New Afghanistan Commander limits civilian airstrikes (real hearts & minds)

[TayTay]

U.S. Toughens Airstrike Policy in Afghanistan

By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: June 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/world/asia/22airstrikes.html?hp">New York Times Online

KABUL, Afghanistan — The new American commander in Afghanistan said he would sharply restrict the use of airstrikes here, in an effort to reduce the civilian deaths that he said were undermining the American-led mission.
In interviews over the past few days, the commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said the use of airstrikes during firefights would in most cases be allowed only to prevent American and other coalition troops from being overrun.

Even in the cases of active firefights with Taliban forces, he said, airstrikes will be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas — the very circumstances in which most Afghan civilian deaths have occurred. The restrictions will be especially tight in attacking houses and compounds where insurgents are believed to have taken cover.

“Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly,” General McChrystal told a group of his senior officers during a video conference last week. “We can lose this fight.”

This was done by order of General McChrystal. The early stages of the Iraq War were carried out with the same mindset that doomed a lot of what happened in Vietnam -- any kill of an enemy is a good kill and a step toward victory, whatever that meant. McChrystal's order here is a step toward defining victory: securing the native population, minimizing destruction and civilian casualties and making the civilian population more stable. That is the change in strategy since early 2007 in Iraq and now Afghanistan.

[karynnj]

1. This is a good step forward

I'm glad to see this, especially because of the concerns about McChyrstal.

[beachmom]

2. This is very promising, but let's see if they stick with it.

Thanks for the heads up, Tay. I consider Afghanistan your "beat".

[TayTay]

3. Thanks. But this is about an overall shift in military strategy everywhere

Afghanistan is joining the rest of the strategy. This is one that is playing out in Iraq and Pakistan as well.

The early part of the "War on Terror" was marked by military success in Afghanistan that was so sweeping and complete that commanders and politicians at home deemed it utterly won. Victory in Afghanistan set the stage for invasion in Iraq. America was going to clean out "terrorists" whenever and wherever we damn well felt like it. It was easy.

This was one of the fatal mistakes made in Iraq and remade in Afghanistan. Neither America nor any other country can purge the world of terrorism. (Terrorism is a tactic, not an event or a standing army or a politician. Terrorism is a tactic used to put fear and instability into a population to make it impossible to govern. All societies loath chaos and will choose order and that is how insurgencies hope to achieve power, through the use of disruptive tactics. This is how the Taliban came to power in the first place, they were a form of societal order.)

McChrystal is a living symbol of what the US has learned in 9 years. The neocon philosophy proposed that America could basically conquer the world and prevent other nations from challenging our global hegemony through force of arms and superior technology. 9/11 didn't teach us the right lessons, or we didn't have the right President and leadership in place to learn the right lessons. We learned cruelty and force. We learned to ignore the people we came to supposedly "liberate" and we showed them contempt and degraded them with torture.

America, under George Bush and the Neocons, became the "Evil Empire" of the world. The disconnect between what American citizens think we are saying to the rest of the world, and what our actions actually say to people we came in contact with is devastating. We are not the liberators. We are the people who came to steal the oil or other natural resources and would do anything to keep power. We became Big Brother from Orwell telling people that poverty means wealth and torture means freedom and so forth. We told Iraqis we were there to liberate them and then devastated their social structure and removed the means of stabilizing their society. (Without a stable government, there is no structure for freedom. Anarchy is not freedom, it is structureless and lethal chaos.)

McChrystal probably had people tortured and hid the evidence, as stated in articles that came out at the time he was nominated for his current command post. Yes, that is horrible. But it was also policy at the time. America believed it could impose it's will on the world and those who got in the way were evil and could be treated as subhumans without rights. (We are still having this conversation.)

What I have tried to follow is the change that has happened. 3 years ago, Sen. Kerry took up that lonely mission to begin a withdrawal process for our troops in Iraq. He and Sen. Feingold brought that Amendment to the floor that would have begun troop withdrawals three years ago this month. On first glance, they failed. But they didn't fail at all. That is what this is about.

We are no longer fighting a war against a people. We are fighting to protect people. That is a big, big change. It is not semantics, it is everything. Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis and all other people should have the right to live their lives free from the tyranny of an Osama bin Laden and his nutty philosophy of an oppressive caliphate that would catapult so many into a horribly backward and oppressive government.

America has a part to play in that global event. It is not the part of the Evil Empire though. We should seek to be smart partners who cooperate with our global neighbors to root out these backward movements that threaten the lives and real freedom of others. We can't do that through force of arms or superior technology. We just might be able to do it with genuine partnerships with our equals on the global stage. We just might be able to help if we honor our own commitment to "life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" as it exists in other cultures.

McChystal wants to lessen the amount of damage done to civilians. Bravo. This is just what we should be doing. It is the only way to show people that we are not the oppressors that the wacko fundamentalists say we are. We genuinely are there to assist other peoples in stabilizing their lands, governments and systems. They matter as people. In fact, they are the only thing that really matters.

This is change. This is what we fought for the last few years. This is what that lonely quest to talk about a withdrawal was all about.

And we are winning. This is the proof. We will emerge a better nation because of it.

Do you see this? IT is not about Afghanistan, per se. It is about America and how we will conduct ourselves from here on out. And there is still opposition to this. The current debate on how Obama should respond to the Iranian uprising shows that the neocons still think their way is the right way. They have not yet learned that there is an inherent contradiction in forcing freedom at the point of a gun. You can't force a democratic movement, it has to be grown internally. We can help on that, we cannot, however, do this for them.