We're all PSYOP now.
US troops Won't Be Sent To Pakistan: Robert Gates
CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan — There are no plans to deploy U.S. ground troops to Pakistan, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday, despite concerns over increasing violence between Pakistani troops and Taliban militants.
Speaking to about 300 Marines at Camp Leatherneck in southern Afghanistan on Thursday, Gates assured them that they wouldn't be fighting in the neighboring sovereign nation.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/0..._n_198759.html
School bombing exposes Obama’s secret war inside Pakistan
THE discovery of three American soldiers among the dead in a suicide bombing at the opening of a girls’ school in the northwestern Pakistan town of Dir last week reignited the fears of many Pakistanis that Washington was set on invading their country.
Barack Obama has banned the Bush-era term “war on terror” and dithered about sending extra troops to Afghanistan, but across the border in Pakistan, the US president has dramatically stepped up the covert war against Islamic extremists.
US airstrikes in Pakistan, launched from unmanned drones, are now averaging three a week, triple the number last year. “We're quietly seeing a geographical shift,” an intelligence officer said.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle7017929.ece
Pak urged to acknowledge role in drone strikes
Further stressing the point, [Levin] claimed that Pakistani leaders “not only understand and acquiesce, but in many cases privately support the drone attacks”. The minimum the United States should expect from Pakistan “is a silence on their part rather than a public attack on us”.
Such criticism “creates real problems for us in terms of the Pakistani public and helps create some real animosity towards us — a sense of revenge, the implication that we’re violating Pakistan’s sovereignty”, he said.Senator Levin said he believed it was wrong to put all the blame on the US and “I’ve told them that to their face”.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/...-strikes-hs-04
General McChrystal says we shouldn't believe him
If today's New York Times was reporting accurately, you should be very skeptical of anything that Afghan commander General Stanley McChrystal says. Not because he's inherently dishonest, mind you, but because misleading everyone about the situation in Afghanistan may be part of his strategy for victory.
To be specific, today's Times also contains an article with the headline "Top U.S. Commander Sees Progress in Afghanistan." It quotes McChrystal as follows: "I am not prepared to say that we have turned the corner. So I'm saying the situation is serious, but I think we have made significant progress in setting the conditions in 2009, and beginning some progress, and that we'll make real progress in 2010."
This is nicely hedged, but McChrystal went to describe the war in a way that leads me to question virtually anything he might have to say now or in the future. According to the Times, the general also said that "The biggest thing is in convincing the Afghan people ...
This is all a war of perceptions. This is not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants".
On the one hand this statement is something of a truism, in the sense that resolve, morale, and expectations about the future can be critical factors (though what is actually happening on the battlefield is hardly irrelevant). But McChrystal's statement invites us to doubt anything he might choose to tell us about the progress of the war either now or in the months to come. Why? Because if he believes it is "all a war of perceptions," then spinning the war in the most favorable possible light has to be part of his strategy, in order to try to persuade both Afghans and Americans that we are winning. And that means we can't accept anything he says at face value, because we can't know if he's giving us an honest appraisal or just deploying a lot of blue smoke and mirrors in order to influence perceptions (which he thinks are key).
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...nt_believe_him