cleaning the slate

The first two words that occurred to me about Obama’s new man in Afghanistan were Phoenix Programme. This is possibly unfair. The assassination programme Gen McChrystal ran in Iraq never degenerated into a rampage and made perfect sense in terms of the logic of occupation. What stood between the US and Iraqi official forces and the war weary former insurgents reaching out to them were AQI cadres and their ability to control their territory. If the cadres turn up one morning lying dead at the side of the road and the men they lead and pay are demoralised and dispersed, well…"no man, no problem”, as Uncle Joe once said.

There seems to be some dispute about whether the appointment signals a shift from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism in Afghanistan. You could look at it as leading on the kinetic aspects of counterinsurgency if you define this as reducing to an absolute minimum the number of people you have to kill and then killing all of them. Then you build the roads, dig the wells and so on. I don’t want to sound like some liberal laptop bombardier smacking his chops over surgical strikes, but this could be the least worst option if it actually minimises the number of kills and effectively targets combatants.

The problem lies in the definition of “minimum number”, which can expand to include entire populations. In Iraq, the fact that the population was heartily sick of both AQI and the criminal exuberance of rogue Sadrist groups made for good intelligence, which kept things within bounds. It’s not clear that the same situation exists in Afghanistan. If not then you’re stuck in an institutional model which measures success by body counts and dependence on local allies with their own agendas, leading to classic purge logic: every friend has an enemy and every enemy has a friend.

One of the reasons I thought of the Phoenix Programme was because I’d recently read Christian Appy’s oral history of the Vietnam war, which contained the following reminiscences by a veteran of that operation:

The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.'Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.

The McChrystal appointment cuts through the general muddle in the sense that it could either work out well or go very wrong, very quickly. It also looks like Obama’s got his mind on an exit. The last thing you do for your local friends is kill their enemies.

Comments

[Dan Hardie]

I do think you're drawing a ton of conclusions from an ounce of evidence. McChrystal is an officer with a Special Operations background, who spent several years running raids and targeted killings, so the new policy in Afghanistan will all be about raids and targeted killings? Maybe, but maybe not.

There are other things to consider. The man newly-appointed to serve as the operational commander under McChrystal is David Rodriguez, who ran infantry operations in Eastern Afghanistan. Both men will be subordinate to David Petraeus, who worked well with McChrystal in Iraq.

McChrystal's main plan so far appears to be to select a group of several hundred American officers who will commit to several years of serving continuously in Afghanistan, interspersed with staff jobs in the States also concerned with Afghanistan. That sounds like a sensible way round the current lack of institutional memory in the US military about Afghanistan, and doesn't sound like the plan of a one-track door-kicker.

'The last thing you do for your local friends is kill their enemies.'

Well...no, actually. Killing enemies is one of the things you do in guerrilla wars, even if it's not the only thing. People were killed in say, the Malayan Emergency, or Oman, as well as all the hearts-and-minds stuff, and the 'local friends' came out rather well.

People were also killed in every counter-insurgency that went disastrously wrong, of course, but I suspect it's a real stretch to imagine that a campaign ultimately run by Petraeus will 'measure success by body counts'.

I do think there should be far more questions asked about whether McChrystal ordered, or turned a blind eye to, torture by men under his command. If the answer is 'yes' or 'maybe' he should be out of the military.

I suspect, though, that the CIA and the sneakier bits of the US military have rather a large number of capable field officers who were rather horribly complicit in the Cheney-ordered torture campaign.

[Phil]

I think Jamie meant 'last' in time sequence, rather than order of preference.

[Dan Hardie]

Maybe, Phil, but if so I still disagree. If you're leaving in disarray, the last thing you do is minimise your own casualties, and pay off whatever scores you can- probably only a few (the Russians possibly killed General Zia when they left Afghanistan, but they couldn't kill Hekmatyar or Massoud). If you're leaving after what you think is a job well done, no need for any killing.

[Dan Hardie]

...I think that Massoud was still in a state of truce with the Russians when they left, but I also think it's right to say they didn't manage to knock off any of the main Mujaheddin leaders in their last year.