McChystal episode reveals a war without coherence

Joshua Holland's article focuses on the media interest on General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding military officer in Afghanistan. The article appearing in the magazine Rolling Stone. Written by Matt Hastings, he reports on "derogatory comments McChrystal and his staff made about the White House. Media pundits and hosts are speculating on whether President Obama will fire McChrystal from his job because of the general's insubordination. While this part of Hastings' story has been covered widely in the media, the most important part of the story, Holland points out, is overlooked, namely, that the US-led war and occupation in Afghanistan is failing and has no coherent direction. Military leaders think that with enough time and more troops the war in Afghanistan can still be won. Here are excerpts from Holland's article.

Dont Let the McChrystal Frenzy Obscure the Dirty Truth About Afghanistan
By Joshua Holland, Printed on June 23, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/147302/

It should come as no surprise that General Stanley McChrystal’s return to Washington to explain a series of derogatory comments he and his staff made about the White House has ignited a media frenzy.

[....]

....the most important part of Hastings’ article is largely being ignored by the corporate media.

Hastings told a tale of a project with no hope for success. His story shows us that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is all about tactics dressed up as a strategy. It’s a profile of a military establishment running on inertia -- unable to withdraw because withdrawing is an admission of defeat, but also unable to accomplish the wholly unrealistic tasks put before it.
This is perhaps the most revealing passage from Hastings’ report:

"[Team Obama] 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."

...."If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further.

[....]

Anan Gobal noted that in 2008, after seven years of fighting, less than a third of the country was under the control of the central government in Kabul, and added: “Many say even that is now an optimistic assessment.” Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the Pentagon was making cash payments to Afghan warlords. According to Bloomberg, “Contractors told congressional investigators they believe that, in turn, the ‘warlords make protection payments to insurgents’ who are fighting the U.S.”

[....]

According to a report released in January, the U.S.-backed government is also awash in corruption, which Afghans now view “as a bigger concern than security and unemployment.” The government we’re backing may be extracting as much as one quarter of Afghanistan’s gross national product in bribes. And Karzai’s own brother has been implicated in Afghanistan’s rich drug trade.

[....]

Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress didn’t miss what lies at the heart of the Rolling Stone report. “The significance of this food fight is not in what was said,” he wrote, “but in what it says about where the United States is in Afghanistan":

What has become apparent is that … the mythic status now given to the surge in Iraq led to a significant degree of over-confidence on the part of McChrystal and others about their ability to turn the Afghan war around after it had utterly deteriorated year after year under the neglectful watch of the Bush administration.


Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.