Patrick Cockburn: Putting Petraeus in Perspective

"His great achievement in Iraq was to persuade Americans that they had won the war when, in fact, they were withdrawing with little achieved. He was able to sell the "surge" as a triumph of military tactics when in reality its most important feature was that Sunni insurgents allied themselves with American forces because they were being slaughtered by the Shia."

http://www.counterpunch.com/patrick06252010.html

The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

"We're Losing This F--cking Thing!"

The Great Myth of Counter-Insurgency

By CONN HALLINAN

"The problem is not Afghanistan, but the entire concept of COIN, and the debate around it is hardly academic. Counterinsurgency has seized the high ground in the Pentagon and the halls of Washington, and there are other places in the world where it is being deployed, from the jungles of Columbia to the dry lands that border the Sahara. If the COIN doctrine is not challenged, Americans may well find themselves debating its merits in places like Somalia, Yemen, or Mauritania.

“Counterinsurgency aims at reshaping a nation and its society over the long haul,” says military historian Frank Chadwick, emphasizing “infrastructure improvements, ground-level security, and building a bond between the local population and the security forces.”

...

COIN is always presented as politically neutral, a series of tactics aimed at winning hearts and minds. But in fact, COIN has always been part of a strategy of domination by a nation(s) and/or socio/economic class.

The U.S. has strategic interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and “terrorism” is a handy excuse to inject military power into these two energy-rich regions of the world. Whoever holds the energy high ground in the coming decades will exert enormous influence on world politics.

No, it is not all about oil and gas, but a lot of it is.

Winning “hearts and minds” is just a tactic aimed at insuring our paramount interests, and/or the interests of the “friendly” governments that we fight for. Be nice to the locals unless the locals decide that they don’t much like long-term occupation, don’t trust their government, and might have some ideas about how they should run their own affairs.

Then “hearts and minds” turns nasty. U.S. Special Operations Forces carry out as many as five “kill and capture” raids a day in Afghanistan and have assassinated or jailed more than 500 Afghans in the past few months Thousands of others languish in prisons.

The core of COIN is coercion, whether it is carried out with a gun or truckloads of money. If the majority of people accept coercion—and the COIN supported government doesn’t highjack the trucks—then it may work.

And then maybe not. Tufts University recently researched the impact of COIN aid and found little evidence that such projects win locals over. According to Tufts professor, Andrew Wilder, “Many of the Afghans interviewed for our study identified their corrupt and predatory government as the most important cause of insecurity, and perceived international aid security contracts as enriching a kleptocratic elite.”

...

So COIN is back. And it is working no better than it did in the 1960s. Take the counterterrorism portion of the doctrine.

Over the past several years, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has been carrying out a sort of long-distance Phoenix program, using armed drones to assassinate insurgent leaders in Pakistan. The program has purportedly snuffed out about 150 such “leaders.” But it has also killed more than 1,000 civilians and inflamed not only the relatives of those killed or wounded in the attacks, but Pakistanis in general. According to an International Republican Institute poll, 80 percent of Pakistanis are now anti-American, and the killer drones are a major reason.

“Hearts and minds” soldiers like Petraeus don’t much like the drone attacks because they alienate Pakistan and dry up intelligence sources in that country.

But McChrystal’s Phoenix program of killing Taliban “leaders” in Afghanistan is no better. As author and reporter Anne Jones notes, “Assassinating the ideological leaders, the true believers and organizers—those we call the ‘bad Taliban’—actually leaves behind leaderless, undisciplined gangs of armed rent-a-guns who are more interested in living off the population we’re supposed to protect than being peeled off into abject Afghan poverty.”

The “hearts and minds” crew have their own problems. McChrystal and Petraeus have long stressed the counterproductive effect of using airpower and artillery against insurgents, because it inevitably produces civilian casualties. But this means that the war is now between two groups of infantry, one of which knows the terrain, speaks the local language, and can turn from a fighter to a farmer in a few minutes."

A Time for Falcons?

TomDispatch wonders:

Shouldn't somebody consider, for instance, whether the principle found in so many individual martial arts -- that defense, and even striking reserves of power, can be found not in meeting force with blunt force, but in giving way before force -- might apply to more collective situations? Don't such groups as the Taliban and al-Qaeda feed off of, thrive and recruit off of, military action against them as well as the human destruction and the attention that goes with it?

The Habbush Affair

In December 2003, a letter from Iraqi Director of National Intelligence Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti to Saddam Hussein dated in 2001 was "discovered" by the provisional regime in Baghdad. The letter "proved" that Iraq had WMD and had trained Muhammad Atta. 

Here (and here) is the initial Telegraph reporting on the discovery of the letter.

Ron Suskind's new book claims (based on interviews with CIA sources) that Habbush informed the CIA in 2001 that Iraq had no WMD the White House ordered the CIA to forge the letter to justify the war ex post facto. 

Amy Goodman and WaPo on Habbush  Affair.

Col. Bacevich: In Defense of Realism

Boston University Professor of History and International Relations Andrew Bacevich previews his new book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (part I and II). 

Bacevich is interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal and Democracy Now!

The Fate of Empire

In the summer of 2006, Israel waged savage if ultimately unsuccessful war on Lebanon to get its two captured soldiers back (while Obama led the cheer leading section, its worth adding). It failed. It was forced to recognize, yet again, that there are clear and absolute limits to the kind of power that "flows from the barrel of a gun." Israel, once seen as nearly omnipotent in the face of its Arab neighbors, faced military defeat at the hands of Hizballah for the second time in less than seven years. 

Well Israel got the bodies of its soldiers back, but not under the conditions of its own  choosing. This is what it looks like when Empires fall. 

Here are the coffins of Arab bodies that Israel was forced to hand over to Nasrallah:

Fourth Generation Warfare

William S. Lind on "Fourth Generation Warfare" in Iraq (CP)

Iran and Central Asian Grand Strategy

Pepe Escobar offers his perspective on the the view of American Empire from Iran (TD). He describes a "Look East" (India, Pakistan, and China) Iranian foreign policy as a response to post-9/11 US military encirclement (new bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Central Asia, and the Gulf).

C. Johnson and the "Intellectual" Origins of American Empire

Chalmers Johnson discusses the history and politics of the RAND corp at TD. Though he does not write in a Saidian vocabulary- Johnson's analysis of RAND as a handmaiden to American power dovetails quite nicely with Edward Said's legendary analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge in his 1978 book, Orientalism. However, Johnson is unwilling to concede that what RAND produces can actually granted the ontological status of "knowledge." For Johnson, what RAND produces is much more akin to propaganda for the powerful.   

PsyOps: The American Front in the Terror War

This from the Times: "Behind Military Analysts, The Pentagon's Hidden Hand" 

The Times informs us that "Hidden behind the appearance of objectivity [is] a Pentagon information apparatus that [has] used analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance..." or achieve what Torrie Clark referred to as "information dominance." 

The Times now thinks that Gens. McCaffery and Downing "serving" on the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" might have undermined their claims to "objectivity." They don't call it the "paper of record" for nothing...

Funny, when Col. Sam Gardiner (professor of Strategy at various military institutions) described stories such as the toppling of the Saddam Statue in Firdos Sq. and the rescue of Pvt. Lynch as media plants, and part of a well orchestrated campaign of information warfare directed at the at the American public, what they in the business call PsyOps (DN!, 2 Dec 2004), it was dismissed as "wild conspiracy theory," but now that the Times has conducted an "examination" it passes through the pearly gates of facticity.   

Incoherent Empire

UCLA Sociologist Michael Mann discusses his book Incoherent Empire 

Shahid on Hizballah

"For the first time in history, an Israeli invasion had been reversed by a cunning guerilla resistance"