LongWire
09-27-2009, 08:53
Good Article~
http://u.tv/News/Stanley-McChrystal-The-presidents-stealth-fighter/e3bd3060-b154-492b-b35f-c0e627ce2430
Stanley McChrystal: The president's stealth fighter
Sunday, 27 September 2009
The depiction of a US officer as a "true warrior" is an American military cliche. When it is used, it is to suggest more than command of the tools of permissive violence alone. Instead, it is a phrase employed to signify a deeper quality: the attributes of the warrior-scholar, the thinking soldier who is not simply part of the machine.
In the last few years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have heard it used so many times, each time to describe a new commander or an up-and-coming officer. Each is burdened with a weight of new ideas and expectation. Most of them are defeated by reality.
As described by the few former colleagues who have spoken about his largely clandestine career of three decades, General Stanley McChrystal, appointed commander of US forces in Afghanistan earlier this year, is one who would fit the category of "true warrior". The real question today is whether he is any smarter than the commanders in Afghanistan who have gone so unsuccessfully before him.
It is a moot point as McChrystal has found himself thrust into a controversy that has pitted the former special forces officer, credited with hunting down and killing the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, against the Afghanistan policy announced six months ago by the president of the United States.
As McChrystal prepares to pursue his request for up to 40,000 extra US troops in the next few weeks, the leaking of his bleak, confidential August assessment of the Afghan conflict to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post suggests a sharp critical intelligence at least. It boils down to a warning that without quick action, and clear policy objectives, the war could very easily be lost within 12 months. It's a warning that has plunged him into a political storm, not least because what McChrystal has had to say has been political poison: that five years and a joint Afghan-US-led security force of 500,000 may be required to win the conflict. And that America's corrupt partners in the Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai are as big a threat to the country as the Taliban fighters.
On a personal note, McChrystal has also been forced to deny that he has threatened to resign if he did not get what he required. But then McChrystal has a reputation for saying and thinking what others are afraid to, one of the reasons behind his original appointment.
The pseudonymous Dalton Fury, a former special forces officer and the author of Kill Bin Laden, is one of those who served under McChrystal in the US Army Rangers. Fury has written about a visit that the then Colonel McChrystal paid to his office when Fury was a young captain. What was on McChrystal's mind was the decision by the commander of the mission to rescue the US hostages in Iran in 1980 to abort the effort after two aircraft crashed killing eight servicemen.
McChrystal controversially believed that Colonel Charlie Beckwith, commander of the fated mission, should have pushed on with fewer men and helicopters because, as Fury remembers it, McChrystal "felt the embarrassment in the eyes of the world of failing to try was exponentially more devastating to our nation's reputation".
Indeed, it has been McChrystal's described ability to think outside of military conventions that is most mentioned by his admirers. On being appointed commander in Afghanistan, one of his first acts was to insist on limiting the air strikes, often undertaken on the shakiest of intelligence, that had led to the deaths of hundreds of Afghan civilians, undermining the US-led efforts.
While this initiative might suggest that McChrystal has been a more humane soldier in contrast to the men who went before him in Afghanistan – regarding air strikes at least – he has a darker reputation from his previous incarnation between 2003 and 2008 as head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a unit so clandestine that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.
The few details known about this period of his career suggest McChrystal was known as a ruthless, perhaps unparalleled hunter of terrorist suspects, largely operating in Iraq. And while Zarqawi was JSOC's biggest scalp under McChrystal's command, it has been suggested that there were very many others.
It was not just in Iraq that JSOC was active. General McChrystal, it is said, was a keen sponsor of a joint operation with the CIA to launch a raid into Pakistan in 2005 which he believed would result in the death or capture of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy. It was an operation cancelled at the last minute by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld who believed it was both too dangerous and based on unreliable intelligence.
The unit's work was not without controversy. A piece published in Esquire magazine shortly after the announcement of McChrystal's appointment and a Human Rights Watch report ("No Blood, No Foul") both claimed that elite soldiers abusively interrogated captives in Iraq, alleging, in Esquire's case, that some of those soldiers involved may have come from McChrystal's command.
But whatever McChrystal did while leading JSOC – or what he knew about – it is clear his masters under the Bush administration, both political and military, liked it. So much so that the unit, whose role was once seen as hostage rescue rather than terrorist hunting, was "promoted" and given more independence with McChrystal being awarded his third star.
The questions about US special forces' interrogations in Iraq have not been the only question mark over McChrystal. In 2007, a Pentagon investigation into the accidental shooting of former football star Pat Tillman by fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan held the general accountable for inaccurately suggesting he had been killed by enemy fire in recommending Tillman for a Silver Star.
Which leaves the question of precisely what kind of man Stanley McChrystal is? On his appointment, he was described, by former general William Nash, as "lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier" with "all the special ops attributes, plus an intellect".
Known as "Stan the Man" and "the Pope" during his time as a Ranger and Green Beret commander, the ascetic workaholic seems to have modelled himself on a classical ideal of the warrior straight out of Herodotus or Thucydides. Born in 1954 into a military family of four brothers and one sister, all of whom would serve or marry soldiers, McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976 before starting a career that quickly led him towards the Special Operations Command.
Eating once a day, it is said, and often sleeping little, he was noted during his time as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for running 12 miles a day, part of his rigorous fitness programme conducted while listening to audio books on his iPod. His knowledge, too, of terrorists and terrorism is described as encyclopedic and obsessive.
If there are echoes of another figure it is, perhaps, not any of his peers but a character from film, the Colonel Kurtz described in the assassin Willard's dossier in Apocalypse Now.
But if McChrystal is an intense man from an intense family, as a sister-in-law has described him, his reputation at the Council on Foreign Relations was somewhat smoother – of a man also confident with the world of academics, diplomats and politicians.
The reality, however, is that it is as much what McChrystal represented as who he is that mattered on his appointment earlier this year. When General David McKiernan was removed from his command after a shamingly short time, a notion of how the war should be fought in Afghanistan was also rejected: the attempt to fit conventional tactics to the asymmetric warfare of insurgency. McChrystal, his admirers believe, is attempting the reverse, retooling the tactics of conventional warfare with the understanding of a special forces man.
At an organisational level, he has recognised the folly of constant rotations of personnel and the loss of valuable personal contacts that entails each time, pushing for a central corps of 400 or so officers in a Pakistan-Afghanistan co-ordination cell.
It was in keeping with McChrystal's role to shape the US-led war more clearly into a counterinsurgency campaign where Afghan politics and the building of relationships with the local population would be as important as fighting. Which makes the conclusions of his report something of a surprise. He appears to have presented, his critics say, a solution that looks, on the crudest of readings at least, like something out of the playbook of General Westmoreland in Vietnam: escalation. The reality is that is not at all what McChrystal is proposing. Rather, he is arguing for resources for a shift in emphasis from aggressive war of confrontation with the Taliban to a focus on protecting Afghanistan's civilian population.
Thrust to the centre of the spotlight, "Stan the Man" may be discovering that politics is more dangerous, more cloak and dagger even than clandestine war.
(Cont Below)
http://u.tv/News/Stanley-McChrystal-The-presidents-stealth-fighter/e3bd3060-b154-492b-b35f-c0e627ce2430
Stanley McChrystal: The president's stealth fighter
Sunday, 27 September 2009
The depiction of a US officer as a "true warrior" is an American military cliche. When it is used, it is to suggest more than command of the tools of permissive violence alone. Instead, it is a phrase employed to signify a deeper quality: the attributes of the warrior-scholar, the thinking soldier who is not simply part of the machine.
In the last few years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have heard it used so many times, each time to describe a new commander or an up-and-coming officer. Each is burdened with a weight of new ideas and expectation. Most of them are defeated by reality.
As described by the few former colleagues who have spoken about his largely clandestine career of three decades, General Stanley McChrystal, appointed commander of US forces in Afghanistan earlier this year, is one who would fit the category of "true warrior". The real question today is whether he is any smarter than the commanders in Afghanistan who have gone so unsuccessfully before him.
It is a moot point as McChrystal has found himself thrust into a controversy that has pitted the former special forces officer, credited with hunting down and killing the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, against the Afghanistan policy announced six months ago by the president of the United States.
As McChrystal prepares to pursue his request for up to 40,000 extra US troops in the next few weeks, the leaking of his bleak, confidential August assessment of the Afghan conflict to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post suggests a sharp critical intelligence at least. It boils down to a warning that without quick action, and clear policy objectives, the war could very easily be lost within 12 months. It's a warning that has plunged him into a political storm, not least because what McChrystal has had to say has been political poison: that five years and a joint Afghan-US-led security force of 500,000 may be required to win the conflict. And that America's corrupt partners in the Afghan government led by Hamid Karzai are as big a threat to the country as the Taliban fighters.
On a personal note, McChrystal has also been forced to deny that he has threatened to resign if he did not get what he required. But then McChrystal has a reputation for saying and thinking what others are afraid to, one of the reasons behind his original appointment.
The pseudonymous Dalton Fury, a former special forces officer and the author of Kill Bin Laden, is one of those who served under McChrystal in the US Army Rangers. Fury has written about a visit that the then Colonel McChrystal paid to his office when Fury was a young captain. What was on McChrystal's mind was the decision by the commander of the mission to rescue the US hostages in Iran in 1980 to abort the effort after two aircraft crashed killing eight servicemen.
McChrystal controversially believed that Colonel Charlie Beckwith, commander of the fated mission, should have pushed on with fewer men and helicopters because, as Fury remembers it, McChrystal "felt the embarrassment in the eyes of the world of failing to try was exponentially more devastating to our nation's reputation".
Indeed, it has been McChrystal's described ability to think outside of military conventions that is most mentioned by his admirers. On being appointed commander in Afghanistan, one of his first acts was to insist on limiting the air strikes, often undertaken on the shakiest of intelligence, that had led to the deaths of hundreds of Afghan civilians, undermining the US-led efforts.
While this initiative might suggest that McChrystal has been a more humane soldier in contrast to the men who went before him in Afghanistan – regarding air strikes at least – he has a darker reputation from his previous incarnation between 2003 and 2008 as head of the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a unit so clandestine that the Pentagon for years refused to acknowledge its existence.
The few details known about this period of his career suggest McChrystal was known as a ruthless, perhaps unparalleled hunter of terrorist suspects, largely operating in Iraq. And while Zarqawi was JSOC's biggest scalp under McChrystal's command, it has been suggested that there were very many others.
It was not just in Iraq that JSOC was active. General McChrystal, it is said, was a keen sponsor of a joint operation with the CIA to launch a raid into Pakistan in 2005 which he believed would result in the death or capture of Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy. It was an operation cancelled at the last minute by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld who believed it was both too dangerous and based on unreliable intelligence.
The unit's work was not without controversy. A piece published in Esquire magazine shortly after the announcement of McChrystal's appointment and a Human Rights Watch report ("No Blood, No Foul") both claimed that elite soldiers abusively interrogated captives in Iraq, alleging, in Esquire's case, that some of those soldiers involved may have come from McChrystal's command.
But whatever McChrystal did while leading JSOC – or what he knew about – it is clear his masters under the Bush administration, both political and military, liked it. So much so that the unit, whose role was once seen as hostage rescue rather than terrorist hunting, was "promoted" and given more independence with McChrystal being awarded his third star.
The questions about US special forces' interrogations in Iraq have not been the only question mark over McChrystal. In 2007, a Pentagon investigation into the accidental shooting of former football star Pat Tillman by fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan held the general accountable for inaccurately suggesting he had been killed by enemy fire in recommending Tillman for a Silver Star.
Which leaves the question of precisely what kind of man Stanley McChrystal is? On his appointment, he was described, by former general William Nash, as "lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier" with "all the special ops attributes, plus an intellect".
Known as "Stan the Man" and "the Pope" during his time as a Ranger and Green Beret commander, the ascetic workaholic seems to have modelled himself on a classical ideal of the warrior straight out of Herodotus or Thucydides. Born in 1954 into a military family of four brothers and one sister, all of whom would serve or marry soldiers, McChrystal graduated from West Point in 1976 before starting a career that quickly led him towards the Special Operations Command.
Eating once a day, it is said, and often sleeping little, he was noted during his time as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations for running 12 miles a day, part of his rigorous fitness programme conducted while listening to audio books on his iPod. His knowledge, too, of terrorists and terrorism is described as encyclopedic and obsessive.
If there are echoes of another figure it is, perhaps, not any of his peers but a character from film, the Colonel Kurtz described in the assassin Willard's dossier in Apocalypse Now.
But if McChrystal is an intense man from an intense family, as a sister-in-law has described him, his reputation at the Council on Foreign Relations was somewhat smoother – of a man also confident with the world of academics, diplomats and politicians.
The reality, however, is that it is as much what McChrystal represented as who he is that mattered on his appointment earlier this year. When General David McKiernan was removed from his command after a shamingly short time, a notion of how the war should be fought in Afghanistan was also rejected: the attempt to fit conventional tactics to the asymmetric warfare of insurgency. McChrystal, his admirers believe, is attempting the reverse, retooling the tactics of conventional warfare with the understanding of a special forces man.
At an organisational level, he has recognised the folly of constant rotations of personnel and the loss of valuable personal contacts that entails each time, pushing for a central corps of 400 or so officers in a Pakistan-Afghanistan co-ordination cell.
It was in keeping with McChrystal's role to shape the US-led war more clearly into a counterinsurgency campaign where Afghan politics and the building of relationships with the local population would be as important as fighting. Which makes the conclusions of his report something of a surprise. He appears to have presented, his critics say, a solution that looks, on the crudest of readings at least, like something out of the playbook of General Westmoreland in Vietnam: escalation. The reality is that is not at all what McChrystal is proposing. Rather, he is arguing for resources for a shift in emphasis from aggressive war of confrontation with the Taliban to a focus on protecting Afghanistan's civilian population.
Thrust to the centre of the spotlight, "Stan the Man" may be discovering that politics is more dangerous, more cloak and dagger even than clandestine war.
(Cont Below)