The Desert Ox

As the New York Times reports, former Iraqi prime minister and U.S. sock puppet Iyad Allawi’s apparent victory in his country’s recent election sets up a "period of uncertainty" that may "threaten plans to withdraw American troops." Gen. Ray Odierno, the U.S. commander in Iraq who reminds one of John Candy’s character in the film Stripes, is likely creating seismic events as he jumps for joy.

Odierno, Gen. David Petraeus’ pet lummox, has been publicly pushing for an extended stay in Iraq since February 2009, when Petraeus canonizer and former journalist Thomas E. Ricks quoted him in the Washington Post as wanting to see a U.S. presence of "30,000 or so" U.S. troops in Iraq until 2015 (or so). Odierno’s statement to Ricks was part of a multimedia campaign to sell Ricks’ then-new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008,which itself was part of the ongoing propaganda campaign to extend the Iraq war for as long as humanly possible.

As Ricks inelegantly admitted in The Gamble, when Petraeus took charge of the Iraq surge strategy in early 2007 he did, in fact, "betray us." In 2007, Petraeus told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, “We’re after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage.” His plan, however was to pave the way for the Pentagon’s Long War, to buy the American public’s patience through artificially lowering violence statistics by bribing militantsand cooking the numbers.

In Fiasco, Rick’s first book on the Iraq war, published in 2006, Odierno comes off like a blob in a china shop, his "heavy-handed tactics" singularly responsible for the calamity the Iraq project flopped into after U.S. psych warfare operators staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue. By the timeThe Gamble hit the shelves in 2009, Odierno had undergone a "transformation."

Determined to "operate differently" in his second tour in Iraq, according to the Ricks narrative, Odierno "became the lone senior officer in the active-duty military to advocate a buildup of American troops in Iraq." Odierno communicated "almost daily by phone with retired general Jack Keane, an influential former Army vice chief of staff and his most important ally in Washington." Odierno conducted "his own strategic review," bypassing his superiors to launch a "guerrilla campaign for a change in direction in Iraq that eventually reversed almost every tenet of U.S. strategy."

Crediting Odierno with the intellectual capacity to have pulled off such a feat may be the premier example of journalistic humbuggery to emerge from our woebegone war on terror. Ricks characterizes Odierno as "the best of the Army’s conventional thinkers." If that’s true, it speaks tomes about the dismal quality of Army thinking, conventional or otherwise.

In The Gamble, Odierno admits to Ricks that when he left Iraq after his first tour, he "thought this thing was going well." It’s bad enough for him to have thought that, worse still to admit it to Ricks for public consumption after he’d supposedly undergone his "transformation."

Odie has said many things on the record that indicate he has the strategic acumen of the dog in a certain popular comic strip, but none so illustrative as his reaction to a memorandum written by Col. Timothy Reese in July 2009. Reese, who at the time was chief of the Baghdad Operations Advisory Team, noted that Iraq’s government and security forces are aswarm with corruption, laziness, nepotism, ineffectiveness, and a host of other malignancies. Odierno dismissed Reese’s concerns as mere "tactical issues."

Babe Odierno is smart about one thing though; he can test the winds and shift with them faster than any other general or flag officer I’ve ever seen. One minute he’s saying conditions may cause a delay in our scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, the next minute he’s saying the drawdown is still on schedule. I guess it depends on whom he talked to last, his war mongrel comrades who want him to talk up staying the course forever or somebody from the White House like Rahm Emanuel who threatens to turn his rear end into road pizza the next time he openly defies the commander in chief’s policies.

In my day we called that sort of thing "talking out both sides of your mouth." Now its nomenclature is "Information Operations."

Now that slut puppy Allawi may be coming back into power, Pavlov’s dogs of war are foaming at the mouth again. Current Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is contesting the vote count, and accusations of fraud are coming from many corners, but Odierno and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill are applauding "the overall integrity" of the election. And well you might expect them to. Maliki had a nasty penchant for reminding the U.S. that they had to get their forces out of his country by the end of 2011. They won’t even have to buy Allawi dinner to get him to beg us to stay.

In a recent interview, Odierno told reporters he would meet President Obama’s deadline to reduce the U.S. troop level to 50,000 by the end of this August, but that "We have to stay committed to this past 2011."

Odie made noise to reporters as if he meant “committed” with something other than troop presence, but how does he suppose we’re going to stay committed without troops? By continuing to pour money into a nation that Transparency International ranks among the top five most corrupt countries in the world? There’s no way on earth we can stick a bunch of civic-minded civilians into Iraq for the purpose of rebuilding it without sending along a bunch of troops to protect them. Petraeus himself admits there are still roughly 20 attacks per day against U.S. troops in Iraq. Incredibly, Petraeus was actually bragging, implying that his surge was a success because U.S. troops are only attacked 20 times a day. Imagine the mayor of Chicago boasting that his police officers only get jumped by hoodlums 20 times a day.

Odierno, whom a senior military official describes as "a pit bull on a poodle," says we should take advantage of our opportunity to establish "overall stability in the Middle East." We’ve spent the last eight years blowing Middle East stability to smithereens. How does Odie reckon we’re going to fix things now?

Where do we find such men? (Answer: West Point, Md.)

Desert Ox Odierno says, "People have to get past why we came here." Odie and his confederates would love for people to forget why we invaded Iraq. As the September 2000 neoconservative manifesto “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” stated, the purpose was to build a centrally located military base of operations so we could play "a more permanent role in Gulf regional security."

Everyone who has been tracking Iraq knows that a permanent military presence in Iraq is still the objective – even Tom Ricks. In a Feb. 25 piece at ForeignPolicy.com, he offered a "signed copy of any of my books" to whoever guesses closest as to how many troops we’ll still have in Iraq in 2014.

The correct guess can only be one of two things: "zero" or "too many."

And 2014 is a mighty long time to wait for a signed copy of anybody’s books, much less one of Tom Ricks’.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

Unwarranted Influence

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."
– President Dwight David Eisenhower, 1961

Michael D. "Mike" Furlong has, to all appearances, established himself as the premier military-industrial scumbag of the New American Century, an eye-watering accomplishment considering the competition in this category.

Furlong is the prototypical American war mongrel. During his 25-year military career he ingratiated himself into the circles of power through tours in Washington, and he managed to transition upon retirement from active duty into the upper levels of the defense industry, where he exploited his expertise in information operations (IO). As a defense contractor, Furlong established U.S.-government-funded propaganda broadcast networks in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq. As an "on-site contractor for the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy," according to his bio at the official U.S. Air Force Web site, he "received the Secretary of Defense’s Exceptional Public Service Award for his strategic influence work following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."

The official Air Force Web site doesn’t mention that the undersecretary of defense for policy at the time was neoconservative luminary Douglas J. Feith, who was also in charge of the Office of Special Plans and the Office of Strategic Influence, the infamous sub-ministries of truth created by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to concoct a case for invading Iraq. With credentials and connections like that, it’s little mystery how Furlong bagged a senior-level executive government billet as the Strategic Planner and Technology Integration Adviser for Joint Information Operations Warfare Command at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas.

And with the amoral fiber that made him so useful to Feith and Rumsfeld, it’s no wonder at all how Furlong managed to parlay his experience as a government big shot into defense contracts for all his friends to sell information to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) mob of Central Command assassins.

According to Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, Furlong "hired contractors from private security companies that employed former CIA and Special Forces operatives" who "gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action."

There isn’t room in a column-length essay to fully explain all the things that are wrong with this arrangement, but we’ll hit the highlights.

The core sin that should land Furlong and his confederates (named by the Times as contractor Robert Young Pelton, former CIA official Duane Clarridge, and ex-network news executive Eason Jordan) in perdition is the assassination program itself. For the jackal’s share of a decade now, we’ve had people running amok in the western slice of Asia knocking off "suspected" terrorists on the say-so of local sources who couldn’t pass even the most cursory background check. Whenever we run these assassination raids, whether we do it with manned aircraft or drones or platoons of dudes with rifles and night-vision goggles, we tend to not get the alleged evildoer we were going after or we never find out for sure if we got him, and even if we’re sure we got him, we’re not all that sure he did any evil. He might just have been a lifelong enemy of the scumbag we paid to finger him. We can, however, be pretty sure that all the women and children we rubbed out in the process of offing the ostensible bad guy didn’t do any evil at all, so we’ve got that going for us.

That the U.S. government is conducting this kind of barbarism in the name of its people is bad enough, but it’s doing it in such a way as to distance itself from the crime. In the case of Furlong’s racket, we have retired guys who can no longer be held responsible for anything who, for all anyone knows, pull their "intelligence" out of their rear ends. They pass this information along to the "officials" who assign the wet work to a bunch of sorry suckers who have to answer to a chain of command and a code of justice. When things go to hell in a handcar, it’s not the guys who are getting both retirement pay and contract blood money from Uncle Sam who get in trouble; it’s the guys who won’t ever see a government retirement because they’ll be out on their ears with bad discharges long before they qualify for one. These guys will have trouble getting decent jobs on the outside because of their criminal records and will drift into killing unarmed civilians for mercenary outfits like Blackwater, but that’s a separate trail of military-industrial slime.

The slime trail we want to follow on this story is the one that leads to the upper tiers of the food chain, where bags even scummier than Furlong are trying to skulk away from the scene of the crime without getting sucked into the dragnet.

Read Adm. Gregory Smith, a career bull-feather merchant who is McChrystal’s chief propaganda and information warfare officer, says there are nine international media venues under employ of the U.S. military in Afghanistan doing "routine jobs in administration, information processing, and analysis." Whatever any other international media employees might be doing in Afghanistan, Smith has no idea about, and whatever they were up to, he certainly wasn’t responsible for their actions, he told Filkins and Mazzetti of the Times. But, Smith added, whatever they might have been doing, he was against it and he didn’t want them to do it any more. So there.

Filkins and Mazzetti also tell us "American officials don’t know" who "condoned and supervised" Furlong’s "off-the-books spy operation." Moreover, Filkins and Mazzetti say, despite the fact that Furlong is known to have "extensive experience" in psychological operations and has "plied his trade" in Iraq, the Balkans and elsewhere, officials don’t know exactly when Furlong’s "activities" began. The officials do know, however, that those activities "seemed to accelerate" in the summer of 2009.

Filkins and Mazzetti don’t tell us that summer of 2009 is when McChrystal took command of the mess in Afghanistan, and that before that, he and his SOCOM assassination team answered directly to Dick Cheney, that bosom pal of Doug Feith and Donald Rumsfeld. If Filkins and Mazzetti had mentioned those things, it might be impossible for anyone to avoid the conclusion that McChrystal has been the head culprit in Furlong’s shenanigans from the get-go.

When you get down to it, Furlong’s part in this scandal was that of a functionary, not of a co-conspirator. How he became the fall stooge is a bit of a mystery. In my time we’d have said that he must have knocked up some big shot’s wife or daughter, but these days that sort of thing is paltry.

Maybe they talked him into wearing the goat collar by promising him a house in the Hamptons and a VP slot with Lockheed Martin when he gets out of the can.

And they’ll probably make McChrystal CEO.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy Retired, writes at Antiwar.com and Pen and Sword. His novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon of America's rise to global hegemony, is on sale now.

Lawyers, Guns and Blackwater

It’s shameful enough for the country that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined to hire mercenaries to fight its woebegone wars; the mercenaries we hire are hooligans who we kicked out of our overpriced military.

As Tim McGlone of The Virginian-Pilot reported on March 8, two Blackwater "workers" – Christopher Drotleff of Virginia Beach and Justin Cannon of Texas – got themselves escorted to the front gate with other-than-honorable discharges shoved up their pockets over a shopping list of infractions. Drotleff and Cannon are now ex-workers of Blackwater because in May 2009 they shot three unarmed Afghan civilians, which, to be fair to Drotleff and Cannon, is a relatively small number of unarmed civilians to shoot by Blackwater standards, and what’s more, only two of them were killed, for cripes’ sake. The third civilian was just wounded and is probably grateful to still be alive.

Not surprisingly, Blackwater didn’t have either of these hooligan’s military records on file even though they were required to by contractual agreement. The contract also required Blackwater to review the hooligans’ records before hiring them, which Blackwater probably did, and that’s probably why the records weren’t on file, so Blackwater could plead ignorance when the hooligans pulled a stunt like shooting unarmed Afghan civilians.

Drotleff and Cannon’s boss at Blackwater was no altar boy either. Johnnie Walker (supposedly that really is his name) was a two-fisted, double-barreled, heat-seeking disaster. A senior Blackwater executive wrote an internal memo that said Walker’s management at Camp Alamo in Kabul “cultivated an environment that indirectly” led to the May shootings, and he described Walker as “an exceptionally ineffective” manager who habitually blew off meetings with Department of Defense and NATO officials. The Blackwater executive also mentioned that Johnnie Walker was a Hemingway-class drinker and characterized him as having “no regard for policies, rules, or adherence to regulations in country.”

Local military brass weren’t enamored of Walker’s Wild West show. Maj. Gen. Richard P. Formica at one point wrote a memo to the Camp Alamo’s commanding officer, Lt. Col. Brian Redmon, demanding that he get the Blackwater cowboys under control, but there wasn’t much Redmon could do about them. The mercenaries weren’t in his chain of command, and they weren’t subject to discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Redmon wrote to his superiors asking for clarification as to just what his responsibilities regarding the Blackwater workers were, but he never heard back.

Walker had a deal worked out where Blackwater employees had access to the weapons arsenal at Camp Alamo, even though the weapons were for use by the Afghan police and the U.S. Army only. One Blackwater worker checked out weapons under the name "Eric Cartman," which is the name of the fat kid on the TV show South Park. Sometimes the Blackwater workers didn’t bother to sign for the weapons as Stan or Butters or any of the other kids on South Park, or as anybody at all, for that matter.

The Blackwater workers managed to get hundreds of guns from a Navy buddy of theirs identified as Chief Warrant Officer Sailer (another allegedly real name) with no paperwork or receipts of any kind to document the transition. In a teleconference interview with Senate Armed Services Committee staffers investigating the weapon-custody shenanigans, Sailer allowed as how yeah, he’d given guns to Blackwater guys, but he didn’t remember the circumstances. Sailer also said in response to written questions that he did "not recall ever having a conversation with anyone picking up weapons … regarding the intended use of the weapons." He probably didn’t recall bothering to ask what their intended use was either, nor did he likely recall why he thought it was no big deal to hand over weapons without getting any documentation. Chief Warrant Officer Sailer needs to become Seaman Recruit Sailer for as long as it takes the military legal system to turn him into Mr. Sailer, at which time he’ll no doubt use his other-than-honorable discharge to get a civilian job with Blackwater.

The musical gun monkey business led to an "accident" in December 2008 in which one Blackwater worker shot another worker in the head. As Johnnie Walker told Senate committee staffers, some of his workers determined they needed "learn how to shoot" from a vehicle. One of the workers decided it would be a good idea to get on the back of a moving car with an AK-47 and "ride it like a stagecoach." The car hit a bump and the gun went off and shot one of the other workers in the head.

The worker who got shot in the head suffered brain damage and is partly paralyzed. Even though the incident involved "unauthorized activities" and, in Walker’s words, "poor judgment," Army and Blackwater supervisors allowed the reindeer games to continue, and that led to the May shooting of Afghan civilians by Drotleff and Cannon. On the day of that shooting, Drotleff, Cannon, and Walker attended a party of the sort that in my day we called a "DRUNK-EX." Hey, who doesn’t need a little liquid courage before they go out and plug a few unarmed civilians?

Days after the deadly incident, Walker, still tight as a tick, made a phone call to his superiors at Blackwater and threatened to pull his entire security team out of Afghanistan if he were fired. In retrospect, Blackwater probably wishes it had taken him up on the offer. Raytheon, the primary contractor, fired Blackwater from the job last summer. Now renamed "Xe" in an effort to clean up its image but still referred to by the entire known universe as "Blackwater," the company is trying to get a new contract for $1 billion to do the same job it was doing before it got the ax from Raytheon, which is training Afghan police. Yikes. With security forces trained by the likes of Walker and Drotleff and Cannon, who needs insurgents?

Xe Vice President Fred Roitz says the bad old Blackwater days are over, that the company has cleaned up its act now. Roitz doesn’t mention that the new management and policies were already in place when the May killings occurred, or that the killings were merely the latest chapter in a long litany of bad behavior displayed by mercenaries who we’re ostensibly paying to fight terrorism, not to practice it.

Mercenary work is an ugly business that new vice presidents and new policies won’t make any prettier. It’s the kind of work done by the Drotleffs and Cannons and Walkers of this world, and for every Johnnie Walker you fire or bring to justice, there’s a Jim Beam and a Jack Daniels and an Old Granddad or two from Vietnam days who are ready, willing, and able to knock down fast money for behaving like homicidal sociopaths.

Blackwater is under investigation by Congress and the Justice Department over more sins than you can throw a grand inquisitor at, and that’s fine, but the best way to get mercenaries to stop running amok is to quit hiring them. That alone, however, won’t stop our national rampage, because, as horrible as it is to admit, our mercenaries haven’t killed the tiniest fraction of innocent civilians that our official uniformed military has.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The Truth Blurts

Individuals in the upper level of the Pentagon and media polloi are beginning to commit a cardinal sin. They’re blurting the truth – sort of. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military’s senior spin surgeon (his father was a Hollywood publicity agent), says that "Afghans are in the lead" of the Marjah offensive. But not everybody involved in writing the narrative is willing to tell a lie that big.

New York Times journalist C.J. Chivers, a former Marine, was among the first mainstream media voices to shoot down claims the Afghan army was leading the operation. In a Feb. 20 article posted from Marjah, Chivers reported that Marines were doing the "heavy lifting" while the Afghans lagged behind. They lagged so far behind, Chivers noted, that the Marines coined a new acronym: WOA (waiting on the Afghans).

"Statements from Kabul have said the Afghan military is planning the missions and leading both the fight and the effort to engage with Afghan civilians caught between the Taliban and the newly arrived troops," Chivers wrote. "But that assertion conflicts with what is visible in the field. In every engagement between the Taliban and one front-line American Marine unit, the operation has been led in almost every significant sense by American officers and troops."

In response to truth-outs like Chivers’, unnamed "senior military officials" tell us via NPR that the U.S. definition of "in the lead" means the Afghans are "planning the operation" and are "sitting down with Afghan elders in mosques or in meetings known as shuras."

If the Afghans are sitting down with elders in mosques, it’s because U.S. planners told them to go find another babysitter. Planning a military operation like the Marjah madness involves a lot of things; talking to old civilians isn’t really one of them.

The logistical complexity of moving and equipping and feeding a force the size of the one Gen. Stanley McChrystal drove into Marjah is something far beyond anything the Afghans are capable of. Marine Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson blurted to NPR that the quality of Afghan troops and police is so poor that "probably 3 to 4 out of every 10 we have probably need to really go home.”

That assessment jibes with a Jan. 31 60 Minutes report on U.S. Army Green Berets attempting to train Afghan commandos. These Afghan commandos were supposedly the best of the best recruits the Afghan army has, um, recruited. On top of that, the Afghan commandos received three months of "advanced training" before coming to the Green Berets for graduate-level studies. The best of the best Afghan soldiers turned out to be a battalion of Sad Sacks. One night one of the Afghan commandos accidentally shot the unit’s American medic in the leg. The next night one of the Afghan commandos shot himself in the foot, a haunting analog of what we’re doing to ourselves in Afghanistan.

Frustrated, the Green Berets began retraining the Afghans in basics of loading their rifles and carrying them safely. When the best-of-the-best Afghan troops couldn’t even handle that, the Green Berets put them back in "boot camp," attempting to teach them by yelling at them, by making them do strenuous exercise until they vomited, and probably by roughing them up a considerable bit (60 Minutes didn’t show the roughing-them-up part).

James Danly, a retired Army officer who trained Iraqi forces, told NPR, “You don’t forge armies out of nothing." That’s disheartening, since it sounds like "nothing" is precisely what we’re trying to forge the Afghan army out of. It’s not a simple thing, Danly says, "for units to become cohesive" and to learn to do tasks like load and carry their rifles tasks properly. “It could take a long time,” Danly says.

It could take forever. Afghan forces are starting from prenatal stage compared to where Iraq’s security force started – prior to the Iraqi Freedom invasion, Iraq had an actual army that had won an actual war with one of its neighbors – yet the Iraqis haven’t progressed much past the Gomer Pyle level themselves.

In July 2009, five years after "King" David Petraeus was in charge of training Iraqi security forces, Col. Timothy Reese, chief of the U.S. Army’s Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, blurted a memo lambasting the Iraqis’ lack of combat readiness. Corruption in the Iraqi officer corps is "widespread," Reese said. Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are "rampant." Laziness is "endemic." Lack of initiative is "legion." Iraq’s forces are "unable to plan," and their "near total effectiveness" prevents them from becoming self-sustaining.

After Iraq’s fourth election since U.S. psychological operations forces staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad nearly seven years ago, violence is once again rampant and the hapless Iraqi forces are helpless to stop it. Conditions in Iraq are so bad that Petraeus’ pet ox, "Babe" Odierno, who always makes me think of John Candy’s character in the film Stripes, is again echoing the mantra that he may have to delay the timeline for sending combat troops home. (Lean-mean-fightin’ Odierno has been the official mascot of the Long War Society since February 2009, when he went on record with Petraeus hagiographer and former journalist Thomas E. Ricks as wanting to scrap President Obama’s withdrawal plan and keep 30,000 or so U.S. troops in Iraq until 2015 or whenever.)

As investigative correspondent Gareth Porter notes, the main purpose of the Marjah offensive was not to gain a military advantage over the Taliban and other militants in Afghanistan. The operation was geared to influence U.S. public opinion. In operational art, this sort of thing is called an incremental victory, a success (usually a meaningless one) designed to dupe the folks on the home front to continue to support an unjustifiable war.

Ricks blurted in a February Washington Post piece clearly aimed at pleasing the war mafia that Petraeus, as commander of the surge in Iraq, never had any intention of "creating conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage,” as he told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Petraeus’ intention was to use cherry-picked violence statistics and other incremental victory stratagems to make Congress and the public think he was making progress so the Pentagon could make its Long War longer.

The modus is the same in Afghanistan. Marjah is a "test" that will tell us if the much-touted clear-hold-build counterinsurgency strategy will work. Marjah will pass the test, of course. At least, it will in the press releases McChrystal’s psyops czar Rear Adm. Gregory Smith hands out to the mainstream media’s stenography pool. And in Smith’s version of history, the Afghan army will have led the victory, no matter how many people blurt that they did so from their safe haven in the rear echelon.

Petraeus himself did a bit of blurting recently on Meet the Press when he explained that the Marjah offensive was "just the initial operation of what will be a 12- to 18-month campaign." That would put the campaign right up against President Obama’s July 2011 deadline for beginning to withdraw troops, a deadline that the Petraeus mob is taking as seriously as it’s taking Obama’s Iraq deadlines. Petraeus also noted that the 12- to 18-month campaign has been "mapped out" by Gen. McChrystal and his team. Petraeus apparently didn’t get the memo about how he’s supposed to say the Afghans are doing all the planning now.

Tsk, tsk, General.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com

Oops, Our Bad

Among the worst Orwellian deceptions being exposed by the Pentagon’s Marjah offensive is the ludicrous notion that we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan in order to protect Afghan civilians. The recent U.S. Special Forces air strike in the Marjah area that killed 27 or more civilians, including four women and a child, is a prime example of a cognitive disconnect that has been endemic in U.S. military operations throughout our misnamed war on terrorism.

The Feb. 21 air strike occurred in an area under Dutch control. The Dutch are durn-burnit het up about that, because the day before, the Dutch government collapsed over an initiative to extend the deployment of the country’s 2,000 troops in Afghanistan. (We could learn something from the Dutch on how to throw a peace movement, couldn’t we?)

A Dutch Defense Ministry spokesmodel, who talked to the press at the Hague on what the New York Times described as "customary anonymity," said it wasn’t any Dutch boy who called in that air strike. The Dutch Defense Dude wouldn’t say who did call in the air strike, and unidentified NATO officials didn’t say who ordered the strike in either. Sadly, it’s just possible that nobody knows who called in the air strike. If that’s the case, though, the operations types running the show over there are bigger screw-ups than I thought they were, and I already thought they were colossal screw-ups.

The NATO officials did, however, release a statement that said, "After the joint ground force arrived at the scene and found women and children, they transported the wounded to medical treatment facilities." It’s a good thing the NATO guys made sure everybody knows they took care of the civilians they wounded; otherwise, the Afghans might have gotten mad about all the civilians they killed.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head hatter of the Marjah madness, expressed his "sorrow and regret" over the civilian deaths to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. This happened moments after McChrystal won two out of three falls from a crocodile in a crying contest. Dead civilians? Oops, my bad.

McChrystal’s been wearing a bleeding-heart mask ever since his confirmation hearing in June 2009 when he fed the Senate Armed Services Committee that line of coke about how "the measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed. It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence." McChrystal then turned around and, in his first major action as commander in Afghanistan, launched an offensive in Kandahar province designed to kill the enemy.

The Pentagon (i.e., Gen. David Petraeus and his minions) sold McChrystal to the Senate as a counterinsurgency expert. McChrystal was and is nothing of the kind. From 2003 to 2008, he commanded the Joint Special Operations Command, the super secret outfit that reported directly to Dick Cheney and that specialized in targeting, tracking, and assassinating suspected terrorists in Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

You can bet a shiny new Missouri quarter that for the five years Stan the Man and his Howling Commandos were running amok in the west end of Asia they whacked a whole lot of mommies and babies more or less by mistake. McChrystal has more blood on his hands than Lady Macbeth. His apology to Karzai for the recent collateral deaths, like his confirmation hearing statement about protecting Afghan civilians, was a talking point crafted for him by the likes of Rear Adm. Gregory "Word" Smith, a career bull-feather merchant who is now McChrystal’s propaganda czar.

Smith no doubt had a lot to do with fabricating the "tactical directive" McChrystal promulgated in June 2009 that ordered a "new operational standard" to "minimize the use of deadly force" as a measure to protect Afghan civilians. Smith briefed the press that not only would McChrystal cut back the air strikes, but ground troops would refrain from "firing on structures where insurgents may have taken refuge among civilians" unless, of course, "Western or allied troops are in imminent danger."

The assertion made by Smith and other war merchants that we can separate the "enemy from the people" in a scenario like the one we have in Afghanistan is hallucinatory. The Taliban and other militant groups in Afghanistan didn’t invade the country. There may or may not be foreign fighters in theater looking for an opportunity to sock it to Uncle Sam’s infidels, but this insurgency, like pretty much all insurgencies, is a home-based enterprise. What’s more, just about everybody in Afghanistan and Pakistan is related to somebody who totes a gun for the guerillas, so separating the "civilians" from the insurgents would involve splitting genetic material. As one Pentagon planner has aptly noted, “It’s harder to separate the enemy from the people when they are the people.”

Hence, when you bump against insurgents, you bulldoze civilians, and if the insurgents are fighting you, you are bound by the U.S. Standing Rules of Engagement that command you to defend yourself and your unit. And if you’re in danger, which you are the moment you’re in a firefight you can’t withdraw from, you call in an air strike to bail you out of it.

So the June 2009 order to limit air strikes didn’t limit air strikes at all. In fact, at the time the directive was issued, one of McChrystal’s advisers said the order didn’t mean the use of air power would be reduced. It just meant, as the Los Angeles Times related, that the "emphasis" would be on "protecting civilians rather than killing insurgents."

What kind of air strike emphasizes protecting civilians? The kind that drops leaflets that say "Have a Nice Day" in Pashto? And if the emphasis of an air strike isn’t to kill insurgents, why call it in to begin with?

McChrystal has now issued a new directive that will, as the Boston Globe puts it, "limit night raids on civilians." What in the wide world of sports are they conducting night raids on civilians for? McChrystal says, "We didn’t understand what a cultural line it was" to burst into civilian Muslims’ homes. We’ve been busting into Muslims’ homes for nearly a decade now to disastrous results. How could McChrystal or anyone not understand what a cultural line it is to cross? How could anyone not understand what a line it is to cross in any culture? Does McChrystal think maybe the Jews in Berlin liked it when the Gestapo kicked their doors in? Will Americans like it when Chinese bill collectors come for their high-definition TVs and bargain barn furniture?

Like the directive on air strikes, the directive on night raids is classified so we can’t see what it actually says, but Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a NATO spokesmodel, tells us it "does not limit the ability of troops to operate." It’s just that the emphasis of raiding civilian’s homes will now be to protect the civilians who live in them, not to kill insurgents.

It’s entirely possible that the personality disorders with life-support systems that run our military truly believe the lies they tell us, but that doesn’t excuse them. It merely makes them pathological liars, along with the other malignant things they are.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Marja Madness

As journalist Gareth Porter said in a recent interview with Real News, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s offensive in Marjah, Afghanistan, is "more of an effort to shape public opinion in the United States than to shape the politics of the future of Afghanistan." Like so much of what we’ve seen in our woeful war on terrorism, the Marjah effort is short on substance and long on Newspeak, Doublethink, and other Orwellian deceptions.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and an unhealthy chunk of the rest of the news outlets are calling the Marjah madness a "test" of "Obama’s strategy" in Afghanistan. Amazingly, nobody is calling it a test of McChrystal’s strategy. Stan the Man is, after all, the maestro who orchestrated the big honking counterinsurgency (COIN) plan with its attendant troop escalation and who then, along with Gen. David Petraeus and the rest of the warmongery, boxed Obama into going along with the scheme through an expansive media campaign that included McChrystal’s September 2009 infomercial on 60 Minutes.

We don’t need to feel sorry for Obama, though. He asked for this during the 2008 presidential race when he decided to show the hawks his baby-makers by saying he’d pull us out of Iraq but he’d "get the job" done in Afghanistan. Pavlov’s dogs of war started frothing when he stepped on that land mine. Obama had a chance to get rid of the war dons – Petraeus, McChrystal, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, and the Pentagon’s bureaucratic survival savant, Robert Gates – when he took office. But no, President Obama kept them around, despite the fact that they all had publicly criticized Candidate Obama’s plan to establish an Iraq withdrawal timeline. Obama exacerbated things when he named retired Marine Gen. James Jones as national security adviser; Jones had stated for the record in 2007 that an Iraq withdrawal deadline would be "against our national interest."

So, yes, Marjah is a referendum on Obama’s fitness as commander in chief, and it’s becoming clear that the guy is in over his pay grade.

A key component of McChrystal’s hallucinatory COIN plan is an initiative to build up Afghanistan’s security forces to an end-strength of 400,000. He’d be better off paying them all off to go home and keep out of the way.

When 60 Minutes reported on the status of Afghan security forces training in late January, the native troops were literally shooting themselves in the foot and their instructors in the leg. According to 60 Minutes – which means according to what Af-Pak propaganda czar Rear Adm. Gregory Smith told 60 minutes – the Afghan troops were commandos, Afghanistan’s best soldiers, and they were being trained by Green Berets, America’s "best soldiers."

The "specialized" Afghan troops had received three months of "advanced training" before coming under the tutelage of the Green Berets. When they displayed their tendency to shoot everybody but the bad guys, the Green Berets drilled them in the fundamentals of how to load their weapons and hold them safely. When the Afghan commandos couldn’t even perform those tasks correctly, the Green Berets started treating them like raw recruits and tried to instruct them by yelling at them.

Yet somehow Smith and his spin merchants and their dupes in the mainstream media expected us to believe that by late February, Afghan forces were ready to take charge of their country’s destiny. "In Marjah offensive, Afghan forces take the lead," claimed a Feb. 15 headline in the Christian Science Monitor. But by Feb. 20 even the New York Times, the journalistic home of McChrystal idolater Dexter Filkins, had to confess that "Marines Do Heavy Lifting as Afghan Army Lags in Battle."

Bravo to journalist C.J. Chivers, a former Marine, for reporting that the assertion by American and Afghan officials that portrays "the Afghan Army as the force out front in this important offensive against the Taliban" conflicts with "what is visible in the field." By all important measures, "from transporting troops, directing them in battle and coordinating fire support to arranging modern communications, logistics, aviation, and medical support – the mission in Marjah has been a Marine operation conducted in the presence of fledgling Afghan Army units, whose officers and soldiers follow behind the Americans and do what they are told."

I hope the owners of the Times don’t fire Chivers. It would be nice to think that the rag of record has at least one reporter capable of telling the truth.

Another Times contributor, Timothy Hsia, a West Point graduate who has served in Iraq, says in a Feb. 18 piece that success in Marjah will hinge on a "civilian surge." Hsia has, lamentably, bitten off on the jagged piece of crack-pottery that says in order to succeed in Afghanistan we need lots and lots of American civilians to go over there and be policemen and fire dudes and construction workers and so on as part of a Civilian Response Corps. The idea is so ludicrous that its proponents picked Dick Cheney protégé Doug Feith, the dumbest freaking guy on the planet, to shill it in a May 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed.

We already have a Civilian Response Corps; it’s called the Peace Corps, and it’s been around since before people joined it to get out of fighting in Vietnam. As you might have already inferred, the reason we call it a "Peace" Corps is that it only works in a peacetime scenario. Sending U.S. civilians into a hot war zone, especially one like we have in Afghanistan where there are no front lines, doesn’t accomplish a whole lot except get a whole lot of U.S. civilians killed. The only way to try to protect the civilians is to send more soldiers to the war zone or (aha!) hire mercenary outfits like Blackwater to do the job. Even then, the civilians have to stay holed up in areas where the soldiers or the hired thugs can protect them, so they can’t do what we supposedly sent them for.

But civilians provide a vital layer in the Pentagon’s lame-excuse stratagem. If our military can’t win a war, it’s because we don’t have enough military in the theater of operations. If we have enough military, we don’t have enough military from the country we’re fighting in to fight with us. If we have enough military from the country we’re fighting in but they turn out to be a pack of Gomer Pyles, then we don’t have enough civilians involved. Next, I suppose, come household pets.

Of course, civilians might be able to do one thing that our Green Berets can’t: teach Afghan soldiers how to load and carry their rifles.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

On Marja: More Bananastan Bull Feathers

The propaganda continues to pile higher and deeper regarding our war in the Bananastans (Afghanistan and Pakistan, our Central Asian banana republics). The latest piece of manipulation disguised as news comes from Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, who is rapidly supplanting Thomas E. Ricks as the Pentagon’s favorite bull feather merchant.

In a February 15 piece titled "Secret Joint Raid Captures Taliban’s Top Commander," Filkins and co-author Mark Mazetti breathlessly announce, "The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan." The unnamed "American officials" we’ve come to know so well over the course of our woebegone war on terror say that the prisoner, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, "ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder." Details of the raid are, not surprisingly, "murky."

Baradar’s capture was supposedly a "joint effort" between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI). "Officials" say that the arrest "had provided a window into the Taliban and could lead to other senior officials," including and especially Omar. Yeah, right.

Unnamed officials have told us we’ve captured or killed a number-two evildoer so many times since 9/11 that by now I couldn’t give a number two less. Regardless, Filkins and Mazetti tell us that the unnamed officials tell them Baradar is "the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago." If that were all I had to show for eight years of war, I wouldn’t brag about it, but the propaganda operatives who fed this tripe to Filkins and Mazetti aren’t targeting the sharpest tools in the American shed.

Throughout the article, one senses the hidden, guiding hand of Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, the former Chief of Naval Information (CHINFO) who is now the Director of Communication for the International Security Assistance Force (DIC-ISAF). A career public affairs officer, Smith is in charge of, among other things, General Stanley McChrystal’s "information operations," AKA misinformation, disinformation and deception stratagems.

Filkins and Mazetti describe Taliban leader Omar as "a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks," and note that the Taliban "have so far refused to disavow al-Qaeda." Both statements had to have been cut and pasted from an ISAF press release, and like most of what Smith’s minions put out, are so misleading that they amount to outright falsehoods.

Thanks to Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service and Arnaud de Borchgrave of United Press International, we know that Omar and bin Laden have never been kissing cousins. Porter gives us convincing evidence (including, gasp, sources identified by name, just like real reporters used to do back in the real reporter days) that in 1998 Omar placed severe restrictions on bin Laden in an attempt to prevent him from carrying out plots against the United States. Nine years ago, prior to 9/11, Omar himself told de Borchgrave that he had "offered the United States and the United Nations to place international monitors to observe Osama bin Laden pending the resolution of the case, but so far we have received no reply."

And as Porter also tells us, Taliban leadership in recent months has expressed a willingness to throw al-Qaeda under the caravan, and he notes that "In September, Mullah Omar declared the Taliban has no interest in a global jihadist campaign and in December a Taliban statement said the organization is ready to provide ‘legal guarantees’ against ‘meddling’ in foreign countries – an obvious reference to any al-Qaeda bases – as part of a settlement involving withdrawal of foreign forces."

How much more of a disavowal do we need. What do we want Omar to do, make bin Laden kiss his naked rear end live on al Jazeera?

The Filkins-Mazetti Times article contains a grain of truthiness nested below the headline and lede paragraphs, well past the point where most readers quit reading, which is where our mainstream media most often hide the truth.

The reporters quote Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid as saying the news of Barada’s capture "is just rumor spread by foreigners to divert attention from the Marja offensive." A statement from a Talibani that Barada wasn’t really captured seems hard to swallow, but then again, the guy telling us that went on record, which is a lot more than you can say about the guys telling us Barada was captured. And unlike "unknown officials," Zabiullah Mujahid never talked us into invading another country by lying about its non-existent weapons of mass destruction program.

But half of what Mujahid says you can take to the bank: Gregory’s minions are trying to keep headlines in the U.S. from reading "McChrystal Makes Major Mistake in Marja." The latest news from the front reveals that the best trained, best equipped military in history has been stymied by sniper fire from fighters who likely had to teach themselves how to shoot.

Marja was supposed to be, according to the Karen de Young of the Washington Post, "a key test of Obama’s strategy." I’m not sure Obama has a strategy for Afghanistan except maybe to go along with whatever McChrystal and David Petraeus want, which is to make their Long War last as long as possible. I doubt if even McChrystal has any hopes that the Marja offensive will produce anything more tangible than whatever his publicity people manage to spin out of it.

Ultimately, the Pentagon is shooting for an official narrative that says whatever peace accord comes to pass was only made possible by offensive U.S. military operations. This is the same pile of bull feathers the warmongery blew up the American public’s skirt over Korea, the three-year war that contained two years of unsuccessful peace talks, and Vietnam, where we pursued "peace with honor" throughout the Nixon presidency, and Iraq, where we’ve been brokering a civil war since young Mr. Bush declared "mission accomplished" nearly eight years ago.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Bin Laden: Dead and Loving It

The tallest Arab ever wanted dead or alive by a president of the United States is still at large. Either that or he’s dead. Again. We’ve been hearing from intelligence sources and the media that bin Laden is dead for a long time. How dead can one evildoer get?

In July 2002 the New York Times carried an op-ed piece that led with "Osama bin Laden is dead." Bin Laden died in December 2001, according to the author, Amir Taheri, an editor of the Paris-based journal Politique Internationale. Both Taheri and his journal have been broadly accused of questionable journalism practices. Taheri’s sources – all unnamed except for then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who "repeated" the information – weren’t any more reliable than Taheri is, but he ultimately based his conclusion on logic. "With an ego the size of Mount Everest," Taheri reasoned, "Osama bin Laden would not have, could not have, remained silent for so long if he were still alive."

And what of all the videos of bin Laden that have surfaced between 2001 and now? David Ray Griffin, whom the BBC identifies as "a former theology professor and member of the 9/11 Truth Movement," says they’re false because "None of them can be proven to be authentic."

These are negative proof arguments, the kind that say, "We can’t prove little green men are flying over Nevada in spaceships, but we can’t prove they aren’t, so it must be true."

Live or Memorex?

As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi noted in December 2009, analysts "inside and outside the government" base their assessment that bin Laden has found sanctuary in the hereafter on non-evidence: specifically, that they haven’t had any solid information about the al-Qaeda leader since late 2001.

That puts our intelligence agencies, which have access to more space-age gizmology than any other spy apparatus in the history of espionage, on par with the likes of the conspiracy theorists at WHATREALLYHAPPENED.COM. According to these folks, bin Laden is dead because unreliable journalist Taheri said so in a New York Times op-ed piece, and because a video released in December 2001 made bin Laden look much older than he did in a photo taken when he was much younger, and because in the video he didn’t move his left side much therefore he must have been suffering from diabetes, and because in November 2001 the UK Guardian revealed that Le Figaro of Paris reported that in 2000 bin Laden had ordered a mobile dialysis machine to be delivered to his base in Afghanistan.

The bin Laden narrative aptly illustrates the extent to which our government institutions have used the big media and polluted the information environment. Rumor begets hearsay. Hearsay begets opinion. Opinion begets unconfirmed facts, unconfirmed facts beget disinformation begets propaganda begets intelligence, and intelligence begets nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

What makes these convoluted yarns successful is something I call the "grain of truth" factor. If one or more of the assertions in a far-fetched fable seem plausible, a certain type of person will accept some or all of the rest of the tale because "there’s a grain of truth in it." There is, of course, grain in every pile of horse manure, but that doesn’t make horse manure easy to swallow, does it?

Having said all that, there’s a fair chance that bin Laden really is dead. If he’s hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border high up in the Hindu Kush mountains where helicopters can’t fly, he could have died of a nosebleed by now. And in November 2008 then CIA Director Michael Hayden said bin Laden was still alive, which adds credence to the argument that he wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter either way. Dead or alive, Osama bin Laden is the greatest strategist in the history of human conflict. With no navy or air force or anything that resembles a formal army, he’s managed to whip the world’s mightiest nation like a rented camel. Our economy is shot, the best-trained, best-equipped military in history has been proven impotent, and our moral standing in the world has gone through the sub-basement.

Speculation about bin Laden’s status vis-à-vis mortality is little more than a smoke screen to keep the American hoi polloi from focusing on a harsh reality.

A tenet of the Dead Osama Theory says that the Bush administration hid the fact that Osama died in December 2001 to justify continuing the war on terrorism. President Obama stepped in a boiling vat of OOPS when, as Candidate Obama, he vowed to "get the job done" in Afghanistan to deflect criticism of Sen. Obama’s vote against the Iraq surge. In October 2008, a month before the election, Obama vowed to "snuff out" bin Laden, and if bin Laden isn’t available for snuffing out because he’s already snuffed, it gets real hard for Obama to justify the massive Afghanistan escalation that Generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the rest of the warmongery strong-armed him into going along with.

Hence, the Obama administration has a vital stake in preserving the belief that bin Laden is still consuming oxygen. That may explain why, in January 2010, the FBI published a digital image of how bin Laden looks today on the State Department’s "Rewards for Justice" Web site. Shortly afterward, it turned out the picture was an alteration of a web photo of Spanish parliament member Gaspar Llamazares. Nice try, FBI.

The most recent evidence that bin Laden still lives was the recording al-Jazeera released just before Obama’s first State of the Union Address in which bin Laden taunted, "God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support to the Israelis will continue." But the recording was just an audiotape, so maybe the FBI hired Rich Little to do a voice impersonation.

It is little wonder that the status of the man who goaded history’s mightiest nation has become the stuff of checkout-line tabloids. The facts of our so-called war on terror are more ludicrous than our fictions, as witnessed by the National Security Agency’s exploitation of expanded and probably unconstitutional surveillance authorities to eavesdrop on obscene phone calls.

Here’s the disturbing news: our war on terror has been a colossal blunder regardless of whether bin Laden’s safe haven is in this world or the next one.

All the king’s machines and men deployed to far-flung corners of the earth have done little to stem the threat of terrorism, as the Christmas panty bomber illustrated. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington. We’re now discovering, thanks to Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service, that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader we ousted from power in Afghanistan because he gave aid to bin Laden’s planning of 9/11, actually attempted to prevent bin Laden from attacking America. Oops. Our bad.

Our "struggle against violent extremism" has produced, at a conservative estimate, a minimum of 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq alone. The figure may be well over a million. In 2007, official Iraqi government statistics showed that the country possessed 5 million orphans. That’s a bunch more Iraqi orphans than Saddam Hussein ever made.

Osama bin Laden didn’t need to survive beyond December 2001 to wreak havoc on the United States and the rest of the world. We’ve done it for him.

Originally posted at Antiwar.com.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. (Click on the link to order your copy with an amusing inscription from the author! ;-)

Talking Ourselves out of Afghanistan

It’s becoming apparent to the foreign policy wonks in the Obama administration that the goose in Afghanistan is cooked. Now it’s only a matter of talking themselves into sticking a fork in it. The “great dilemma of this war,” as the New York Times calls it, is “whether to reconcile with the men who sheltered Osama bin Laden and who still have close ties to al-Qaeda.” That option is considered to be “rife with political risk at home” which means the neocons and their pals in the right-wing hate chorus will flay Obama alive if he takes it.

The reconciliation option would also entail making nice with Taliban leader Mohammed Omar, the sleazebag we kicked out of power in 2001 so we could put sleazebag Hamid Karzai in his place. According to Transparency International, Karzai runs one of the most corrupt governments in the world, second only to Somalia, which, since it doesn’t really have a government, shouldn’t really count.

Karzai plans to hold a “grand assembly” of Afghan bigwigs to discuss his plan to negotiate with the Taliban. Omar says secret talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban have not taken place, which means they probably have. The Taliban have previously said they won’t accept any kind of deal with Karzai unless foreign troops leave Afghanistan first, which they (we) almost certainly won’t do.

But as Gareth Porter of Inter Press Service points out, the crux of negotiations revolves not around whether “the Taliban movement will be participating in the Afghan political system, however, but on whether or not the administration could accept the participation of a specific individual — Mullah Omar — in the political future of Afghanistan.”

That’s a bit like having suggested that we allow Saddam Hussein to be a minister in Nuri al-Maliki’s Iraqi cabinet. Well not quite. Omar wasn’t a pleasant fellow, what with enforcing all that mean old sharia law and not allowing Afghan girls to go to school or vote or anything, but unlike Hussein, he never invaded a neighboring country that we had to go to war with him over. On the other hand, also unlike Hussein, he did give bin Laden sanctuary to plan the 9/11 attacks. So letting him back in the power mix is a might big pill to swallow.

Speaking of big pills to swallow, Hillary Clinton is one of the Obama palace puzzlers who hasn’t been all that hot to trot to cuddle up to Omar. She’s been in favor of letting rank-and-file Talibani back in the fold and giving them jobs and such, kind of like we were supposed to do with Sunni militants in Iraq but didn’t. Hillary has been a bigger disaster than Condi Rice and the Titanic combined. She says she’s willing to negotiate with anybody as long as they completely capitulate to America’s terms first, which was the Dick Cheney modus: set preconditions for diplomatic talks that the other guys will never accept, say “See, we tried diplomacy and it didn’t work,” and then blow them to smithereens.

The only good thing about Hillary being Secretary of State is that it means she doesn’t control foreign policy. Foreign policy has been dictated by the Department of Defense ever since young Mr. Bush started doing whatever his generals told him as long as it was what he wanted to hear.

The generals, who once found the idea of letting Omar back in the hen house anathema, are starting to march to a different tune. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, wasn’t keen on negotiating with the Taliban at all at his Senate hearings in June of 2009. Now he’s listening to a different drummer.

In late January 2010, when pressured by a reporter to state how far he was willing to bend in order to reach a settlement with the Taliban, McChrystal cautiously answered "any Afghan can play a role if they focus on the future and not the past." That sounds like a flip-flop to me.

An ISAF official told Porter that the goal of negotiations is to establish “the conditions under which reconciliation will take place." It’s worth noting that “reintegration” is the term being used to describe settling with the Talibani polloi, and that “reconciliation” specifically refers to dealing with Taliban “leadership,” aka Omar.

One can only speculate as to what’s gone on in McChrystal’s sleep deprived and underfed little mind since his Senate hearings and his big media campaign in late 2009 to strong arm Obama into going along with a major escalation in Afghanistan. It’s likely, though, that he’s grasping for a quick exit plan because he sees there’s no way his pie-in-the-sky counterinsurgency plan is going to work.

The counterinsurgency doctrine calls for a competent and reasonably honest host nation government and security force, and the Vulcans will reveal themselves and give us matter-antimatter technology before we see either of those things in Afghanistan.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Wild Wild Left Radio

An interview with Wild Wild Left Radio on Afghanistan, China, and Queer Eye for the G.I.