a group of soldiers. Four days later, Mr. Ali’s body was returned to the family home “tortured to death,” a petition signed by his mother, Jehan Sultana, said.
New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAHT
Published: September 14, 2009
MINGORA, Pakistan — Two months after the Pakistani Army wrested control of the Swat Valley from Taliban militants, a new campaign of fear has taken hold, with scores, perhaps hundreds, of bodies dumped on the streets in what human rights advocates and local residents say is the work of the military.
Michael Kamber for The New York Times
The New York Times
Pakistan’s army wrested control of Swat from the Taliban.
In some cases, people may simply have been seeking revenge against the ruthless Taliban, in a society that tends to accept tit-for-tat reprisals, local politicians said.
But the scale of the retaliation, the similarities in the way that many of the victims have been tortured and the systematic nature of the deaths and disappearances in areas that the military firmly controls have led local residents, human rights workers and some Pakistani officials to conclude that the military has had a role in the campaign.
The Pakistani Army, which is supported by the United States and in the absence of effective political leadership is running much of Swat with an iron hand, has strenuously denied any involvement in the killings. The army has acknowledged that bodies have turned up, but its spokesmen assert that the killings are the result of civilians settling scores.
“There are no extrajudicial killings in our system,” said Col. Akhtar Abbas, the army spokesman in Swat. “If something happens, we have a foolproof accountability system.”
But neighbors of the victims and Swat residents say there is something more going on than revenge killings by civilians.
A senior politician from the region and a former interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Sherpao, said he was worried about the army’s involvement in the killings. “There have been reports of extrajudicial killings by the military that are of concern,” he said. “This will not help bring peace.”
Pakistan’s military operations against the Taliban in Swat, begun in May under public pressure from the United States, has been hailed by Washington as a showcase effort of the army’s newfound resolve to defeat the militants. The American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, visited Mingora, the biggest town in Swat, last week, becoming the first senior American official to go to Swat since the army took over.
Now, concerns over the army’s methods in the area threaten to further taint Washington’s association with the military, cooperation that has been questioned in Congress and has been politically unpopular in Pakistan.
The number of killings suggests that the military is seeking to silence any enthusiasm for the Taliban and to settle accounts for heavy army casualties, said a senior provincial official who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprimand by the army.
A sullen, uncertain atmosphere prevails in Mingora, where people interviewed last week in shops, homes and government institutions nervously complained of the arbitrary and unpredictable army rule.
Bodies, some with torture marks and some with limbs tied and a bullet in the neck or head, have been found on the roads of Mingora and in rural areas that were militant strongholds.
Reports on Sept. 1 in two national daily newspapers, Dawn and The News, said the bodies of 251 people had been found dumped in Swat.
The Human Rights Commission, a nongovernmental organization, disputed that all the victims had been killed by civilians, saying last month that there were credible reports of retaliatory killings by the military. It said that witnesses had seen mass graves and that in some cases, the bodies appeared to be those of militants.
The exact number of alleged killings was impossible to calculate because the presence of human rights monitors was limited by the authorities, the commission said. The International Committee of the Red Cross, which investigates illegal killings, was ordered by the military to leave Swat last month over matters unrelated to the killings, a senior Pakistani government official and the Red Cross said.
In one case, a family filed a petition with the army command last week describing the alleged killing of their son while in military Colonel Abbas said the army did not acknowledge that Akhtar Ali had been in military custody. If the inquiry found that a member of the army was guilty of the death, he would be disciplined, he said, “whatever the rank.”
According to the family’s account, family members went to army headquarters in Mingora the day after his arrest. “We were assured he would be released,” the petition said. A day or two later they were told he would be home the next day.
Instead, at 6 a.m. on Sept. 5, security forces dropped his body on the doorstep, the statement said. “There was no place on his body not tortured,” the petition said. Nails were “hammered into his body, and cigarettes burned into the skin.”
The petition said Mr. Ali had no relationship with the Taliban.
In another alleged retaliatory killing, a man in his mid-20s, also called Akhtar Ali, was arrested in Mingora on July 22, shortly after the army declared the city safe.
His father, Aziz Ullah, said Mr. Ali had been taken away by soldiers near the family home. The next morning, Mr. Ali’s body was found on the street not far from where he had been picked up, Mr. Ullah said.
“He had spoken in the mosque in favor of the Taliban, but he never picked up a gun,” he said.
The Human Rights Commission report said residents also described mass graves in Kukarai village and in an area between the villages of Daulai and Shah Dheri. Witnesses said some of the bodies in the graves appeared to be those of Taliban militants, the report said. The army has rejected any suggestion that soldiers were involved.
The chief spokesman for the military, Gen. Athar Abbas, said the graves were the result of the Taliban killing their wounded as they retreated and dumping the bodies. The military was dealing with arrested militants through the courts and was seeking changes in the law of evidence to ensure more convictions, General Abbas said.
About 250 to 300 people told the commission of suspected retaliatory killings, a commission official said. In some cases, five people told the group about the same single episode, he said.
A well-to-do landlord, Sher Shah Khan, who had criticized what he termed the army’s early reluctance to confront the militants, said he was not worried about the reports. “If the security services kill in the same manner as the Taliban killed, people have no problem.”
But the principal of a girls’ school, Ziauddin Yousafzi, said the military was making examples of the wrong people.
“The state cannot be barbaric,” he said. “If people see the bodies of the top leaders of the Taliban rather than the body of people like Akhtar Ali, they will be jubilantcustody. The army has initiated an inquiry, Colonel Abbas, the military spokesman in Swat, said.
The family of the man, Akhtar Ali, 28, said he was arrested at his electrical shop in Mingora in the early evening of Sept. 1 by a group of soldiers. Four days later, Mr. Ali’s body was returned to the family home “tortured to death,” a petition signed by his mother, Jehan Sultana, said.
Exit Strategy, Nation Building, State Building or What—III?
Exit Strategy, Nation Building, State Building or What—III?
So what are we doing--Nation Building or State Building? The line between the two is very fine and trips us up in our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nation Building is about bringing together differing racial, ethnic, religious and political groups and persuading them to identify themselves as a “nation” rather than individual groups or tribes. Such groups are more or less loyal to a common cause.
We began nation building in this country by trying to brew tea in Boston Harbor. Two and a half years before we declared our independence from Great Britain, Massachusetts’s colonists rebelled against another tax, the Tea Tax, since it was another tax imposed on them by people who were not their elected representatives. This nascent effort was the first of many steps to the “shot heard ‘round the world”, on April 19, 1775 at Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this historic moment some sixty years later in his Concord Hymn published in 1837—
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard 'round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee."
If you have been to Concord and stood in this spot and touched the “votive stone” as I have, you cannot help but be caught up in the aura that seems to exist there. It is hallowed ground for Americans—it is the birthplace of our Nation. Our Nation—50 states strong, many religions, 300,000 million people all with a common cause—the preservation of our Nation.
So how does this apply to places like Afghanistan?
Terms like democracy, representative government, duly elected representatives, vox populi, non-fraudulent elections and freedom of the press are not to be found in the lexicon of the ordinary Afghani.
While there is some evidence that people have been in that area for 50,000 years and although Afghanistan borders on the “cradle of civilization”—ancient Mesopotamia—it is far from a “civilized” nation or peoples measured by any modern yardstick. There have been so-called capitals over the millennia; I think they might more appropriately be called “city states” much like those of ancient Greece, with a modicum of fealty from bordering tribal areas.
Although Afghanistan had been multi-religious (Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians and others) for centuries, Islam came to Afghanistan in the 7th century and after Mohammed died, the Islamists split between Shias and Sunnis. And so it is today. Not only are there tribes, but also there are differing religious sects among the tribes. Although Pashtuns make up the largest segment of the population (about 42%), there are also Tajiks another 25% of the population), Hazaras, Uzbeks, Aimaks, Turkmen, Balochs, and others.
In addition to tribal and religious divisions, the country has as many six languages are spoken (Pashto, Dari [often called Afghan Persian], Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashai and along with dialects among these languages). For the most part, when we decided we wanted to be a nation, we all spoke the same language—English—or as I like to call it Vulgate English or American. Yes, many other languages are spoken here, but the lingua franca is English/American.
While all of these people may identify themselves as Afghanis, this veneer is extremely thin. They are quick to point out their tribal and religious affiliations. I believe it is safe to generalize about this phenomenon for the entire region. While I do not know anyone from Afghanistan or Iraq, I do have friends from Iran. In one instance, the family has a 400-year history of living in Iran. Do the people identify themselves as Iranians? No. They are Armenians. Not only that, they are Christian Armenians. In the other instance, a Muslim woman I know does not identify herself as an Iranian either—she is a “Persian”. I once made the mistake of asking her if she was an Arab—and the lecture, well…
Here in the United States, most of us are what I call “Heinz variety” Americans, a mixture of many nationalities. For example, I am English, Irish, Scot, German (Pennsylvania Dutch my maternal grandfather called it) and a smattering of French. My wife is Irish and Scot. Most of us just identify ourselves as Americans, but some chose to identify themselves as hyphenated-Americans—African-American, Italian-American, Irish-American, Mexican-American, German-American, etc, etc, etc. And in many cities, we have “tribal” areas such as Chinatown and Little Italy. But in the main, we are Americans.
Also common in the Middle East is to attach the place of your birth to your name. For example, Saddam Hussein’s full name was Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid (father’s name) al-Tikriti. (Saddam was born or near where he was born) Hamid Karzai (born in Karz). Also the honorific hadji or hajji is used to address an individual who has made the hadj/hajj to Mecca, which every Muslim is expected to do once in their lifetime. Unfortunately, the term has become a derisive term used to refer to Iraqis and I suspect for Afghanis now that there is a greater troop exposure to Afghanis.
Many have come to Afghanistan but few have stayed. Indo-Europeans, Indo-Aryans, Persians, Macedonians, Islamic Arabs, Mongols, the British and the Russians. And now, The Americans with a coalition force consisting of troops from Britain, Canada, Holland France, Denmark, Australia, and Estonia. While some have left their mark, they have mostly disappeared for various and sundry reasons. In the mid-19th century, Britain lost all but one person of some 16,000 who fled Kabul after an Afghanis revolt. It is thought that Dr. William Brydon, a surgeon in the British Army was spared to serve as a witness about the massacre.
The bottom line for all of this—nationalism must well up from inside the people like an artesian spring. Outsiders cannot impose nationalism on a people. Trying to accomplish nation building by force is like herding cats. State building is an entirely different issue.
So what are we doing--Nation Building or State Building? The line between the two is very fine and trips us up in our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nation Building is about bringing together differing racial, ethnic, religious and political groups and persuading them to identify themselves as a “nation” rather than individual groups or tribes. Such groups are more or less loyal to a common cause.
We began nation building in this country by trying to brew tea in Boston Harbor. Two and a half years before we declared our independence from Great Britain, Massachusetts’s colonists rebelled against another tax, the Tea Tax, since it was another tax imposed on them by people who were not their elected representatives. This nascent effort was the first of many steps to the “shot heard ‘round the world”, on April 19, 1775 at Concord, Massachusetts. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured this historic moment some sixty years later in his Concord Hymn published in 1837—
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard 'round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare,
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee."
If you have been to Concord and stood in this spot and touched the “votive stone” as I have, you cannot help but be caught up in the aura that seems to exist there. It is hallowed ground for Americans—it is the birthplace of our Nation. Our Nation—50 states strong, many religions, 300,000 million people all with a common cause—the preservation of our Nation.
So how does this apply to places like Afghanistan?
Terms like democracy, representative government, duly elected representatives, vox populi, non-fraudulent elections and freedom of the press are not to be found in the lexicon of the ordinary Afghani.
While there is some evidence that people have been in that area for 50,000 years and although Afghanistan borders on the “cradle of civilization”—ancient Mesopotamia—it is far from a “civilized” nation or peoples measured by any modern yardstick. There have been so-called capitals over the millennia; I think they might more appropriately be called “city states” much like those of ancient Greece, with a modicum of fealty from bordering tribal areas.
Although Afghanistan had been multi-religious (Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians and others) for centuries, Islam came to Afghanistan in the 7th century and after Mohammed died, the Islamists split between Shias and Sunnis. And so it is today. Not only are there tribes, but also there are differing religious sects among the tribes. Although Pashtuns make up the largest segment of the population (about 42%), there are also Tajiks another 25% of the population), Hazaras, Uzbeks, Aimaks, Turkmen, Balochs, and others.
In addition to tribal and religious divisions, the country has as many six languages are spoken (Pashto, Dari [often called Afghan Persian], Uzbek, Turkmen, Balochi, Pashai and along with dialects among these languages). For the most part, when we decided we wanted to be a nation, we all spoke the same language—English—or as I like to call it Vulgate English or American. Yes, many other languages are spoken here, but the lingua franca is English/American.
While all of these people may identify themselves as Afghanis, this veneer is extremely thin. They are quick to point out their tribal and religious affiliations. I believe it is safe to generalize about this phenomenon for the entire region. While I do not know anyone from Afghanistan or Iraq, I do have friends from Iran. In one instance, the family has a 400-year history of living in Iran. Do the people identify themselves as Iranians? No. They are Armenians. Not only that, they are Christian Armenians. In the other instance, a Muslim woman I know does not identify herself as an Iranian either—she is a “Persian”. I once made the mistake of asking her if she was an Arab—and the lecture, well…
Here in the United States, most of us are what I call “Heinz variety” Americans, a mixture of many nationalities. For example, I am English, Irish, Scot, German (Pennsylvania Dutch my maternal grandfather called it) and a smattering of French. My wife is Irish and Scot. Most of us just identify ourselves as Americans, but some chose to identify themselves as hyphenated-Americans—African-American, Italian-American, Irish-American, Mexican-American, German-American, etc, etc, etc. And in many cities, we have “tribal” areas such as Chinatown and Little Italy. But in the main, we are Americans.
Also common in the Middle East is to attach the place of your birth to your name. For example, Saddam Hussein’s full name was Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid (father’s name) al-Tikriti. (Saddam was born or near where he was born) Hamid Karzai (born in Karz). Also the honorific hadji or hajji is used to address an individual who has made the hadj/hajj to Mecca, which every Muslim is expected to do once in their lifetime. Unfortunately, the term has become a derisive term used to refer to Iraqis and I suspect for Afghanis now that there is a greater troop exposure to Afghanis.
Many have come to Afghanistan but few have stayed. Indo-Europeans, Indo-Aryans, Persians, Macedonians, Islamic Arabs, Mongols, the British and the Russians. And now, The Americans with a coalition force consisting of troops from Britain, Canada, Holland France, Denmark, Australia, and Estonia. While some have left their mark, they have mostly disappeared for various and sundry reasons. In the mid-19th century, Britain lost all but one person of some 16,000 who fled Kabul after an Afghanis revolt. It is thought that Dr. William Brydon, a surgeon in the British Army was spared to serve as a witness about the massacre.
The bottom line for all of this—nationalism must well up from inside the people like an artesian spring. Outsiders cannot impose nationalism on a people. Trying to accomplish nation building by force is like herding cats. State building is an entirely different issue.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
We are pinned down
The following is from McClatchy News. Would someone please remind me again why we are fighting? It appears in this instance that as Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and they are us." The JCS and General McCrystal can deny all they want but this looks more and more like Vietnam each day. When you are restricted on how you kill the enemy, the enemy gets to kill you--no holds barred. I have highlighted some sections that show how are military folks are being betrayed by our own people.
Why is the American public sitting on its collective hands? When are we going to be pissed off enough to protest?
George Harris
Posted on Tuesday, September 8, 2009
'We're pinned down:' 4 U.S. Marines die in Afghan ambush
By Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers
GANJGAL, Afghanistan — We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition.
"We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.
Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.
U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.
"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.
Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.
Three Americans and 19 Afghans were wounded, and U.S. forces later recovered the bodies of two insurgents, although they believe more were killed.
The Marines were cut down as they sought cover in a trench at the base of the village's first layer cake-style stone house. Much of their ammunition was gone. One Marine was bending over a second, tending his wounds, when both were killed, said Marine Cpl. Dakota Meyer, 21, of Greensburg, Ky., who retrieved their bodies.
HISTORY OF RESISTANCE
A full moon was drenching the mountains in ghostly light as some 60 Afghan soldiers, 20 border police officers, 13 Marine and U.S. Army trainers and I set out for Ganjgal at 3 a.m. from the U.S. base in the Shakani District.
The operation, proposed by the Afghan army and refined by the U.S. trainers, called for the Afghans to search Ganjgal for weapons and hold a meeting with the elders to discuss the establishment of police patrols. The elders had insisted that Afghans perform the sweep. The Americans were there to give advice and call for air and artillery support if required.
Dawn was breaking by the time we alighted for a mile-long walk up a wash of gravel, rock and boulders which winds up to Ganjgal, some 60 rock-walled compounds perched high up the terraced slopes at the eastern end of the valley, six miles from the Pakistani border.
Small teams of Afghan troops and U.S. trainers headed to ridges on the valley's southern and northern sides, setting up outposts as the main body headed slowly up toward the village and, unbeknownst to us, into the killing zone.
The terrain — craggy ravines and sweeping, tree-studded mountains riddled with boulders and caves — was made for guerrilla warfare. The ethnic Pashtun villagers pride themselves on their rejection of official authority, their history of resistance and their disdain of foreign forces that many regard as occupiers.
A possible clue to what was to come occurred when the lights in Ganjgal suddenly blinked out while our vehicles were still several miles away, crashing slowly through the semi-dark along a rutted track toward the village.
NO AIR SUPPORT
The first shot cracked out at 5:30 a.m., apparently just as the four Marines and the Afghan unit to which they were attached reached the outskirts of the village. It quickly swelled into a furious storm of gunfire that we realized had been prepared for our arrival.
Several U.S. officers said they suspected that the insurgents had been tipped off by sympathizers in the local Afghan security forces or by the village elders, who announced over the weekend that they were accepting the authority of the local government.
"Whatever we do always leaks," said Marine Lt. Ademola Fabayo, 28, a New Yorker who was born in Nigeria and is the operations officer for the trainers from the 3rd Marine Division. "You can't trust even some of their soldiers or officers."
Sniper rounds snapped off rocks and sizzled overhead. Explosions of recoilless rifle rounds echoed through the valley, while bullets inched closer to the rock wall behind which I crouched with a handful U.S. and Afghan officers.
Lt. Fabayo and several other soldiers later said they'd seen women and children in the village shuttling ammunition to fighters positioned in windows and roofs. Across the valley and from their ridgeline outposts, the Afghans and Americans fired back.
At 5:50 a.m., Army Capt. Will Swenson, of Seattle, WA, the trainer of the Afghan Border Police unit in Shakani, began calling for air support or artillery fire from a unit of the Army's 10th Mountain Division. The responses came back: No helicopters were available.
"This is unbelievable. We have a platoon (of Afghan army) out there and we've got no Hotel Echo," Swenson shouted above the din of gunfire, using the military acronym for high explosive artillery shells. "We're pinned down."
The insurgents were firing from inside the village and from positions in the hills immediately behind it and to either side. Judging from the angles of the ricochets, several appeared to be trying to outflank us to get better shots.
"What are you going to do?" Maj. Talib, the operations officer of the Afghan army unit, asked Maj. Williams through his translator.
"We are getting air," Williams replied.
"What are we going to do?" Talib repeated.
"We are getting air," Williams replied again, perhaps knowing that none was available but hoping to quiet Talib.
At 6:05 a.m., as our position was becoming increasingly tenuous, Swenson and Fabayo agreed that it was time to pull back and radioed for artillery to fire smoke rounds to mask our retreat.
"They don't have any smoke. They only have Willy Pete," Swenson reported, referring to white phosphorus rounds that spew smoke.
Fifty minutes later, as a curtain of white phosphorus smoke roiled across the valley, Swenson and Fabayo unleashed an intense volley of covering fire while the rest of us sprinted back some 20 yards to a series of dirt furrows, weighed down by our flak vests and water carriers.
The two officers raced back to join us. Everyone jumped up and ran for the next stone wall. Everyone but me. Afraid that too many people were jammed together as they raced, offering easy targets, I waited behind for a break in the gunfire, an Afghan border police officer crouched next to me.
TIME TO MOVE
We soon noticed that the insurgent snipers were trying to outflank us again. I saw one up on a small rise fire and miss us by several feet. My companion decided that it was time to go and bolted away across the wash, but the gunfire grew too intense, and again I pulled my body into the dirt and rocks.
I wasn't as terrified as I was angry: angry at the absence of air support, angry that there was no artillery fire, angry that Williams' interpreter had been killed, angry at the realization that the operation had obviously been betrayed and angry at myself for not bolting with the others.
I knew it was time to move when I saw a gaggle of Afghan soldiers pounding through the boulders past me, their commander, a bright 26-year-old lieutenant named Ruhollah, hopping between two of them, a bullet wound in his groin. Staying put was no longer an option.
Bundling my legs beneath me and grabbing the small bag I use to carry my pad, pens, glasses and other necessities, I sprang and ran, trying to weave as bullets kicked up dust around me.
I reached the next wall and plunged behind it, nearly falling on top of Swenson, Fabayo and several badly wounded U.S. soldiers.
As Fabayo cracked off rounds, Swenson lay flat on his back, clasping a pressure bandage to the shoulder of one soldier with one hand and holding the microphone of his radio in the other, calling out insurgents' positions to two U.S. helicopters that finally had arrived.
It was now 7:10 a.m., and with the helicopters prowling overhead and firing into the hillsides, the incoming gunfire slackened enough for us to move again.
I stumbled down the valley to safety after I helped one of the injured soldiers into a medivac helicopter. Capt. Swenson and Lt. Fabayo headed off to find vehicles and, together with Cpl. Meyer, crashed back up the way we'd just fled to retrieve the bodies of the dead Marines and any other casualties they could find.
ABOUT THE REPORTER
McClatchy's Jonathan S. Landay, who was ambushed with U.S. Marines in a remote Afghan village Tuesday, is a veteran foreign affairs reporter with long experience in South Asia, Iraq, the Balkans and Washington.
Landay covered South Asia — including Afghanistan — as well as the Balkans from 1985 to 1994 for United Press International and for The Christian Science Monitor. He joined the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau in 1999.
He was part of the Knight Ridder team, with State Department correspondent Warren P. Strobel and Bureau Chief John Walcott, that investigated and disproved the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program and ties to al Qaida.
The team won a National Headliner Award for "How the Bush Administration Went to War in Iraq," a 2005 Award of Distinction from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism for "Iraqi Exiles Fed Exaggerated Tips to News Media," and a 2007 Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy for the Iraq coverage.
The McClatchy Co. acquired Knight Ridder in 2006, and Landay is now the senior national security correspondent in the McClatchy Washington Bureau and a regular contributor to the bureau's Nukes & Spooks blog. He regularly travels to Afghanistan, Pakistan and other trouble spots.
Why is the American public sitting on its collective hands? When are we going to be pissed off enough to protest?
George Harris
Posted on Tuesday, September 8, 2009
'We're pinned down:' 4 U.S. Marines die in Afghan ambush
By Jonathan S. Landay McClatchy Newspapers
GANJGAL, Afghanistan — We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition.
"We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation.
Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to arrive, despite earlier assurances that air cover would be five minutes away.
U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren't near the village.
"We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We've lost today," Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, said through his translator to his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter's repeated demands for helicopters.
Four U.S. Marines were killed Tuesday, the most U.S. service members assigned as trainers to the Afghan National Army to be lost in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. Eight Afghan troops and police and the Marine commander's Afghan interpreter also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle that raged from dawn until 2 p.m. around this remote hamlet in eastern Kunar province, close to the Pakistan border.
Three Americans and 19 Afghans were wounded, and U.S. forces later recovered the bodies of two insurgents, although they believe more were killed.
The Marines were cut down as they sought cover in a trench at the base of the village's first layer cake-style stone house. Much of their ammunition was gone. One Marine was bending over a second, tending his wounds, when both were killed, said Marine Cpl. Dakota Meyer, 21, of Greensburg, Ky., who retrieved their bodies.
HISTORY OF RESISTANCE
A full moon was drenching the mountains in ghostly light as some 60 Afghan soldiers, 20 border police officers, 13 Marine and U.S. Army trainers and I set out for Ganjgal at 3 a.m. from the U.S. base in the Shakani District.
The operation, proposed by the Afghan army and refined by the U.S. trainers, called for the Afghans to search Ganjgal for weapons and hold a meeting with the elders to discuss the establishment of police patrols. The elders had insisted that Afghans perform the sweep. The Americans were there to give advice and call for air and artillery support if required.
Dawn was breaking by the time we alighted for a mile-long walk up a wash of gravel, rock and boulders which winds up to Ganjgal, some 60 rock-walled compounds perched high up the terraced slopes at the eastern end of the valley, six miles from the Pakistani border.
Small teams of Afghan troops and U.S. trainers headed to ridges on the valley's southern and northern sides, setting up outposts as the main body headed slowly up toward the village and, unbeknownst to us, into the killing zone.
The terrain — craggy ravines and sweeping, tree-studded mountains riddled with boulders and caves — was made for guerrilla warfare. The ethnic Pashtun villagers pride themselves on their rejection of official authority, their history of resistance and their disdain of foreign forces that many regard as occupiers.
A possible clue to what was to come occurred when the lights in Ganjgal suddenly blinked out while our vehicles were still several miles away, crashing slowly through the semi-dark along a rutted track toward the village.
NO AIR SUPPORT
The first shot cracked out at 5:30 a.m., apparently just as the four Marines and the Afghan unit to which they were attached reached the outskirts of the village. It quickly swelled into a furious storm of gunfire that we realized had been prepared for our arrival.
Several U.S. officers said they suspected that the insurgents had been tipped off by sympathizers in the local Afghan security forces or by the village elders, who announced over the weekend that they were accepting the authority of the local government.
"Whatever we do always leaks," said Marine Lt. Ademola Fabayo, 28, a New Yorker who was born in Nigeria and is the operations officer for the trainers from the 3rd Marine Division. "You can't trust even some of their soldiers or officers."
Sniper rounds snapped off rocks and sizzled overhead. Explosions of recoilless rifle rounds echoed through the valley, while bullets inched closer to the rock wall behind which I crouched with a handful U.S. and Afghan officers.
Lt. Fabayo and several other soldiers later said they'd seen women and children in the village shuttling ammunition to fighters positioned in windows and roofs. Across the valley and from their ridgeline outposts, the Afghans and Americans fired back.
At 5:50 a.m., Army Capt. Will Swenson, of Seattle, WA, the trainer of the Afghan Border Police unit in Shakani, began calling for air support or artillery fire from a unit of the Army's 10th Mountain Division. The responses came back: No helicopters were available.
"This is unbelievable. We have a platoon (of Afghan army) out there and we've got no Hotel Echo," Swenson shouted above the din of gunfire, using the military acronym for high explosive artillery shells. "We're pinned down."
The insurgents were firing from inside the village and from positions in the hills immediately behind it and to either side. Judging from the angles of the ricochets, several appeared to be trying to outflank us to get better shots.
"What are you going to do?" Maj. Talib, the operations officer of the Afghan army unit, asked Maj. Williams through his translator.
"We are getting air," Williams replied.
"What are we going to do?" Talib repeated.
"We are getting air," Williams replied again, perhaps knowing that none was available but hoping to quiet Talib.
At 6:05 a.m., as our position was becoming increasingly tenuous, Swenson and Fabayo agreed that it was time to pull back and radioed for artillery to fire smoke rounds to mask our retreat.
"They don't have any smoke. They only have Willy Pete," Swenson reported, referring to white phosphorus rounds that spew smoke.
Fifty minutes later, as a curtain of white phosphorus smoke roiled across the valley, Swenson and Fabayo unleashed an intense volley of covering fire while the rest of us sprinted back some 20 yards to a series of dirt furrows, weighed down by our flak vests and water carriers.
The two officers raced back to join us. Everyone jumped up and ran for the next stone wall. Everyone but me. Afraid that too many people were jammed together as they raced, offering easy targets, I waited behind for a break in the gunfire, an Afghan border police officer crouched next to me.
TIME TO MOVE
We soon noticed that the insurgent snipers were trying to outflank us again. I saw one up on a small rise fire and miss us by several feet. My companion decided that it was time to go and bolted away across the wash, but the gunfire grew too intense, and again I pulled my body into the dirt and rocks.
I wasn't as terrified as I was angry: angry at the absence of air support, angry that there was no artillery fire, angry that Williams' interpreter had been killed, angry at the realization that the operation had obviously been betrayed and angry at myself for not bolting with the others.
I knew it was time to move when I saw a gaggle of Afghan soldiers pounding through the boulders past me, their commander, a bright 26-year-old lieutenant named Ruhollah, hopping between two of them, a bullet wound in his groin. Staying put was no longer an option.
Bundling my legs beneath me and grabbing the small bag I use to carry my pad, pens, glasses and other necessities, I sprang and ran, trying to weave as bullets kicked up dust around me.
I reached the next wall and plunged behind it, nearly falling on top of Swenson, Fabayo and several badly wounded U.S. soldiers.
As Fabayo cracked off rounds, Swenson lay flat on his back, clasping a pressure bandage to the shoulder of one soldier with one hand and holding the microphone of his radio in the other, calling out insurgents' positions to two U.S. helicopters that finally had arrived.
It was now 7:10 a.m., and with the helicopters prowling overhead and firing into the hillsides, the incoming gunfire slackened enough for us to move again.
I stumbled down the valley to safety after I helped one of the injured soldiers into a medivac helicopter. Capt. Swenson and Lt. Fabayo headed off to find vehicles and, together with Cpl. Meyer, crashed back up the way we'd just fled to retrieve the bodies of the dead Marines and any other casualties they could find.
ABOUT THE REPORTER
McClatchy's Jonathan S. Landay, who was ambushed with U.S. Marines in a remote Afghan village Tuesday, is a veteran foreign affairs reporter with long experience in South Asia, Iraq, the Balkans and Washington.
Landay covered South Asia — including Afghanistan — as well as the Balkans from 1985 to 1994 for United Press International and for The Christian Science Monitor. He joined the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau in 1999.
He was part of the Knight Ridder team, with State Department correspondent Warren P. Strobel and Bureau Chief John Walcott, that investigated and disproved the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program and ties to al Qaida.
The team won a National Headliner Award for "How the Bush Administration Went to War in Iraq," a 2005 Award of Distinction from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism for "Iraqi Exiles Fed Exaggerated Tips to News Media," and a 2007 Edward Weintal Prize from Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of Diplomacy for the Iraq coverage.
The McClatchy Co. acquired Knight Ridder in 2006, and Landay is now the senior national security correspondent in the McClatchy Washington Bureau and a regular contributor to the bureau's Nukes & Spooks blog. He regularly travels to Afghanistan, Pakistan and other trouble spots.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Exit Strategy, Nation Building, State Building or What?- II 1955-1975
As I have noted, much has been made of the terms “Nation Building” and “Exit Strategy” by the printed press and the visual media. I am not certain that either knows just exactly what these entail. This is a bit about Exit Strategy or lack thereof.
I want to apologize in advance for the truncated and chopped up history below, but I hope it will serve to make my point. We somehow have forgotten how to win a war.
When I went to the U. S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College 40 years ago (Class of 1969), “Nation Building” was not a topic that was discussed. But 40 years may have clouded my memory. Nevertheless, I suspect the general feeling was this was something the State Department or some other “They” did. Marines went ashore to take a foothold; i.e., in simplistic terms, a port and an airfield, necessary to allow follow-on forces (read this to mean Army and Air Force) to have a safe place to continue further operations.
The “Exit Strategy”—when the Army and Air Force were firmly ensconced, the Marines would back load and move out. But subtle changes were beginning to take place. Although the Marine Corps was still the amphibious force, they had begun to take on some of the characteristics of a land army during the Korean War. Instead of landing, securing a beachhead and making way for the Army to take over, the Marines came and stayed to the bitter end.
The “Exit Strategy” for Korea—The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade landed in Korea on August 2, 1950 to join with Army forces that have been there since July. The Marine Corps’ First Marine Division left in March 1955 when the Army moved units from Japan to Korea and took over Marine Corps positions! This division had 4,004 dead and 25,864 wounded. The First Marine Division returned to Camp Pendleton, California with little thought to returning to the Far East in just over a decade.
Believe it or not, Americans were in Vietnam in 1945. As a matter of fact, the first American killed in Vietnam was Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey, head of American OSS mission. He was killed by Vietminh troops while driving a jeep to the airport. Reports later indicated that his death was due to a case of mistaken identity -- he had been mistaken for a Frenchman.
In 1950, we provided $15 million to the French and we also provided some military advisors. Six years later, the US Military Assistance Advisor Group (MAAG) assumes responsibility, from French, for training South Vietnamese forces. The following year, thirteen of these advisors were wounded in a bombing incident in Saigon. 1959 brought the deaths of Major Dale R. Buis and Master Sergeant Chester M. when guerillas struck at Bienhoa. By the end of 1963, there are 16,300 U.S. military advisors in Vietnam.
On August 2, 1964 three North Vietnamese PT boats allegedly fire torpedoes at the USS TURNER JOY and the USS MADDOX , which were located in the international waters of the Tonkin Gulf, some thirty miles off the coast of North Vietnam. The attack comes after six months of covert US and South Vietnamese naval operations. A second, even more highly disputed attack, is alleged to have taken place on August 4. It was learned later that these attacks did NOT happen. (Remember the WMD in Iraq?)
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is approved by Congress on August 7, 1964 and authorizes President Lyndon Johnson to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The resolution passes unanimously in the House, and by a margin of 82-2 in the Senate. The Resolution allowed President Johnson to wage all out war against North Vietnam without ever securing a formal Declaration of War from Congress. (Doesn’t this look like what happened when President Bush was given similar authority the tragedy of September 11, 1991, to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.")
By the close of 1964, the U.S. had 23,000 military advisors on the ground. I don’t think Congress or anyone else had any idea that more than a decade would go by before we abandoned our war efforts in Vietnam.
In February 1965, General William Westmoreland, our military commander in Vietnam requests two battalions of Marines to protect the Danang airbase. The first American combat troops, 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed in Danang in March 1965. Just over four years later (April 1969) there are 543,400 American forces in Vietnam. At this same time, 33,641 Americans have been killed—more than we lost in the Korean War. We began to grow weary of the war and President Richard M. Nixon meets with South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu to inform him that American troop strengths are going to be drastically reduced. A month after meeting with Thieu, Nixon sends a secret letter to Ho Chi Minh seeking and end to the war. In August 1969 Henry Kissinger secretly meets representatives of the Hanoi government in Paris to begin serious negotiations on a peace settlement. Troop withdrawals are started and by the end of 1969 some 115,000 American troops have come home. The death toll has grown to 40,024. By June of 1970, the Senate repeals the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, but the fighting continues.
Seven years later that last of the American combat troops are withdrawn, but there are more than 16,000 advisors still in-country. Although the Paris peace agreement is signed in January 1973, it takes two more years, 30 April 1975 before the last 10 Marines are finally evacuated. You remember the picture of the helicopter leaving from the roof of the embassy. So regardless of how you want to count it, 15 years or 30 years, we lost some 58,000 killed, 153,329 wounded and nearly 2,000 still missing in action. We dropped more bombs than in all of World War II and Korea combined. Their combined explosive power was perhaps 100 times as much as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children of those who served are still feeling the effects of the tens of thousand of gallons of Agent Orange we sprayed.
And our exit strategy—we tucked our tails between our collective legs, came home and licked our wounds.
Is this to be our fate in Afghanistan and Iraq? Will we be there 15 years or 30 year? We couldn’t win in Vietnam with 500,000 troops, how are we going to win in Afghanistan with 150,000? Or 200,000 or 300,000 or … What is our exit strategy?
I want to apologize in advance for the truncated and chopped up history below, but I hope it will serve to make my point. We somehow have forgotten how to win a war.
When I went to the U. S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College 40 years ago (Class of 1969), “Nation Building” was not a topic that was discussed. But 40 years may have clouded my memory. Nevertheless, I suspect the general feeling was this was something the State Department or some other “They” did. Marines went ashore to take a foothold; i.e., in simplistic terms, a port and an airfield, necessary to allow follow-on forces (read this to mean Army and Air Force) to have a safe place to continue further operations.
The “Exit Strategy”—when the Army and Air Force were firmly ensconced, the Marines would back load and move out. But subtle changes were beginning to take place. Although the Marine Corps was still the amphibious force, they had begun to take on some of the characteristics of a land army during the Korean War. Instead of landing, securing a beachhead and making way for the Army to take over, the Marines came and stayed to the bitter end.
The “Exit Strategy” for Korea—The 1st Provisional Marine Brigade landed in Korea on August 2, 1950 to join with Army forces that have been there since July. The Marine Corps’ First Marine Division left in March 1955 when the Army moved units from Japan to Korea and took over Marine Corps positions! This division had 4,004 dead and 25,864 wounded. The First Marine Division returned to Camp Pendleton, California with little thought to returning to the Far East in just over a decade.
Believe it or not, Americans were in Vietnam in 1945. As a matter of fact, the first American killed in Vietnam was Lt. Col. A. Peter Dewey, head of American OSS mission. He was killed by Vietminh troops while driving a jeep to the airport. Reports later indicated that his death was due to a case of mistaken identity -- he had been mistaken for a Frenchman.
In 1950, we provided $15 million to the French and we also provided some military advisors. Six years later, the US Military Assistance Advisor Group (MAAG) assumes responsibility, from French, for training South Vietnamese forces. The following year, thirteen of these advisors were wounded in a bombing incident in Saigon. 1959 brought the deaths of Major Dale R. Buis and Master Sergeant Chester M. when guerillas struck at Bienhoa. By the end of 1963, there are 16,300 U.S. military advisors in Vietnam.
On August 2, 1964 three North Vietnamese PT boats allegedly fire torpedoes at the USS TURNER JOY and the USS MADDOX , which were located in the international waters of the Tonkin Gulf, some thirty miles off the coast of North Vietnam. The attack comes after six months of covert US and South Vietnamese naval operations. A second, even more highly disputed attack, is alleged to have taken place on August 4. It was learned later that these attacks did NOT happen. (Remember the WMD in Iraq?)
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is approved by Congress on August 7, 1964 and authorizes President Lyndon Johnson to "take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The resolution passes unanimously in the House, and by a margin of 82-2 in the Senate. The Resolution allowed President Johnson to wage all out war against North Vietnam without ever securing a formal Declaration of War from Congress. (Doesn’t this look like what happened when President Bush was given similar authority the tragedy of September 11, 1991, to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.")
By the close of 1964, the U.S. had 23,000 military advisors on the ground. I don’t think Congress or anyone else had any idea that more than a decade would go by before we abandoned our war efforts in Vietnam.
In February 1965, General William Westmoreland, our military commander in Vietnam requests two battalions of Marines to protect the Danang airbase. The first American combat troops, 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade landed in Danang in March 1965. Just over four years later (April 1969) there are 543,400 American forces in Vietnam. At this same time, 33,641 Americans have been killed—more than we lost in the Korean War. We began to grow weary of the war and President Richard M. Nixon meets with South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu to inform him that American troop strengths are going to be drastically reduced. A month after meeting with Thieu, Nixon sends a secret letter to Ho Chi Minh seeking and end to the war. In August 1969 Henry Kissinger secretly meets representatives of the Hanoi government in Paris to begin serious negotiations on a peace settlement. Troop withdrawals are started and by the end of 1969 some 115,000 American troops have come home. The death toll has grown to 40,024. By June of 1970, the Senate repeals the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, but the fighting continues.
Seven years later that last of the American combat troops are withdrawn, but there are more than 16,000 advisors still in-country. Although the Paris peace agreement is signed in January 1973, it takes two more years, 30 April 1975 before the last 10 Marines are finally evacuated. You remember the picture of the helicopter leaving from the roof of the embassy. So regardless of how you want to count it, 15 years or 30 years, we lost some 58,000 killed, 153,329 wounded and nearly 2,000 still missing in action. We dropped more bombs than in all of World War II and Korea combined. Their combined explosive power was perhaps 100 times as much as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Children of those who served are still feeling the effects of the tens of thousand of gallons of Agent Orange we sprayed.
And our exit strategy—we tucked our tails between our collective legs, came home and licked our wounds.
Is this to be our fate in Afghanistan and Iraq? Will we be there 15 years or 30 year? We couldn’t win in Vietnam with 500,000 troops, how are we going to win in Afghanistan with 150,000? Or 200,000 or 300,000 or … What is our exit strategy?
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