Enemy of Troops as CIC Not Listening to Generals nor Troops!

Is It Amateur Hour in the White House?
newsweek
Analysis: the leak of Gen. McChrystal’s report shows the Obama administration is mishandling Afghanistan.
The administration’s handling of Afghanistan policy has been amateur hour. The leak of General Stanley McChrystal’s assessment of the dire situation there faces President Obama with by far his most serious foreign-policy challenge. It’s also a challenge to what appears to be his whole approach to foreign policy.
Buzz about the leak of McChrystal’s report focuses on two questions. Who slipped the document to the great Bob Woodward of the Washington Post? That’s fun, but not serious. And who’s responsible for allowing President Obama to get into this mess? That is serious.
What mess? That, of course, is the administration’s immediate spin. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even maintained—under politely insistent inquiry by The Newshour’s Margaret Warner—that while Gen. McChrystal might be making one set of recommendations, the administration is talking with others who disagree. Really? Is Obama running an administration where an analysis required of a four-star general confirmed into his job by the Senate—an analysis drafted by an international civilian and military team of experts recruited for the task—can be second-guessed by some guy someone at State knows in a think tank? What’s worrying about this administration is that the answer may be: yes.
In his campaign, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq but safeguarded his national-security credentials by supporting the war in Afghanistan. A war, he said, America had to win—but to which, he charged, the Bush administration had failed to devote the necessary resources. In office, Obama ordered up a new Afghanistan strategy, and announced this on March 27 as the product of what he called “a careful policy review.” Shorn of rhetoric, the new strategy actually accepted all the Bush administration’s goals in Afghanistan—defeating the insurgents; preventing Al Qaeda from reestablishing a sanctuary there; working to set up a democratic and effective government; training Afghan forces to take over from U.S. troops; coaxing the international community to give more help. The review even added a new goal: saving Pakistan—or, as the review put it, “assisting efforts to enhance civilian control and stable constitutional government in Pakistan and a vibrant economy that provides opportunities for the people of Pakistan. And to accomplish this breath-taking set of objectives? Obama had already agreed to send another 17,000 troops to Afghanistan to safeguard polling in the Afghan presidential election in August. Now, as part of his new strategy, he agreed to send an additional 4,000 troops to train Afghanistan’s own forces.
What remains a mystery is whether Obama thought those 21,000 would be enough, or whether he was ducking a tough decision to send the numbers really needed. If he did believe 21,000 would suffice, who was advising him? The strategy Obama adopted—one that he inherited from a rethink all but completed in the last months of the Bush presidency—was what the military calls COIN: counter-insurgency. That means protecting the Afghan population from the Taliban and their allies so they can then be wooed into supporting the government and then, hopefully, turning in the insurgents. Whether counter-insurgency is a plausible strategy in Afghanistan is much debated within the military. But that’s the strategy Obama adopted in March. What was always clear was that COIN would need thousands more troops. The mystery is whether Obama realized this.
Even at the start of the year, the then commander in country, General David McKiernan, was asking for 10,000 more combat troops than the 17,000 Obama agreed. The administration decided to defenestrate McKiernan in May. A new strategy required a new commander. Now Obama’s new handpicked commander, Gen Stanley McChrystal, has concluded that he will need another 45,000 troops to carry out Obama’s strategy. Plus, by the way, a vastly expanded, better organized, and costly effort to carry out the civic improvement projects that are an essential part of COIN strategy.
McChrystal hasn’t plucked his demand for troops from thin air. They are the product of what the Army calls a TTT analysis—TTT meaning “troops to task”: how many troops to cover X thousand square miles of that desolate country, and protect Y millions of its population. McChrystal’s math is that to cover six vital provinces in southern and eastern Afghanistan under the most urgent threat from the Taliban and its allies, and to bring security to the Afghans living in them, will take close to 45,000 additional troops. (The analysis allows for U.S. troops to replace European units soon to leave the south, plus a few to shore up the north.) McChrystal was planning to submit this troop demand as an appendix to his overall assessment. Now, at the command of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, McChrystal has submitted to two constraints. He has postponed sending up these calculations until the administration chooses to ask for them. And he has refined his needs into three categories: reinforcements of 10,000, 30,000, and 45,000. The administration will certainly call these “options.” They’re not; they’re “risk assessments.” Given only 30,000, McChrystal has calculated, he will have to leave important areas of south and east Afghanistan unprotected. Given only 10,000, more areas will remain unprotected. (McChrystal’s numbers, though not formally submitted, are circulating in Washington like samizdat writings banned in the Soviet Union.)
Suddenly, the strategy Obama announced in March is being ditched. Back then, Obama said that Afghanistan had not received (from the Bush administration) “the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently needs.” Specifically, he charged, the resources U.S. commanders needed “have been denied.” “Now, that will change,” he said. As late as last month, Obama was declaring the struggle in Afghanistan “a war of necessity” where victory was “fundamental to the defense of our people.”
That, it appears, was then. Now, faced with the bleak assessment of the general he sent out to turn things round, Obama is equivocating, saying: “One of the things I’m absolutely clear about is that you have to get the strategy right, and then make a determination about resources.” He has ordered yet another review of strategy, a review which the chairman of the joint chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, said was going back to “the first principles, if you will.”
What’s going on ? The March 27 “White Paper” laid out what Obama called his administration’s “comprehensive new strategy.”
The administration spin is that the debacle of the Afghan presidential elections, which President Hamid Karzai appears to have won by industrial-strength vote-rigging, has altered the situation. That’s nonsense. Everyone knew Karzai would do whatever it took to win. (The U.S. in practice settled for that months ago, having tried but failed to find a plausible competitor to Karzai.) If the U.S. does have vital national interests at stake in the region, those remain, no matter how disputed the Afghan government is (or however ineffective the government in Pakistan). Lousy local governments just make the job tougher.
Now though, Obama and his administration give every sign of being torn, unable to decide to fulfill Obama’s pledge to resource this “war of necessity.” Meanwhile Obama is losing control of the debate about Afghanistan back home. Congressional heavyweights like Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, have voiced their doubts about U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The administration has been trying to prevent Gen. McChrystal from coming back to give Congress his views. That was always short-sighted; now that his assessment has leaked, it’s untenable.
Afghanistan is by far Obama’s toughest foreign-policy test. Iran, North Korea and the Israeli/Palestinian impasse are important issues. In each, Obama finds himself confronting a collision between rhetoric and reality. But those are tests of diplomatic adroitness and leverage. Afghanistan too has turned into a test between rhetoric and reality. But Afghanistan is different. It’s also a sensitive domestic issue, because what is immediately at stake are the lives of American kids in uniform.
Comparisons with Vietnam may be overblown, and are certainly misguided in detail. But the political parallel seems ever more appropriate. Like Lyndon Johnson, Obama has inherited from his predecessor a messy war with only indirect connections to vital U.S. national interests. LBJ had a soaring domestic agenda, but he didn’t know how to handle Vietnam. Obama, with comparable domestic ambitions, appears not to know how to handle Afghanistan. Vietnam sank LBJ’s presidency in his first term. Afghanistan could do the same to Obama.

The roads are so littered with enemy bombs that nearly all transport and resupply to this base occurs by helicopter. The pilots roar through the darkness, swoop into small bases nestled in the saddle of enemy territory, and quickly rumble off into the night.

A witness must spend only a short time in the darkness to know we are at war. Flares arc into the night, or mortar illumination rounds drift and swing under parachutes, orange and eerily in the distance, casting long, flickering but sharply defined shadows. The worst that can happen is that you will be caught in an open field, covered by nothing and concealed only by darkness, when the illumination suddenly bathes you in light. Best is to stay low and freeze and prepare to fire, or in the case of a writer, to stay low and freeze and prepare to watch the firing.

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With the war increasing, Air Force Pararescue has been crisscrossing the skies picking up casualties.

Images and descriptions from Michael Yon’s blog
Thank you Michael for all you do!!!

Troops React to McChrystal Report
New York Daily News

The soldiers I have talked to in Afghanistan say they would welcome more troops, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal has recommended – any help they can get to get out of here and get back home.

The war here is under-resourced, under-funded and until recently largely ignored in favor of the war in Iraq. There is double the number of troops in Iraq than in Afghanistan right now – and many wonder why Iraq was allowed to distract us from the gains made here early on in the war.
But even if more troops are sent to Afghanistan – it’s not enough, they say. The key to winning – whatever that means – is getting the Afghan government and security forces to stand up for themselves and to stop the corruption that is so prevalent here. The soldiers can train Afghan army and police all day long, but until there is a comittment on their part to make things better, it won’t do any good.
The sense is that U.S. and NATO troops are just holding on here, doing what they can during their deployment until the next unit comes along. They understand the need to protect the people – a main tenent of counterinsurgency – but that also means fighting the enemy. And that has become more difficult as McChrystal and Afghan President Hamid Karzai continue to require that Afghan security forces accompany them on patrols and arrests. Simply put, that’s just not a realistic request. There are too few Afghan forces here and the ones that are on the payroll often don’t bother to show up to work.
Still, even if more troops and more Afghan forces were in place to combat the enemy and provide security for the people – many soldiers question the end-game in Afghanistan – especially as Pakistan and other nations continue to provide a safe haven for the bad guys.

As one soldier put it to me: “It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. You hit one and they pop up somewhere else.”

All said, the soldiers here are dedicated. They want nothing more than to make a difference. They want to “win” – not only to make the world a safer place, but for the friends they have lost in this long, deadly war.

McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan
by Bill Roggio
Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal’s team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn’t given sufficient resources (read “troops”) to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan:
Adding to the frustration, according to officials in Kabul and Washington, are White House and Pentagon directives made over the last six weeks that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, not submit his request for as many as 45,000 additional troops because the administration isn’t ready for it.
In the last two weeks, top administration leaders have suggested that more American troops will be sent to Afghanistan, and then called that suggestion “premature.” Earlier this month, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “time is not on our side”; on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urged the public “to take a deep breath.”
In Kabul, some members of McChrystal’s staff said they don’t understand why Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” but still hasn’t given them the resources they need to turn things around quickly.
Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he’d stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy.

“Yes, he’ll be a good soldier, but he will only go so far,” a senior official in Kabul said. “He’ll hold his ground. He’s not going to bend to political pressure.”

On Thursday, Gates danced around the question of when the administration would be ready to receive McChrystal’s request, which was completed in late August. “We’re working through the process by which we want that submitted,” he said.
The entire process followed by the military in implementing a change of course in Afghanistan is far different, and bizarrely so, from the process it followed in changing strategy in Iraq.
For Afghanistan, the process to decide on a course change began in March of this year, when Bruce Reidel was tasked to assess the situation. This produced the much-heralded yet vague “AfPak” assessment. Then, in May, General David McKiernan was fired and replaced by General McChrystal, who took command in June. General McChrystal’s assessment hit President Obama’s desk at the end of August, almost three months after he took command. And yet now in the last half of September, the decision on additional forces has yet to be submitted to the administration.
Contrast this with Iraq in the fall of 2006. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was fired just one day after the elections in early November. The Keane-Kagan plan for Iraq was submitted to President Bush shortly afterward, and encompassed both the assessment of the situation and the recommended course of action, including the recommended number of troops to be deployed to deal with the situation. General David Petraeus replaced General George Casey in early February 2007, and hit the ground running; the surge strategy was in place, troops were being mustered to deploy to Iraq, and commanders on the ground were preparing for and executing the new orders. The first of the surge units began to arrive in Iraq only weeks later, in March.
Today, the military is perceiving that the administration is punting the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and the military is even questioning the administration’s commitment to succeed in Afghanistan. The leaking of the assessment and the report that McChrystal would resign if he is not given what is needed to succeed constitute some very public pushback against the administration’s waffling on Afghanistan.

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Wild Thing’s comment…….
Good article, gets into how McChrystal arrived at his numbers. Surprising to find it it Newsweek. It’s being in Newsweek means that the One really is in trouble.
Obama is nothing more then a community organizer if that, he’s all about government social welfare programs for the inner city…he’s a military illiterate with a non-American upbringing and no world view….he’s the same as Maxine Waters or Shiela Jackson Lee.
And this was on CNN….”Now, President Obama has to man up and decide: is he going to fight this war or is he going to oversee an American defeat…..said by the vile horrible Michael Ware to the almost as horrible Anderson Cooper.
Obama has no policy for Afghanistan, he ONLY has R.O.E. for our troops.
Damn Barack Hussein Obama to the eternal flames of hell
Michael Yon has also posted Kagans’ report (from AEI) re: AfPak. It reflects what McChrystal (and many others) are saying. Bambi better get off his butt and get moving.
Afghanistan Force Requirements (PDF) – Kagan Report

Obama’s R.O.E.s

“AMBUSHED MARINES’AID CALL REJECTED”

“NATO-led forces are investigating the death of four Marines in eastern Afghanistan after their commanders reportedly rejected requests for artillery fire in a battle with insurgents, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. Tuesday’s incident was “under investigation” and details remained unclear, press secretary Geoff Morrell told a news conference. A McClatchy newspapers’ journalist who witnessed the battle reported that a team of Marine trainers made repeated appeals for air and artillery support after being pinned down by insurgents in the village of Ganjgal in eastern Kunar province. The U.S. troops had to wait more than an hour for attack helicopters to come to their aid and their appeal for artillery fire was rejected, with commanders citing new rules designed to avoid civilian casualties, the report said.”

“WE’RE PINNED DOWN:’4 U.S. MARINES DIE IN AFGAN ABUSH”
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.

“GIS TOLD NOT TO RISK CIVILIAN LIVES”
KABUL — Beginning today, American Soldiers in Afghanistan will be under orders to back down when they’re chasing Taliban fighters whenever they think that civilians might be at risk.
“General McChrystal has been given instructions when he left here that, in all military operations, that we redouble our efforts to make sure that innocent loss of life is minimized, with zero being the goal,” Jones said, noting that, “In one mishap you can create thousands more terrorists than you had before the mishap.”
The new order, however, is likely to draw criticism from some U.S. troops, many of whom feel the rules that govern how they fight the war already are too restrictive.
Many troops here say they depend on air power and heavy weaponry because there aren’t enough ground troops to chase Taliban forces on foot. Jones said no additional ground troops will be sent this year, even though some ground commanders want them.

“Everybody had their day in court, so to speak, before the president made his decision,” he said. “We signed off on the strategy, and now we’re in the implementation phase.”

McChrystal’s order will instruct Soldiers to “think about what else can we do,” said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the military’s top spokesman in Afghanistan. “We cannot keep going down the path of putting civilians at risk. … People want to see changes in behavior.”

“OBAMA’S RULES OF ENGAGEMENT IN AFGHANISTAN COSTING OUR TROOPS LIVES”
Four U.S. Marines died Tuesday when they walked into a well-laid ambush by insurgents in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province. Seven Afghan troops and an interpreter for the Marine commander also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle, which lasted seven hours.
Three American service members and 14 Afghan security force members were wounded.
It was the largest number of American military trainers to die in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.
The battle took place around the remote hamlet of Gangigal, in a valley about six miles from the Pakistani border, after local elders invited the U.S. and Afghan forces for a meeting.
American officers said there was no doubt that they’d walked into a trap, as the insurgents were dug in at the village, and had preset their weapons and their fields of fire.
It was a trap alright….but one they could of extradited themselves out of if not for the rules of engagement laid out by Obama’s General, General Stanley McChrystal:

Airstrikes by coalition forces in Afghanistan have dropped dramatically in the three months Gen. Stanley McChrystal has led the war effort there, reflecting his new emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties and protecting the population.

NATO fixed-wing aircraft dropped 1,211 bombs and other munitions during the past three months — the peak of the fighting season — compared with 2,366 during the same period last year, according to military statistics. The nearly 50% decline in airstrikes comes with an influx of more than 20,000 U.S. troops this year and an increase in insurgent attacks.

The shift is the result of McChrystal’s new directives, said Air Force Col. Mark Waite, an official at the air operations center in southwest Asia. Ground troops are less inclined to call for bombing or strafing runs, though they often have an aircraft conduct a “show of force,” a flyby to scare off insurgents, or use planes for surveillance, Waite said.

“BAGRAM INMATES CAN CHALLENGE DETENTION: PENTAGON”
The Pentagon is to give some 600 prisoners held in the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, the right to challenge their detention, Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said Monday.

“It’s basically a review procedure that ensures people go in front of a panel periodically to give them the opportunity to contest their detention,” he told reporters.

The inmates would be aided by a uniformed “personal representative” who would “guide them through this administrative process, to help gather witness statements,” Whitman added.

“ANALYSIS: WHITE HOUSE POSTPONING HARD CALLS ON WAR”
The Obama administration is holding off major decisions that could put its military forces on a firmer war footing in Afghanistan even as doubts grow about whether the United States can win there.
Many military and diplomatic leaders have urged President Barack Obama to send thousands more Marines, soldiers and pilots to try to reverse Afghanistan’s crumbling security situation.

But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has said no decision about adding troops is expected for “weeks and weeks,” following what he described as intensive evaluation. The troop decision will be a first indicator of whether Obama intends to double down in Afghanistan, becoming a wartime president in earnest.

“NO DEADLINE FOR TROOPS WITHDRAWAL FROM AFGHANISTAN: OBAMA ADMN”
The Obama Administration has declined to set a deadline for withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, arguing that the situation there is different from that of Iraq and 9/11 plotters are still holed up in the Af-Pak region and planning attack against the US.

“We have a different situation in Afghanistan. It is actually the place that – Afghanistan and Pakistan – where the folks who attacked us on 9/11 are holed up and plotting against us still,” David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to the US President, told the NBC news channel in an interview.

“MILITARY LEERY OF AFGHANISTAN ESCALATION WITH NO CLEAR GOALS”
As the Obama administration and Congress begin a heated debate about how many more American troops to send to Afghanistan, military observers, soldiers on the ground there and some top Pentagon officials are warning that dispatching even tens of thousands more soldiers and Marines might not ensure success.
Some even fear that deploying more U.S. troops, especially in the wake of a U.S. airstrike last week that killed and wounded scores of Afghan civilians, would convince more Afghans that the Americans are occupiers rather than allies and relieve the pressure on the Afghan government to improve its own security forces.
The heart of the problem, soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and some officials in Washington told McClatchy, is that neither Barack Obama’s White House nor the Pentagon has clearly defined America’s mission in Afghanistan. As a result, some soldiers in the field said, they aren’t sure what their objectives are.
Current officials and military officers who’re wary of escalation refused to speak on the record because they aren’t authorized to talk to the media and because doing so would be hazardous to their careers.

“Gen. McChrystal’s latest assessment reportedly indicates that the situation in Afghanistan is ‘serious,’ ” said former deputy secretary of state and Pentagon official Richard Armitage, referring to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan. “President Obama needs to define, more clearly than he has so far, what our country’s objectives in Afghanistan are and his strategy for achieving them. Without that, it’s impossible to assess whether the mission requires additional troops.”

“U.N. LAWYERS TARGET U.S. TROOPS”

“Justice: As if fighting a war in Afghanistan isn’t hard enough, ambitious global prosecutors have rolled into Kabul looking to charge U.S. troops. Intentional or not, such legalism will sap U.S. morale as it did in Vietnam.

At about the time NATO’s new secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned NATO’s European members against an early pullout, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, whose body is charged with looking for international war criminals, announced he was looking for new “clients” from anyone with a grievance in Afghanistan.
At a briefing Wednesday in The Hague, Moreno-Ocampo said he had launched a new war crimes inquiry, seeking information about “torture” especially — a European obsession — and had already mined the human rights groups for stories. He added he was also “very open” to more information from foreign governments.
Oh, he’d been evenhanded in his Monday-morning battlefield quarterbacking of course, promising he’d prosecute both Taliban and NATO troops as moral equals.
But it doesn’t take a genius to know what the spotlight-loving attorney (who once launched his own reality TV show back in Argentina) is really after: Americans in the dock as war criminals.
Ground intelligence sources who might have warned them were reportedly more fearful of Taliban retaliation than convinced that American troops would be able to defend them, given the weakening will of the West. They opted to survive.
Now, the latest legalistic block against winning is an international prosecutor looking for NATO troops to prosecute.
Back in 2002, President Bush told the ICC that there wouldn’t be any of that, and he rescinded the U.S. signature from the Rome Statute that would have opened the door to that. Today, there’s a legal battle going on at the ICC to make U.S. troops subject to doing it and there’s no signal from the White House that it will stop it.
Don’t think Moreno-Ocampo won’t do it. His history as a prosecutor suggests an affinity for publicity over justice, which is just what the anti-American crowd wants.