After some debate about the best P.R. strategy to spin continuing incidents of killing of civilians by American forces, the Pentagon released a deviously written "unclassified executive summary" of the report on the May 4th killing of about 100 Afghan civilians. This was timed to coincide with the announcement of an impending shift in counterinsurgency tactics, requiring commanders to verify whether any civilians are present in a target zone. If there are, US forces are to disengage, instead of calling in airstrikes, unless the soldiers are in imminent danger.
However, this new policy does not apply to Pakistan, where last week US airstrikes killed about 80 people at a funeral, mostly civilians, a new record in America’s undeclared war in Pakistan.
And a happy Iraqi Sovereignty Day to you all!
As tens of thousands of American troops deploy throughout Afghanistan, the Obama Administration is currently in the midst of another reassessment about how to implement a winning strategy in Afghanistan (the winning strategy itself was discovered during a previous reassessment). Whatever else comes out of it, one thing has become clear: we are in for one mother of a propaganda campaign, the hallmark of every losing American war effort. The charm offensive is being coupled with another tradition, an intense game of command musical chairs. And lest our enemies think we are getting soft, any collateral improvement in the American treatment of Afghan civilians that might result from the P.R. offensive is also being offset by a concomitant escalation in attacks against civilian targets in Pakistan, culminating last week with a calculated mass casualty bombing of a funeral procession.
The occupation command structure in Afghanistan is getting more complex by the day, with every successive reorganization, ostensibly intended to streamline the system and make it more efficient and humane, instead making it even more convoluted. This month, former Joint Special Operations Command chief General Stanley McChrystal has been confirmed as commander of American forces in Afghanistan, replacing his predecessor who was allowed to serve less than a year before getting sacked. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, formerly Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ senior military assistant, has become his deputy until a further reorganization will make Rodriguez the day to day commander of the American forces on the ground, McChrystal as the coordinating head of all International Security Assistance Force troops in the region, the idea man, while Petreaus, the counterinsurgency expert, is back in Qatar running CENTCOM and giving the operation an overall vision and running the Pakistan ops, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates exercising control over the whole thing through his man on the ground Rodriguez. This makes no sense on its face, since Rodriguez is a quintessential Pentagon bureaucrat intended to represent the pentagram’s will in theater, but he’s getting to run the day to day operations, while McChrystal and Petreaus, both distinguished for their hands on battlefield expertise, are being moved upstairs to plot strategy, but I believe the promotions system is run not on the basis of competency for a given task, but on a complex calculation about who is due what and who is whose man where. Meanwhile the NATO command, while in theory subservient to the American structure, continues to function independently, and in fact seems to be gaining influence by winning many of the longstanding arguments between the Americans and the Europeans, such as the poppy eradication strategy and restrictions in the rules of engagement.
On the non-military side, the diplomatic efforts are being carried out by Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, who is independent of Hillary Clinton’s State Department, which is also supposed to exercise control and does in fact command all the hundreds of foreign service people that Holbrooke would need to implement any initiatives he might devise, and the President himself, who is reportedly very focused on this region. A civilian push is underway, spearheaded by such independent agencies as the USAID, with a heavy reliance on international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, as well as NGOs, who of course obey noone.
What makes the American military command structure much more likeable than their snotty European counterparts is that the Pentagon has stopped having its generals appear at any time in dress uniform. This trend really became ubiquitous after the end of the Cold War, when the US military lost any legitimate defensive function it might have had and shifted to a "the best defense is a good offense" strategy (you may recall the General Schwartzkopf’s camouflaged blockbuster news conferences during the first Gulf War). Evidently, focus groups have indicated that dress uniforms make the public think of the Empire in Star Wars, evil German officers with monocles, and Soviet generals with thick eyebrows, so now all American top officers wear baggy camouflage uniforms at all times, even while doing studio interviews, because the public might distrust the military industrial complex and the "generals gathered in their masses," but they surely do love our boys and girls on the ground in the yellow construction boots and fatigues, risking their lives for our freedoms. Plus you just never know when desert camo could come in handy while getting grilled by Wolf Blitzer, maybe at some point you just want to melt into the background and slip out of the studio. For additional likeability and trustworthiness, no matter what their title or position are, and no matter how many graduates degrees they have and what region they came from, all American generals now speak with a soft Southern drawl and address everybody around them, from senator to janitor, as Sir and Ma’am.
The first thing the new command team did was get the P.R. offensive underway. Because, as always, we aren't losing the war, we are losing the public perception war about losing the war. This is being recognized at the highest levels, as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, wearing her typical no-nonsense frown and pantsuit combo, put it succinctly while recently asking for more war funding from Congress, "We are being out-communicated by the Taliban." Damn those savages and their media savvy! But the US isn’t going to resign itself to the Taliban’s near total control over the media. Having identified the problem, the Obama Administration is springing into action and unleashing the mother of all propaganda campaigns, timed to coincide with the other aspects of their "don’t call this a surge" escalation in the region.
The first layer of this offensive is the steady stream of "guardedly optimistic" articles about McChrystal's determination and newfound sense of urgency, or about our troops’ quiet heroism and resolve in the face of their formidable task, which are now pouring out of Afghanistan, penned by docile embedded reporters eager to accompany the troops on another exciting adventure. (Kafka takeaway quote from this particular piece of placid propaganda: "You need to give Afghans something to lose, McChrystal said, so that they choose the Afghan government over the insurgents - something that has not happened in many parts of the country.") That's the problem, you see, the Afghans have nothing to lose and couldn't care less about the future of their country. Typical colonials, all they have are the lives of themselves and their loved ones, and they don't care about those, lacking Western humanistic values. If only they had cars or something.
But even if the Afghans don’t care about their situation, our Marines sure do! This earnest Reuters article filed from the "Desert of Death, Afghanistan" gives us a heartening exchange between Marine and a grey-bearded "friendly, if a bit stand-offish" farmer: "My name's Kenny," Lieutenant Kenneth Zavada said, reaching out to shake hands. "Is it OK if I come back here again and talk to you about solar-powered pumps for your well?" I guess they were all out of Bibles, but regardless, I think they are going to be fast friends, don’t you?
The second layer of the propaganda push will take place in Afghanistan itself:
It’s an elaborate plan that requires the installation of new satellite transmitters across Afghanistan. These will be used to move anti-insurgent messages across the country as quickly as possible. Targets are to include traditional information sources and new media, including popular social networking sites such as Facebook.
Fully equipped broadcast and print media "operation centers" will be established at coalition-run military bases in Afghanistan, and 129 American public affairs officers will be deployed to staff them. There are now 80 American "paffos" in Afghanistan, plus dozens more from other ISAF countries, including Canada. The new resources are to be in place by the end of the summer.
A bold and somewhat unexpected move in the P.R. war also comes from Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who has announced a major change in the counternarcotics strategy for Afghanistan at a recent G-8 meeting.
"Eradication is a waste of money," Holbrooke said on the sidelines of a Group of Eight foreign ministers' meeting on Afghanistan, during which he briefed regional representatives on the new policy. "It might destroy some acreage, but it didn't reduce the amount of money the Taliban got by one dollar. It just helped the Taliban. So we're going to phase out eradication," he said.
So there you go, the US will no longer target growing fields and farmers in its war on drugs, reversing a hard fought gain achieved only last year that changed the rules of engagement to permit troops to treat growers as insurgents. This reform is of course only for Afghanistan, and the US will continue spending massive amounts on eradication efforts in Latin America and at home. Let that be a lesson to you, Kentucky – a few more IEDs and the government will finally hear your cries. The USA Today reporter, worried for some reason that his readers might be concerned about how our sovereign Afghan allies will react to this sudden 180 degree turn in a campaign that they have been carrying out for the past 8 years on our orders at great human and financial cost, goes on to muse: "While there was no immediate comment from Kabul on Saturday, the U.S. policy shift was likely to be welcomed by Afghanistan's government." Well, you can say this much about puppet regimes: they are usually very welcoming:
"Whatever program or strategy would be to the benefit of Afghanistan, we welcome it," said Afghanistan's counternarcotics minister Khodaidad. He added later: "We are happy with our policy ... so I'm not seeing any pause or what do you call it, deficiency, in our strategy. Our strategy's perfect. Our strategy's good."
So the old program was perfect, but the new one will be even better. Oh, Khodaidad, why don’t you care? If only you had something to lose, like that pile of narcocash you’re sitting on.
But the true P.R. coup de grace so far is an announcement that at some point soon, drum roll please, a directive will be issued by Gen. McChrystal that will direct American battlefield commanders :
In a situation where you are receiving fire from the enemy in a potentially populated structure and there is an option to extract yourself and your troops, consider that as a first option, don't simply return fire where you have unknown consequences against innocent civilians that may be inside that structure.
The details of the actual revisions to the rules of engagement have not been made public yet. But we are entitled to ask, how exactly is that going to play out? Are our brave men and women going to be asked, by the libruls now running the Pentagon, to let Taliban fighters slip away when they have them in their sights, to live and fight another day, turning Afghan villages into potential sanctuaries for the enemy from which to strike at our freedom? Won’t this make us as ineffective as those European sissies that have been dillydallying in their designated zones of occupation in Afghanistan, refusing for years to attack farmers for growing opium or to target villages that are suspected to be harboring Taliban fighters? Perhaps a reading of a real propaganda masterpiece, the definitive and final after action executive summary of a classified Pentagon investigative report about the May 4th bloodbath during which a B-1 bomber dropped three 2,000 bombs on an Afghan village in Farah province, killing over a hundred civilians, will give us a nice preview about how this new "occupation with a human face" would work in practice. This is a fascinating report, nearly poetry, somewhere between Kipling, Kafka and Heller, at once contrite and vindicating, but it does provide some insight about what a battle between Americans and ACM (anti coalition militants) actually looks like, so it’s well worth a read if you have time.
For those not inclined to read this crap, I have picked out the key passages relating to the decision by the commander on the ground to call in airstrikes, which shows us the decision making process and how it will be changed by the new directive. The battle lasted many hours, with American forces, from the Marine Corps Special Operations Command, originally arriving to assist Afghan police and then getting pinned down roughly along the line of a road connecting two Afghan villages, by a Taliban force estimated at about 300. A gravely wounded Afghan sergeant lay dying on exposed ground, and an American medic was wounded trying to evacuate him. The Marine ground commander began getting restless and called in some air support. Two F/A-18 fighters soon arrived. First, they conducted a show of force designed to scare off the militants, dropping flares and then strafing the enemy positions. After this didn’t work, the fighters dropped four 500 pound bombs along the enemy’s front line. These strikes allowed the American forces to clear the enemy position and get their wounded, though they were running low on ammo and still had to wait for a medevac helicopter. When the Americans investigated the bomb craters, they found no evidence of civilian casualties. Success! But here’s where the commander got greedy and the bad things happened.
At around 7 p.m., after nightfall, as the Americans were waiting for the medevac and still receiving intermittent fire from some militants on the hillside above a village, a B-1 "Lancer" bomber came to relieve the F-18s who had run low on fuel. This monster of an aircraft carries much larger bombs and is designed to level cities, not chase individual militants around bushy hillsides. As it circled the sky above the battlefield, the pilot, using his fancy thermo imaging gear, spotted a "group of similarly sized adults moving in a tactical manner – definitively and rapidly in evenly spaced intervals over difficult terrain in the dark." This description is repeated numerous times in the report, as the author must feel that it sufficiently explains how Americans, operating in the dark, were able to establish that Taliban fighters were present at the targeted areas. The other piece of evidence offered to justify the strikes is that the American commander heard chatter over the radio indicating that the Taliban commander was ordering his forces to regroup and mass for another assault on the American position. The group of tactically moving adults, whom the ground commander presumed were regrouping and massing in compliance with the overheard order, moved to an area next to a "non-descript building, the rubble of which was later determined to have been a mosque." The author of the unclassified executive summary gets a bit nervous here, fearing that blowing up a mosque might seem inappropriate to some readers even in light of the Taliban’s obvious intention to bunch into a tight mass in the face of continued airstrikes in order to assault a dug in Marine Special Forces unit buttressed with hundreds Afghan army and police. The summary therefore goes on about the mosque: "The investigation found that this mosque was used both as a madrasa and a barracks for foreign fighters." (pg. 8) Furthermore, the Pentagon investigators are pretty sure, despite explicit Afghan claims to the contrary, that no civilians were killed in the mosque strike, because there was an "absence of a local effort to recovery bodies in a timely manner" the next morning. There you go, if ever a mosque needed to be destroyed, it was this one.
Then a second and third "groups of similarly sized adults moving in a tactical manner – definitively and rapidly in evenly spaced intervals over difficult terrain in the dark" moved to a complex of buildings over a kilometer away from the American position, which complex of buildings is otherwise known as the village of Gieran. The Marine ground commander, after some contemplation, decided that this movement of people away from his position and into the village residential compounds meant that the militants were again "massing and rearming to attack," and authorized two more bombing strikes. There was a problem with these strikes, because as the B-1 maneuvered in on its bombing run, it lost contact with the ground commander and would not have been able to hear an order to abort the mission, had one been issued. This is a minor violation of the current rules of engagement, the only one which occurred during this incident.
But here is where the summary gets downright heroic. It goes further than the rules of engagement and engages in some serious soul-searching as to why nobody bothered to verify that there were no civilians in the village compounds before launching the strike. By a strange coincidence, this is precisely the sort of instance where the new directive would have changed the outcome of the ground commanders’ analysis. It’s almost as if the summary was prepared to give justification to the new directive and to make it look like the US is issuing the directive out of moral concern for the lives of the Afghan civilians. Under the new directive, the ground commander will be required to assess whether there is a likelihood that civilians are present and will have to come to an actual negative conclusion before authorizing a strike on a possible residential compound. To apply that to this instance, if the executive summary contained an additional sentence saying that "based on battlefield intelligence, the commander concluded that no civilians were likely to be present in the building compound," or, alternatively, that "American forces were in imminent danger of attach from the building compound" then the decision to launch the strike would still be kosher. But as it stands, under the revised rules of engagement, the commander would have had to let the B-1 bomber go home and to disengage the ground forces. Unfortunately, the directive did not come in time, but on the other hand, since the decision was made under the old rules of engagement, nobody will be disciplined for these strikes.
But I’m sure the man in charge of the Afghanistan-based propaganda, Brig.-Gen. Ryan, the new director of strategic effects for all coalition forces in Afghanistan will be able to sum up what, if anything, went wrong in Farah better than I can:
We screwed that up like you couldn’t believe," said Brig.-Gen. Ryan, who was not in command of ISAF Strategic Effects at the time. "We were saying only three were killed, when it was 90, and we finally admitted that yeah, OK, it was 33. Those were the bad old days, when we were not getting in there and checking stuff out."
General, what are you saying?! No, wait, that was another incident, last August, the bad old days. The May 4th incident has been handled differently, now that Ryan’s in charge, although it hasn’t helped that, a week after the battle took lace, Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Conway said he believed "there were families who were killed by the Taliban [at Farah] with grenades and rifle fire that were then paraded about and shown as casualties from the air strike." General Ryan, how are you going to get us out of this one?
"We did believe at the time [that there had been Taliban grenade attacks]," said Brig.-Gen. Ryan. "That has not panned out and we’re not fooling with that anymore, unless we have some more compelling evidence. On the grenading, all we’ve got is hearsay."
No more fooling until you have more compelling evidence, General Ryan? I know the families of the Afghan civilians sure do appreciate the straight talk and the suppression of hearsay evidence. While we have you with us, would you like to hazard a guess about how many civilians died in the Farah airstrikes, to demonstrate that this is no longer the bad old days when Americans would arbitrarily minimize the numbers and dispute figures given by the Afghan government based on no evidence?
Brig.-Gen. Ryan said the ongoing U.S.-led investigation likely will demonstrate that the civilian death toll was about 25 to 30, and that 65 to 70 insurgents were killed.
Hmm, then why are the Afghan numbers so high, General? (The Afghan government settled on between 140 and 147 casualties.) Can you handle this discrepancy in a way so as not to antagonize our sovereign allies?
"Well, [Afghan President Hamid Karzai] just framed the entire thing for the Afghan government, right there [by accepting the figure of between 140 and 147 casualties]," said Brig.-Gen. Ryan. "While an investigation is going on ... That was problematic. A little upsetting ... I think [Mr. Karzai’s comments] unhinged the Afghan side [of the investigations], because they were stuck with that, even though privately they will tell you, ‘Yeah, 147, you’ve got to be sh--ing me."
That’s some real straight shootin’ (you just know the Brigadier General is wearing well worn camouflage fatigues and combat boots and possibly holding a piece of straw in his mouth as he’s breaking this down). The Afghans are always privately like, "Can you believe how high our estimates about the deaths of our people are? We are so full of it! LOL!" Well, OK, now that nobody is fooling with anything and nobody is shtting anybody, what is the final civilian death toll? According to the authoritative and poetic executive summary of the after action report:
While this investigation assesses approximately 26 civilian casualties based on information from various sources and on new graves in the Gerani area in early May, no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurring on May 4, 2009. This investigation goes not discount the possibility that more than 26 civilians were killed in this engagement. Additionally, the investigative team notes that the report by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission .... represents a balanced, thoughtful investigation into the incident, citing as many as 86 civilian casualties, with appropriate lessons learned for all involved for all involved in the fighting on May 4th – U.S., Afghan and Taliban.
What a great improvement on the bad old days when Bush used to neglect Afghanistan and forget to change its litter. Back in those days, the US would simply deny and dismiss Afghan casualty counts. Now, we are able to simultaneously deny them, deride them, lampoon them, acknowledge them, and then agree with them, while at the same time addressing lingering doubts about the possibility of knowledge left over from Descartes.
Apparently, however, this occupation with a human face and generals who care and wear fatigues nonsense stops on the northern side of the Durand Line separating Afghanistan from Pakistan. If you are a Pakistani civilian, it’s still fire in the hole! Americans last week launched by far the deadliest airstrike of the war inside Pakistan, targeting the funeral of a mid level Taliban commander in the hopes of nailing a few of his friends, lobbing as many as four missiles from an unmanned aerial drone at the funeral cortege itself and then at cars fleeing the carnage. This attack killed about 60-80 people, at least half of whom were civilians, including 10 children aged five to 10 years and four local tribal elders, based on local hospital sources. This act of daring do demonstrated to the Pakistanis that we are not getting soft, or beginning to actually give a shit about innocent lives, thereby winning major kudos from the people who really care about winning the War on Terror, who have always disagreed with the Bush era policy against, and general human revulsion at, attacks against funeral processions. As the ever polite Brits at the Guardian put it, "bombing a funeral is unusual and may be unprecedented," but the strike was justified by the possibility that some big Taliban fish, including the elusive warlord Baitullah Mehsud could have been in attendance. Alas, subsequent reports have confirmed that all the senior level Taliban had either left the funeral before attacks, or were never in attendance, and in fact, "only relatives and close friends of the commander [remained at the funeral] when the drone fired two missiles at them."
But if you’re one of those people who watches news footage of Hamas fighters parading through the streets of Gaza during a funeral for one of their fighters, surrounded by throngs of women and children, and thinks to yourself, "Why doesn’t Israel bomb this procession right now, they are all gathered together perfectly and the women are already in mourning!" then this will fill you with optimism. The gloves are off! In Pakistan. And we are wearing beautiful fancy gloves in Afghanistan! But don’t feel too bad for the Pakistanis – since the current propaganda offensive isn’t aimed at them, at least they don’t’ have to endure an endless torrent of bullshit after every attack.
And, to end on a good note, happy Sovereignty Day, Iraq! May the streets of your cities never again crumble under the treads of American tanks. And now we dance the occupation shuffle.