Why was General McChrystal fired?

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Why was General McChrystal fired?
25 June 2010

Reactions within the US establishment to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal
indicate that disparaging remarks by McChrystal and his aides concerning
President Obama and other civilian officials published in a Rolling Stone
article were not the principal cause of his dismissal.

Rather, the article brought to a head the deepening crisis arising from the
failure of the US military to suppress the popular resistance in Afghanistan to
Washington’s colonial-style war. Dissatisfaction with McChrystal’s leadership
had been mounting within the Obama administration since the failure of the
offensive in Marjah launched last February. The decision announced earlier this
month to delay for at least three months the assault on Kandahar was widely seen
as an embarrassing setback.

Despite McChrystal’s reputation as a ruthless practitioner of counterinsurgency
warfare, responsible for the killing of thousands of Iraqis, the general has
more recently been the target of growing criticism that the effectiveness of the
operation in Afghanistan was being undermined by his excessive concern over
civilian casualties.

That concern has nothing to do with humanitarian considerations. Rather, it is
based on the cold calculation—the Rolling Stone article refers to McChrystal's
"insurgent math"—that for every innocent person killed, ten new enemies are created.

The article, written by Michael Hastings, deals relatively briefly with the
remarks of McChrystal and his aides about US civilian officials in Afghanistan.
They are predictably crude, and could hardly have come as a surprise to Obama,
let alone to the Pentagon. They are familiar with the fascistic and debased
character of McChrystal’s entourage. Hastings concisely describes the general’s
staff as “a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots,
political operators and outright maniacs.”

The comments made by McChrystal about Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden and
special envoy Richard Holbrooke have generated the most media attention. But
Hastings devotes far more space relating the complaints of American soldiers
that McChrystal is tying their hands by enforcing rules of engagement which
limit the use of air strikes and mortar fire against potential civilian targets
and restrict the ability of US troops to enter the homes of Afghan civilians.

Hastings writes that “McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to
avoid civilian casualties that the US military has ever encountered in a war
zone.” He continues: “But however strategic they may be, McChrystal’s new
marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told
to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. ‘Bottom
line?’ says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and
Afghanistan, ‘I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of
engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will
tell you the same thing.’”

Describing a meeting near Kandahar between McChrystal and disaffected troops,
Hastings writes: “The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal
force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They
want to fight—like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before
McChrystal.”

Whether this view is really widely held among soldiers is not clear. But it
appears that this argument is gaining support within the Washington
policy-making elite and within the media. Hastings indicates his own
standpoint—and, more broadly, that of many of McChrystal’s establishment
critics—when he declares: “When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on
McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis
Khan—and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development
and press scrutiny.”

The New York Times weighed in on Wednesday, before the White House meeting
between Obama and McChrystal at which the general submitted his resignation,
with an article by its Afghan war correspondent, C. J. Chivers, headlined
“Warriors Vexed by Rules For War.”

The article makes the case for the US to “take the gloves off” and dramatically
escalate its assault on the Afghan population. Chivers quotes unnamed soldiers
denouncing McChrystal for limiting the use of air strikes and artillery, and
declares: “As levels of violence in Afghanistan climb, there is a palpable and
building sense of unease among troops surrounding one of the most confounding
questions about how to wage the war: when and how lethal force should be used.”

He continues: “The rules have shifted risks from Afghan civilians to Western
combatants… Young officers and enlisted soldiers and Marines…speak of ‘being
handcuffed…’”

“No one wants to advocate loosening rules that might see more civilians killed,”
he writes. But this is precisely what The New York Times is demanding.

In its lead editorial published on Thursday, entitled “Afghanistan After
McChrystal,” the Times demands a “serious assessment now of the military and
civilian strategies.” It then writes, in chilling language: “Until the
insurgents are genuinely bloodied they will keep insisting on a full restoration
of their repressive power. Reports that some State Department officials are also
advocating a swift deal with the Taliban are worrisome.” [Emphasis added].

This statement, by the authoritative voice of the liberal Democratic Party
policy-making establishment, provides an insight into the deeper issues involved
in McChrystal’s removal. Apparently, for the Times, the United States has not
pursued with sufficient vigor the work of “seriously bloodying” those in
Afghanistan opposed to foreign occupation during more than eight years of war.

Tens of thousands of Afghans have already been killed by US and NATO
forces—nobody knows the full extent of the slaughter since Washington does not
bother to count its victims. Tens of thousands more have been wounded, jailed or
tortured in US prisons.

This campaign of killing and terror is aimed at drowning in blood an entirely
legitimate struggle by the Afghan people for national liberation against a
colonial occupier. The main problem the US faces is that after eight years of
war and more than three decades of US subversion and provocation, popular
resistance by the Afghan masses against American imperialism is growing. The
answer of the US ruling elite is to murder more Afghans.

The war in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity, and those who are
perpetuating it are war criminals.

The struggle to arouse opposition in the working class within the United States
and internationally must be renewed.

Barry Grey

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j25.shtml

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