Author: Kelley Beaucar Vlahos

UPDATE: So President Obama has decided the only way to resolve the Rolling Stone fiasco — which is really a COIN fiasco – is to put Big Daddy COIN in command. Anyone else feel like we’re on Ozzy’s Crazy Train?

There were two major themes that I took away from the now infamous Rolling Stone piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The first is obvious: Stan the Man is an arrogant man’s man who prefers Bud Lite Lime over chardonnay, and who has surrounded himself with a “handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs,” and they are super-cool too. They get sloshed at places called “Kitty O’Shea’s” and crack jokes about wimpy Washington fops like Dick Holbrooke and Joe Biden. They are running the war, reporter Michael Hastings points out. Their swagger comes from the chief maniac himself, Stan the Man, who enthralls Hastings with such witty repartee as this:

“I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,” McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

“Unfortunately,” he adds, “no one in this room could do it.”

With that, he’s out the door.

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.

“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fu**ing gay.”

Swell. But aside from getting himself in a pot of boiling water fired over these and other remarks he and his aides make about the President, Biden, Holbrooke, Eikenberry, et al, McChrystal comes off as a real American ideal — that is , if you are a red-blooded, right wing cowboy who holds the military in much higher esteem than the rest of America’s civil institutions. McChrystal should at least be happy that all of his cliched mannerisms and affectations were given the famous Rolling Stone treatment — like being described as a classic fighting general who goes on regular patrols with his soldiers and whose “slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve fu***d up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.” He’s so dedicated to the war effort and his men that he has seen his wife Annie less than 30 days a year since 2003. When he does see her on their 33rd wedding anniversary, he drags her out with his “inner circle” to dinner at “the least ‘Gucci’ place his staff could find.” Then there’s the cussing and kick-assing, his 100 demerits at West Point, the anti-Parisian-doesn’t-truck-with-no-fancy-schmantzy-bureaucrats ethos. He’s lean (that’s pointed out several times) and mean, and has the temerity to tell his aides that he’s underwhelmed and disappointed with the president when he meets for the first time. Now that’s the kind of guy today’s Republicans and tea partiers would line up behind in a heartbeat.

But aside from noting that Stan and his posse are pretty much “the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan” — and don’t they know it — and more so, the unbelievable break Hastings got when McChrystal and his people said all of these crazy things about administration officials in front of him and on the record, there’s the real story.

Hastings points out what a godforesaken mess Afghanistan is, but he deftly underscores that COIN, and specifically the new rules of engagement handed down by McChrystal himself, are confusing and degrading the morale of the troops on the ground. This isn’t something that Barack Obama has done — Hastings notes early in the piece that McChrystal got nearly all the troops he needed for the 2010 surge — this is about the fundamentals of COIN, the very strategy that McChrystal and his patron Gen. David Petraeus, and friends like Gen. Raymond Odierno, own and have been pushing like a ramrod through Afghanistan since 2009.

We know Rolling Stone has a skeptical if not outright anti-war agenda. But Hastings lets the combat soldiers do the talking and I feel this is the most explosive part of the report:

One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any fu****g sense?” asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a fu****g bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fu**, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fu****g gun on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fu***d up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fu****g losing this thing.”

McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. “I ask you what’s going on in your world, and I think it’s important for you all to understand the big picture as well,” McChrystal begins. “How’s the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you’re losing?” McChrystal says.

“Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we’re losing, sir,” says Hicks.

McChrystal nods. “Strength is leading when you just don’t want to lead,” he tells the men. “You’re leading by example. That’s what we do. Particularly when it’s really, really hard, and it hurts inside.” Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he’s careful not to bullshit the men. “We are knee-deep in the decisive year,” he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative – “but I don’t think we do, either.” It’s similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it’s not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. “This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks,” McChrystal tries to joke. “But it doesn’t get the same reception from infantry companies.”

During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. 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 be able to fight – like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. “We aren’t putting fear into the Taliban,” one soldier says.

“Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing,” McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan. “The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn’t work.”

“I’m not saying go out and kill everybody, sir,” the soldier persists. “You say we’ve stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don’t believe that’s true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s getting.”

“I agree with you,” McChrystal says. “In this area, we’ve not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I’m telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?”

A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn’t have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. “That’s the way this game is,” McChrystal says. “It’s complex. I can’t just decide: It’s shirts and skins, and we’ll kill all the shirts.”

As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn’t succeeded at easing the men’s anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. “There’s no way I can make that easier,” he tells them. “No way I can pretend it won’t hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you’re doing a great job. Don’t let the frustration get to you.” The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren’t buying it.

A lot of people back here haven’t been buying it either. So-called population centric warfare is a fool’s errand. Trying to protect civilians while clearing out the “bad guys” only puts the the troops more at risk, civilians get hurt anyway and the Taliban, well they get to slip back into the shadows, feeding off the elaborate shakedown rackets and a seemingly endless source of support from the population we hope to protect. A vicious cycle. So what is the alternative? McChrystal put his finger on it a bit. Classic counterinsurgency, like what was practiced by the British in the Boer Wars, engaged in pacification, putting women and children in concentration camps. And, as Stan alluded to, just wiping people out. Breaking them down. I don’t think that is what the American people want.

So, the other alternative is disengagement, withdrawal. COINdinista Andrew Exum has already picked up on this from his own reading of the COIN criticisms in the Rolling Stone piece:

Disengagement from Afghanistan? Okay, but what would the costs and benefits of that disengagement be? I am frustrated by the reluctance of the legions of counterinsurgency skeptics to be honest about — or even discuss — the costs and benefits of alternatives. Some do, but not many.

Yes. I wish for that debate to happen. Like right now.

In the meantime, I do not see this Hastings report as a bad thing. It puts the war squarely in the laps of the COINdinistas, where it should be. On it’s current trajectory, the war will fail and the people who own the strategy should be held responsible for it. This might sound like a no-brainer, but the hawks are already trying to fob this mess off on Obama and the White House as the primary puppetmasters of this clusterf***k. I think it’s good to remind the American people that there are a few generals and a posse of “killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs” who made sure they were “in charge” from the very beginning.

Cross-posted at The American Conservative.

It looks like Rand Paul, son of Rep. Ron Paul, has won the Republican Party nomination for senate against establishment candidate Trey Grayson in Kentucky tonight. The media has declared this a “big win for the Tea Party” — because it would seem to fit the familiar one-dimensional narrative. But after months of so-called Tea Partiers jumping on the Rand Paul bandwagon, maybe it really is their night after all.

First, let’s get it straight that Rand Paul, aside from being his own man — who told me personally had been planning a future run at politics for at least 18 years — can attribute much of his early success on the political radar to the Campaign for Liberty folks — the Ron Paul-inspired libertarians who loyally promoted his candidacy, raised money and spread the word to libertarian groups and like-minded individuals across the country. It wasn’t until he declared his candidacy and Sarah Palin gave her infamous endorsement to the younger Paul that Rand started becoming a “Tea Party candidate.” Today, on the evening of his victory, it is the Tea Party, not the individual, that seems to be getting all of the attention.

Of course, Paul did little to counter that along the way, and with good reason. He had to rely on the bedrock Kentucky Republican base in a closed primary. While independents could make noise for Rand,  unless they registered GOP by the first of the year, they could not vote tonight. Paul sensed that his predominantly Republican constituency was angry at Washington, but would identify less with his libertarian views on say, war and civil liberties, than on issues of the deficit and government bailouts and “Obamacare.”  Thus, he played down his support for medical marijuana, his opposition to the Patriot Act, and most importantly, massaged his stance on the war and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Where his father Ron has been consistently vocal about his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rand says he is willing to put the issue of Afghanistan up for a “national debate.” While he is wary of foreign entanglements and like his father, has talked about U.S foreign policy playing a hand in unrest abroad, he only goes so far to suggest there should be a formal declaration of war in Afghanistan — if that is what the nation wants. On Gitmo, he was lambasted for previously suggesting it should be closed, but then shifted into  hawk mode somewhere this winter, warning against unleashing “terrorists” on Main Street and calling for military tribunals for the prisoners.

Polls indicate that Paul has a good chance of becoming Kentucky’s junior senator in November. That would mean two Pauls on Capitol Hill. That should be double trouble for the congressional establishment on both sides of the aisle. Or will it be? Will he be his own man or the Tea Party’s man? Will he follow through on re-0pening a real debate on the Afghanistan War policy, or spend his time dogging the president about trying Gitmo detainees in the military tribunals, which we all know are fatally flawed? Will he shy away from war issues, or become a natural voice for limited foreign intervention?

Time will tell. We know the money will come in like a tsunami from Tea Partiers across the country now. Hopefully, he will remember who brung him to the dance.

UPDATE: It’s clear from Paul’s victory speech, that he no longer sees a difference between the revolution that began with his father’s presidential run and the Tea Party of today (though he has acknowledged publicly that he believes the vast majority in the Tea Party movement voted for John McCain, not Ron Paul in 2008). “I have a message — a message from the Tea Party. A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words. We’ve come to take our government back,” he said during his victory speech last night. I guess we can expect a lot more rhetoric criticizing President Obama for “apologizing” to socialist dictators “for America’s greatness” and for our glorious capitalist system (like he did last night) and a lot less talk about the gushing open wound that is our U.S foreign policy abroad and the erosion of our civil liberties at home (like he used to). Though he talked about the “mountain of debt devouring this country,” there was zero mention of the trillion dollar war in last night’s speech.

So my new question is, if and when Rand Paul and the Tea Party  take “the government back,” who they will give it back to?

As tensions escalate between the administration and Israel, there seems to be growing concern that the American people at large are getting wise to their own interests; an anxiousness over whether we will start looking more closely at whether Israel’s national security interests are in fact, American national security interests. Mostly because the protracted conflict could be putting our troops overseas risk. As John Mearscheimer wrote this week, “if that message begins to resonate with the American public, unconditional support for the Jewish state is likely to evaporate.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s treatment of visiting VP Biden in announcing new settlements crossed a line, critics have pointed out across the board. Neoconservative hawks here in the U.S are playing those implications down, of course, seeming very sensitive right now to the suggestion that American-Israeli interests in the region may be diverging.

Thus, the ADL’s curious rebuke of Gen. David Petraeus after he testified this week regarding the consequences of a failed peace mission:

The assumptions Gen. Petraeus presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee wrongly attribute “insufficient progress” in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and “a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel” as significantly impeding the U.S. military mission in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and in dealing with the Iranian influences in the region. It is that much more of a concern to hear this coming from such a great American patriot and hero.

The General’s assertions lead to the illusory conclusion that if only there was a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S. could successfully complete its mission in the region.

Funny this doesn’t sound much different from what David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said on PBS’ News Hour on Tuesday:

…This is a very contested point that General Petraeus raised today, because, look …nobody serious believes that, if you solve this conflict, it is an open sesame, and it unlocks all the other or any conflicts in the Middle East… Where our disagreement is whether this will fundamentally make a difference in the way America is perceived. I mean, we all would agree, I would think, that, you know, if people are shooting at America in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s because of that local conflict…

[Extremists] don’t say, oh, there was progress on the Arab-Israeli front, no shooting today. So, that’s not the issue. The issue is, is this a layer of anti-Americanism that is fundamental? And I would argue that there is like 20 layers there. This might be one out of 20, and it should be resolved for its own reasons, but it’s not decisive in these other theaters.

But does any of us think that al-Qaida will go away if this issue is solved? They never cared about this issue at all. They’re a Johnny-come-lately to this question.

Oh really? Is that why a U.S military commission at Guantanamo Bay convicted this al Qaeda PR man, for editing and disseminating this video in before his capture in 2004? Because al Qaeda was a ‘Johnny-come-lately’ to the Palestinian cause? Maybe I missed something.

Furthermore, I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the longstanding partnership between the U.S and Israel has not fomented extremism in the region, when it was a primary goal of the neoconservative war planners to overthrow Saddam Hussein as part of a greater vision of “securing the realm” just a decade ago. And whatever happened to ‘The road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad’?

A little jingle that’s lost its juice, I guess, now that there is a pro-Iranian government in Iraq, which no matter how the elections shake out, does not seem to be going anywhere.