Gen. Stanley McChrystal - Tag Search

U.S. defense secretary Robert Gates deserves some credit for his fairly reasoned and non-triumphal public statements during this week's trip to Afghanistan. He warned against over-optimism in Afghanistan, stressing that there are "dark days" ahead and that the quick "clear" phase in Marja doesn't suddenly mean the war is won (or even that Operation Moshtarak is won).

In Now Zad yesterday, he commended soldiers and Marines for clearing the area of Taliban, but then said "you own it" -- and warned of a complicated path ahead.

Pakistani officials say they've arrested another senior Taliban leader in Karachi. Agha Jan Motasim, an aide to Mullah Omar, has been missing for two weeks; military sources said today that he was detained.

The Pakistani government won't give the U.S. access to most of its detainees, so nobody's sure exactly how many members of the Quetta Shura they've arrested -- maybe half, maybe more, maybe less -- but it is clearly a significant number. So I tend to think we've settled the question of whether these arrests are a deliberate effort or just dumb luck.

I'm trying to figure out the logic behind NATO's latest rhetorical pivot.

I expected the Marja triumphalism -- the arrival of NATO's hand-picked governor, Haji Zahir, and the well-publicized flag-raising ceremony. Commanders said today that they've finished the "clear" phase of "clear-hold-build-transfer"; a press release from ISAF said NATO and Afghan soldiers have "cleared the last major pocket of resistance," though -- as with past Helmand surges -- the definition of "cleared" isn't necessarily what you think.

Dexter Filkins, who Josh Foust recently dubbed "ISAF's official spokesman at the New York Times," has a remarkably upbeat analysis of the war in Afghanistan in today's week-in-review section. Filkins mentions several times that he, personally, feels optimistic about the direction of the war -- and builds to this conclusion (emphasis mine).

At week's end, by all accounts, the Marja operation was going well. In Pakistan, Mr. Baradar was said to be talking. After four long years, the initiative, at least for now, had returned to the Americans.

The U.S. is fighting a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. Much ink has been spilled over the last few months about how the war is now population-centric, not enemy-centric; how "hearts and minds" matter more than body counts.

If you go to Google News and search for "Marja," you'll find (literally) about 4,000 stories, most of which are rewrites of the same set of ISAF talking points: 20,000 NATO and Afghan troops are gearing up to attack the Taliban; Marja is the Taliban's last refuge in southern Afghanistan; the battle will be the most important military operation in eight years; etc., etc.

Very few of these bother to point out the inherent contradictions in Operation Moshtarak -- like the conflict between this enemy-centric offensive and NATO's stated population-centric strategy.

Things are already getting better in Afghanistan, according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

The commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, noted that last summer he believed security in Afghanistan was at risk of significant decline, but that he felt differently now. "I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner," he cautioned. "So I'm saying that the situation is serious but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress, and that we'll make real progress in 2010."

Listen, I understand that there's a certain damned if you do, damned if you don't quality to McChrystal's public pronouncements about the war. But why not say to the press, listen, guys, the boss just announced his new strategy in December, Holbrooke just unveiled his civilian plan a few weeks ago, most of the surge troops haven't arrived yet, and it's too early to make any pronouncements -- but we're confident this strategy will work.

Instead McChrystal says things have improved in the last two months -- not really a defensible proposition, and also not one that helps a counterinsurgency strategy in the long term, because it cements in the public mind the illusion of quick and easy progress.

An anonymous British diplomat -- those were the ground rules, sorry (I hate background briefings) -- says Thursday's London conference on Afghanistan will focus on three broad areas of the civilian strategy.

• "Reassurance to the Afghan people," which includes governance and economic development -- basically, quality-of-life issues;

• "Some form of outreach to the insurgency," which will include both reintegration and reconciliation;

• "A regional aspect to the future of Afghanistan," or an effort to align Afghanistan's interests with those of its neighbors, particularly Pakistan and Iran.

The anonymous diplomat stressed that the conference will not cover military strategy; he said (repeatedly) that NATO civilian leaders are confident in Gen. Stanley McChrystal's approach.

Spencer Ackerman reports this morning that, while the number of U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan has increased, the number of civilian casualties caused by U.S. troops has dropped.

Those numbers are certainly encouraging for the U.S. and NATO: Counterinsurgency theory stresses that you shouldn't kill the population you're trying to protect. But I'm not sure (contra Ackerman) that there's anything surprising about this trend.

Update: Exum responded to me by e-mail, but I don't have permission to use it yet. However, I think it is safe (and important) to tell readers this: Exum did not advise the Obama campaign on Afghan issues. That renders moot most of my concerns regarding conflicts of interest and re-judging Exum's writings in context. More to come later.

A sharp critique of U.S. military intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, written by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top intelligence officer in the country, is making waves in Washington, D.C.; even, it seems, inside Flynn's own place of business -- the Pentagon -- which on Tuesday seemed a little taken aback by his decision to publish the article -- which doubles as an official directive -- through the Center for a New American Security.

"I think it struck everybody as a little bit curious, yes ... My sense is that this was an anomaly and that we probably won't see that (in the future)," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters. "It was an unusual and irregular way to publish a document of this nature."

I think Flynn made a bold, honest and correct decision -- he lived up to the expectation of information sharing that he has now demanded from his own officers. (Cynically speaking, he's also made himself look like a great think tank candidate, should he find that the wind leaves his sails after uncorking a grenade like this.)

I took yesterday off from blogging to catch up on some "real" work, so I'm just now reading up on the latest developments from Afghanistan.

First, there was a bit of good news yesterday: Kai Eide, the head of the United Nations mission in Kabul, announced that he will step down when his term ends in March. Eide insists this isn't a resignation -- "I'm just not renewing my contract," he said yesterday. But it's clear that he sees the writing on the wall, after months of controversy over his handling of the Afghan election.

I started writing a post this morning about the incoherent military operations in Afghanistan that have followed Obama's surge announcement. I left it unfinished because I had to run to Capitol Hill for an interview about Lebanon; I came back to this tweet from Matt Yglesias, which sums up my thoughts quite well:

Too many words being written generals testifying on the Hill, not enough about actual events in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry really did not make news in their first round of congressional testimony yesterday -- despite the thousands of stories and blog posts written about the hearings.

I'm alternately amused and annoyed when I read headlines like McChrystal backs Afghan plan to skeptical Congress. McChrystal is an officer in the United States military; the president of the United States is his boss. He has a simple choice: He can support the president's plan, or he can resign. If he does the former, it's not newsworthy.

Same goes for headlines about how McChrystal thinks the war plan will succeed. What did everyone expect? That he would take the witness stand yesterday and say, "sorry, guys, we're fucked"?

Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry start their first of three days of testimony later this morning. Today they'll appear before the House Armed Services committee at 9:30 a.m. and the Senate Armed Services committee at 1:30 p.m.; tomorrow, the Senate Foreign Affairs committee, at 10:00 a.m.; and Thursday, the House Foreign Affairs committee, at 9:30 a.m.

I can't attend any of the hearings, regrettably, though I will try and watch at least one of them on television.

And perhaps I shouldn't regret having better things to do. I'm sure the hearings will be great political theater, but will they be informative? Wired's Danger Room blog posted a great set of questions -- from Robert Farley, Joshua Foust and others -- that Congress should ask the general and the ambassador. My guess, though, is that less than half of these actually get asked.

Juan Cole posted an interesting list of the top 10 things that could derail Obama's Afghan strategy. Spencer Ackerman's stunt-double-for-the-day highlights the second one -- Tajik "domination" of the Afghan army -- and concludes:

This Tajik-Pashtun tension leads to critiques like Gilles Dorronsoro's (h/t Yglesias), that NATO forces should basically cede the Pashtun regions while working to improve quality-of-life in the rest of the country. But I think much of this hinges on just how reconcileable/irreconcileable the Pashtun population really is.

On the first point, ceding the Pashtun regions, I think Nicholas Beaudrot (Ackerman's guest blogger) fundamentally misreads the argument. Critics of surging into Helmand and Kandahar (myself included) aren't worried about tensions between the ANA and the Pahstun population of those provinces.

Pajhwok has been posting and tweeting reactions to Obama's Afghan strategy from actual Afghans. They seem, for the most part, fairly disillusioned.

Criticisms cut along a few common themes. One: More troops? What have NATO troops done for us so far? There's a lot of talk about how the Afghan people have lost confidence in Western troops.

Fred Kaplan, one of the first journalists to write approvingly of bribing Pashtun tribes, doubled down on the idea in his Slate column yesterday. Kaplan says he's encouraged by recent reports on the Community Defense Initiative, a U.S. program to arm and fund Afghan tribal militias.

Kevin Drum, a blogger at Mother Jones magazine, reads Kaplan's article and declares tribal militias "pretty much our only hope."

If that's the case, NATO might as well pack up and go home, because the war is definitely unwinnable.

The U.S. military is obviously trying to spread the word about its new program to arm and fund Afghan tribal militias (dubbed the "Community Defense Initiative"). Dexter Filkins and Jon Boone have articles about it in the New York Times and the Guardian, respectively; David Ignatius, possibly our least favorite columnist, writes about it favorably in today's Washington Post.

The mostly-positive coverage overlooks one basic fact: Similar strategies have been tried before in Afghanistan -- by the British, the Soviets, the U.S. -- and they have not been successful. Not once. Trying the same strategy again is either ignorance or hubris (or both).

I'm sure many of you have spent the last few months despairing over Barack Obama's foreign policy in the Muslim world and wondering, "What would Sarah Palin do?" Wonder no more: ABC's Barbara Walters got the answers. And it's pretty clear Palin hasn't done much foreign affairs reading since the election.

David Kilcullen, the Australian counterinsurgency guru who advised Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq, gave an hour-long talk tonight at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The talk was broadly about counterinsurgency in U.S. foreign policy, but Kilcullen spent a good deal of time on the big story of the day: Afghanistan.

Kilcullen told The Guardian last week that Obama should either go big or go home to avoid a "Suez-like" disaster in Afghanistan. He elaborated on those comments tonight, explaining why he felt the middle ground was so dangerous. And he argued -- perhaps inadvertently -- that the strategies reportedly being considered by the Obama administration move too slowly, and give the Taliban time to adapt.