cryptogon.com news – analysis – conspiracies

June 26th, 2010

This is a decent article, but I’m not sure what to take away from it.

I was reading the article mainly to see what all the fuss was about; the dramatic summoning of McChrystal to the White House, the resignation, the media obsessed with talk of insubordination, etc.

The comments that were critical of the Obama regime (which seemed like drunk talk among a bunch of maniacs) didn’t even register with me as I took in the wider picture of the catastrophic boondoggle in Afghanistan.

But is it really a catastrophic boondoggle?

Here’s the most important sentence in the piece below: “The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there.” Take any class in Small Wars 101 and you will learn that the U.S. has no chance for “victory” in Afghanistan, in any common sense interpretation of the term. So, check your so-called normal sensibilities at the door.

There are, however, a few metrics by which “victory” for the U.S. in Afghanistan may be measured.

First of all, the fact that mayhem continues is a victory for the corporations that profit from the absurd war-related contracts.

There’s the unknown billions of heroin related dollars that are generated from covert operations in Afghanistan. The transformation of Afghanistan into a narcostate is a victory for black money operators.

Ultimately, victory will mean that Afghanistan becomes pacified in a manner that facilities effortless corporate rape. The purpose of the U.S. military is to tie the victim down. Then, the people in the suits step into the room…

What did you guys take from this McChrystal spectacle, if anything?

Via: Rolling Stone:

“The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

…

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a “bleeding ulcer.” In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. “This is going to end in an argument.”

…

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn’t read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman’s death. “If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public,” he wrote, it could cause “public embarrassment” for the president.

“The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat’s true actions,” wrote Tillman’s mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the “golden boy” of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman’s death, McChrystal

was promoted to major general.

…

“They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable,” says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. “That’s the game we’re in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn’t get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future.”

…

The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there.