Top General In Afghan War: US Envoy Betrayed Me

[alright4u]

Bob- We never had a reporter around SOG. We would have never let him near the compounds/FOB's. Very few pencil types dared to go out with even an Infantry platoon or company. Galloway did. Hell, we would not let Donald Duncan near anyone in SOG.

After that bleeding heart Geraldo drew that sand table in Iraq, no Gen or NCO should have trusted the damn media. These guys got drunk IMO. You get drunk in a safe house- like house 10.

[akv]

The last post: McChrystal's bleak outlook

President Obama lost patience with Runaway General's failed strategy
Sunday, 27 June 2010

Sacked US General Stanley McChrystal issued a devastatingly critical assessment of the war against a "resilient and growing insurgency" just days before being forced out.

Using confidential military documents, copies of which have been seen by the IoS, the "runaway general" briefed defence ministers from Nato and the International security Assistance Force (Isaf) earlier this month, and warned them not to expect any progress in the next six months. During his presentation, he raised serious concerns over levels of security, violence, and corruption within the Afghan administration.

Details of General McChrystal's grim assessment of his own strategy's current effectiveness emerged as the world's most powerful leaders set the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, a five-year deadline to improve security and governance in his country.

The G8 summit in Toronto called for "concrete progress" within five years on improving the justice system and for Afghan forces to assume greater responsibility for security. David Cameron said a "political surge" must now complement the military one.

But the "campaign overview" left behind by General McChrystal after he was sacked by President Barack Obama last week warned that only a fraction of the areas key to long-term success are "secure", governed with "full authority", or enjoying "sustainable growth". He warned of a critical shortage of "essential" military trainers needed to build up Afghan forces – of which only a fraction is classed as "effective".

He pinpointed an "ineffective or discredited" Afghan government and a failure by Pakistan "to curb insurgent support" as "critical risks" to success. "Waning" political support and a "divergence of coalition expectations and campaign timelines" are among the key challenges faced, according to the general.

It was this briefing, according to informed sources, as much as the Rolling Stone article, which convinced Mr Obama to move against the former head of US Special Forces, as costs soar to $7bn a month and the body count rises to record levels, because it undermined the White House political team's aim of pulling some troops out of Afghanistan in time for the US elections in 2012. In addition to being the result of some too-candid comments in a magazine article, the President's decision to dispense with his commander was seen by the general's supporters as a politically motivated culmination of their disagreements.

General McChrystal's presentation to Nato defence ministers and Isaf representatives provided an uncompromising obstacle to Mr Obama's plan to bring troops home in time to give him a shot at a second term, according to senior military sources. The general was judged to be "off message" in his warning to ministers not to expect quick results and that they were facing a "resilient and growing insurgency".

It came as mounting casualties added to US and UK discomfort. June has been the bloodiest month for coalition forces since the conflict began, with 88 killed. A soldier from 4th Regiment Royal Artillery died yesterday in hospital in Birmingham of wounds sustained in an explosion on 10 June. He had been on patrol with members of the Afghan National Army in Nahr-e Saraj North District, Helmand Province. He was the 308th British soldier killed since the start of the war nine years ago. The death toll is escalating, with 62 deaths this year – almost double the 32 that died in the same period last year.

Nato played down the chances of success. "I don't think anyone would say we're winning," said a Nato spokesman. The revelations provide context to the disagreements between Mr Obama and his general, highlighted in the article in Rolling Stone in which senior White House figures were criticised.

The reality, according to a senior military source, is that General McChrystal's candour about the reality of the situation was an obstacle to Mr Obama's search for an "early, face-saving exit" to help his chances in the 2012 presidential elections. "Stan argued for time, and would not compromise. Rolling Stone provided an excuse for Obama to fire the opposition to his plan without having to win an intellectual argument," he said.

General McChrystal knew "his time was up" and had been told by White House aides his "time-frame was all wrong", with the general thinking in years while the President was thinking more in months, he added.

The general's departure is a sign of politicians "taking charge of this war", a senior Whitehall official said. "The Taliban are feeling the pressure, but we're not harvesting it politically," he said. "Obama sacking McChrystal was a show of strength. What we are seeing on both sides of the Atlantic, at long last, is the politicians starting to take charge of this war. Wars are won when you have a Churchill and an Alanbrooke, when you have a proper balance between political direction and military leadership."

Mr Cameron asked for a political settlement to be mapped out at a special cabinet meeting held at Chequers earlier this month, he said. "Cameron doesn't want to make Brown's mistake of getting bogged down in details instead of doing grand strategy."

He said General McChrystal had been urging Washington to "start the political track as soon as possible" while his replacement, General Petraeus, has argued "that we need to get the upper hand militarily and regain the military initiative, and then negotiate from a position of strength". He said it would take time to recover from General McChrystal's loss, "particularly if Petraeus just ploughs on with trying to get the upper hand militarily".

Admiral Mike Mullen met with President Karzai yesterday to assure him that the new Nato commander will pursue the same strategy followed by his predecessor. He pledged that General Petraeus would also do his best to reduce civilian casualties.

General McChrystal said progress in the next six months was unlikely. He raised serious concerns over levels of security, violence, and corruption within the Afghan administration. Only five areas out of 116 assessed were classed as "secure" – the rest suffering various degrees of insecurity and more than 40 described as "dangerous" or "unsecure".

Just five areas out of 122 were classed as being under the "full authority" of the government – with governance rated as non-existent, dysfunctional or unproductive in 89 of the areas. Seven areas out of 120 rated for development were showing sustainable growth. In 48 areas, growth was either stalled or the population were at risk. Less than a third of the military and only 12 per cent of police forces were rated as "effective".

A strategic assessment referred to in the presentation revealed just how close the strategy in Afghanistan is to failing. It stated that the campaign was "on track temporarily" – but this was defined as meaning that there was "a low level of confidence that positive trends will be sustained over the next six-month period". It also said the Afghan people "believe that development is too slow" and many "still generally mistrust Afghan police forces". Security was "unsatisfactory" and efforts to build up the Afghan security forces were "at risk", with "capability hampered by shortages in NCOs and officers, corruption and low literacy levels".

A general's damning report...

Afghan security forces

General McChrystal says both the Afghan police (ANP) and army (ANA) were "critically short on trainers – the essential resource required for quality". Out of 2,325 required, only 846 were already on the ground and 660 more were promised.

Governance

The Afghan government was assessed as having "full authority" in only five districts; in 45 more, governance was "unproductive", in 29 "dysfunctional" and in 15 "non-existent". In the "Critical risks" section of his presentation, General McChrystal listed "Governance: ineffective or discredited". ISAF accepted that "governance needs improvement and lags security efforts".

Security

Nato informed that "violence and security varies regionally... focused in localised areas", and "assessments of key district security are improving slightly". However, only a third of 122 "key terrain areas" were regarded as "secure" or suffering "occasional threats". In key areas, 47 per cent of the population were assessed as secure.

Corruption

General McChrystal noted the need to "address principal sources of corruption and grievance" in Kandahar. Nato warned that "corruption remains an impediment to connectivity between the government and its people". Echoes earlier US concerns that the "lack of Afghan government will and the capacity to prosecute narco-corrupt officials continues to undermine development of governance and security".

Justice

Referred to President Karzai's early pledge to "further the reform process within our justice system". But US Department of Defense has since complained courts are "chronically corrupt". McChrystal's recommendations on "Detention operations and rule of law" include "transition to Afghan lead" and "promoting transparency across spectrum of detention activities".

Development/reconstruction

Emphasised need to "create conditions for development", particularly in the south. But there are worries that the government "has become increasingly dependent on contributions from the international community". Although satisfaction with the local electricity supply has risen, many remain without access and the general warns of the need to "significantly expand electrical supply to meet rising demand".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...k-2011730.html

[Richard]

General McChrystal Tells Army He'll Retire
USAToday, 29 June 2010

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last week as the top U.S. general in the stalemated Afghanistan war, told the Army on Monday that he will retire.

Army spokesman Col. Tom Collins said McChrystal, 55, notified the service of his plans. The general submitted formal retirement papers, but it is not clear when he will leave the service because the process usually take a few months.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/militar...hooModule_News

And here's something to think about - y'all be careful over there.

President Obama's ambivalence toward the war is energizing our enemies and undermining our allies.

Richard

Afghanistan: Eyes Wide Shut
WSJ, 29 June 2010

With a wink of its left eye, the Obama administration tells its liberal base that a year from now the U.S. will be heading for a quick Afghan exit. "Everyone knows there's a firm date," insists White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

With a wink of its right, the administration tells Afghanistan, Pakistan, NATO allies and its own military leadership that the July 2011 date is effectively meaningless. The notion that a major drawdown will begin next year "absolutely has not been decided," says Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

The winks are simultaneous.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...wsreel_opinion

[Richard]

And so it goes...

Richard

Can Obama and Petraeus Work Together?
Time, 24 June 2010

It is amazing how quickly General Stanley McChrystal became an afterthought. It happened minutes after he was removed from command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan for idiocy above and beyond the call of duty. He became an afterthought because of the brilliant, and in some ways diabolically clever, decision that Barack Obama made in naming his successor: General David Petraeus, the dominant U.S. military figure of our time.

It was the nature of McChrystal's blunder that made the reascension of Petraeus inevitable. It was the insular, locker-room puerility of McChrystal's team, spewing in a recent Rolling Stone article — the stone-cold belief that they had all the answers; that the civilians in charge, especially those who were members of the Democratic Party, were just a bunch of feckless chin pullers — that made the incident so dangerous; it cut far too close to the bone. It raised timeless questions about civilian authority over the military in wartime and a nagging one that has shadowed American politics since Vietnam: whether Democrats are too soft, too removed from the realities of military life, to pursue an effective national-security policy.

And that is why the Petraeus appointment is at once brilliant and clever — because his prickly relationship with the President has been the symbolic heart of this problem, and now it will take center stage, in Washington and on the battlefields of Afghanistan. How it is resolved, if it is resolved, will determine the fate of Obama's presidency.

Barack Obama's problems with Petraeus began in their very first meeting, in Baghdad during the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama was joined in that session by then-Senators Joe Biden and Chuck Hagel. Petraeus laid on one of his epic PowerPoint slide presentations, which annoyed members of the group. "It was propaganda, assuming we didn't know anything," one of those present told me. "We wanted to ask questions, and when we did, Petraeus treated us badly, interrupting Obama continually, taking a very hard stand." The meeting dissolved into a heated exchange between Obama and Petraeus over Obama's stated intention to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by 2010. Ultimately, Obama's general view on the withdrawal prevailed; even Petraeus eventually came to believe Obama's policy was right, although he also believed it wouldn't have been possible without his 2007 surge in Iraq, which Obama opposed.

And now these two men are locked together for the foreseeable future, perhaps for history. In an odd way, their relationship — with its equal rations of respect and mistrust — reflects positive changes that have taken place in the Democratic Party and the U.S. military. For several decades after Vietnam, most Democratic politicians were antiwar by reflex and antimilitary by instinct. Even now, many Democrats — who come from the coasts, the big cities, the slums — are unfamiliar with a military culture rooted in the Appalachians, the South, the Plains. A moderate Democratic group called the Truman National Security Project offers a course called Military 101 to teach incoming Democratic members of Congress things like the difference between a battalion and a brigade.

Campaigning for the presidency, Obama was very much aware that a solution to his party's perceived military weaknesses was necessary after the Sept. 11 attacks. His answer had the virtue of being politically adept and substantively valid: Iraq had been the wrong war. Afghanistan was the right one, because it had been the home of al-Qaeda, and it had been neglected by George W. Bush. As President, Obama has abided by his campaign talk and has shown himself amenable to targeted but relentless use of force, in a manner that dismays his party's base. He won quiet praise from the people in uniform by retaining Bush's popular Defense Secretary Robert Gates and appointing Jim Jones, a retired Marine four-star general, as National Security Adviser. And Obama was applauded for supporting Petraeus, who was promoted from commander of the multinational forces in Iraq by Bush, in his new job as Centcom commander, a position that oversees American security interests in the most sensitive region in the world. He did so in large part because Petraeus was the exemplar of the creative new thinking that had, at least partly, transformed the U.S. military.

It isn't well remembered now, but Petraeus was an outcast midway through the Bush Administration. Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's wildly incompetent Defense Secretary, didn't like him; neither did many of his peers, who remained enamored of the Army they knew, a rumbling array of tanks and trucks and heavy artillery constructed to fight the Russians on the plains of Central Europe. Rumsfeld sent Petraeus out to pasture at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., which among other things serves as an Army think tank. There, Petraeus and a group of military intellectuals concocted the military's counterinsurgency field manual — a strategy waiting to be implemented as everything else in Iraq failed. The irony about counterinsurgency (which carries the unfortunate, jingling acronym COIN) is that it is a theory of warfare that should be more acceptable to Democrats — and it was, to smart ones like Hillary Clinton — because it emphasized protecting local populations, providing them with services like schools and health clinics and jobs. When Bush turned to Petraeus and COIN was implemented in Baghdad in 2007, it looked an awful lot like community policing and social services on the South Side of Chicago. And it worked.

But it was not the only thing that worked in Iraq. Petraeus' decision to purchase the Sunni tribes in Anwar province — the Bush Administration had considered tribes "part of the past" until then — undermined the insurgency and separated the professional, al-Qaeda terrorists from the indigenous population. Most important was the untold story of the spectacular success that the special-operations forces led by McChrystal suddenly began to have in rooting out the bad guys (this was, in large part, attributable to the resources President Bush devoted to cultivating human intelligence assets). The success in Iraq was attributable to what the military calls full-spectrum warfare, the use of all the tools in its kit, but it was COIN that emerged as the headliner — an oversimplification that has had dire ramifications in Afghanistan.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...999251,00.html

[Richard]

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John R. Allen, DCINC, United States Central Command, assumed the position of acting commander at 1 p.m. today after Gen. David H. Petraeus left CENTCOM to assume command of International Security Assistance Force/U.S. Forces-Afghanistan.

Allen, a 34-year career Marine Corps officer, became CENTCOM’s deputy commander on July 15, 2008.

LTG Allen bio http://www.centcom.mil/en/about-centcom/leadership/

Petraeus, who led CENTCOM since October 2008, was picked by President Obama to succeed Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal as the top commander in Afghanistan. The U.S. Senate today voted 99-0 to approve Petraeus’ appointment.

http://www.centcom.mil/en/press-rele...ting-commander

And so it goes...

Richard

[Razor]

Originally Posted by Richard

MAJ Groves' bio can be found here...

Liam apparently needs to do some substantial counseling, and he's exactly the right guy to do it.