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The Afghan Mosaic

By lex, on October 19th, 2009

A good read, the text of General McChrystal’s speech to the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

IISS

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October 19th, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: afghanistan, GWOT, Military

7 comments to The Afghan Mosaic

  • jpr
    October 19, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    Is it bad when the viewer window says, “Security Error Loading Document info: ‘Error #2048′” ??

  • Tuna
    October 19, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    Definitely a good read- and a scary one at that, for two reasons- for the complexity of the mission General McCrystal has been assigned, and that that staffers 7000 miles away think that they have even a cursory understanding of it.

  • Papa Ray
    October 19, 2009 at 1:19 pm

    Yea, he netted it, explained some of it and warned how involved, convoluted and fragile it was/is and will be.

    But all of this is way over the heads of those in charge of the United States now. Including Obama’s Military advisor[s].

    And of course they can’t agree or listen to him (altho they will swear that they did and that they agonized over every word he said) because they need to continue to cut back the Defense budget and to divert those funds into the programs and pockets of their ongoing efforts to turn this Great Republic into a third world imitation democracy. Which of course our founders didn’t want (You have a Republic…..) and of course they also warned us about the dangers of big government.

    In my opinion there is nothing good that will come out of the next four years of this Administration and this Congress. I feel almost every Congressman needs to be given a ticket home. But of course the American people will continued to do as they have for the last fifty years.

    Everyone needs to understand the road that our Nation is on and do some really hard soul searching and thinking on how they vote and on where they stand with our Republic and what they will sacrifice in protecting Her.

    Papa Ray
    Central Texas

    The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
    2009 Judge Alex Kozinski

    • Ron Snyder
      October 19, 2009 at 4:18 pm

      I do like Judge Kozinski. Never heard it phrased that way.

      And at some point all other rights will fail. Two months, two years, two hundred years -it has always happened.

      Virgil, if you ever ascend to ML, I’ll lend you some of my Gorilla Tape to help put things right.

  • virgil xenophon
    October 19, 2009 at 3:29 pm

    Pappa Ray/

    Were I ever to ascend (by fair means or foul) to the position of Maximum Leader, Judge Kozinski would be the first person picked for the first open vacancy on the Supreme Court (assuming, of course, I decided to ALLOW a SCOTUS. :) )

  • Zane
    October 19, 2009 at 8:55 pm

    There’s a HYYUUUGGGEEE green elephant in the room, and nobody can see it.

    Got another bottle, Virgil?

  • Zane
    October 20, 2009 at 1:10 pm

    http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MmZjNTlhYTU4ODExNzc4YTJkMzFhZjczNTE3ZmJjZmI#

    “This process” is the gargantuan burden of building, from scratch, an oxymoronic sharia-democracy in a backwards, corrupt, fundamentalist Islamic armpit. And as if we’d learned nothing from the ravages against us, the process absurdly assumes that Islam — rather than being a major part of the problem — is an asset that we can turn to our advantage. If such a process could work (it can’t), it would take decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and cause an unknowable number of American casualties.

    But that is the McChrystal plan. The idea is not to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda but to build a modern nation-state that will eventually be both competent to fight and interested in fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda on its own.

    Here is the irony. Those who favor McChrystal’s proposal argue, with great force, that a counterterrorism strategy — i.e., attacking terror nests from remote bases — cannot work. For that conclusion, they cite no less an authority than General McChrystal, who is the nation’s leading expert on military counterterrorism. But if “cannot work” is our criterion, then why would anyone favor a democracy-building effort in Afghanistan?

    The real dirty little secret is that there is only one way to win the war, and that is to attack our militant enemies and their abettors globally. This being the case, our unwillingness to do that necessarily means anything else we try “cannot work.” We have taken real victory off the table. What is left is a series of “cannot work” options, and our burden is to pick the least bad one.

    So can we go back to what is best in us, forthrightness, and stop talking about “victory”? Those who favor the McChrystal plan should be prepared to tell us how many lives, years, and hundreds of billions they are prepared to sacrifice on an experiment in Afghan democracy building that will not defeat our global enemies — and, in fact, will discourage the pursuit of our global enemies since, under our new doctrine, we can’t unleash American might without making a similar sacrifice wherever we go.

    The question is not whether counterterrorism can work. It cannot — any more than having a police station a hundred miles away could guarantee that the local bank would never be robbed. The question is why we should think nation-building — the equivalent of lavish government welfare programs to address the “root causes” of bank robbery — is a better solution.

    I will add what McCarthy doesn’t–”nation building,” or the mere sinking of wells, is “jizya,” the tax we infidels are expected to pay to Muslims. Every well sunk, every inch of road laid, every protection of one warlord over another, is in their eyes what is due to them as superior Muslims, the best of all peoples as the Koran teaches. Just as in Iraq, it buys nothing except perhaps time, and certainly not gratitude, and absolutely not any sense in the recipient that his ways need to change. McChrystal’s essay above is fatally flawed in that respect, and historically inaccurate as well. He is ill-served by his advisors, and we as well.
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