Sunday, October 04, 2009

Which Will It Be?

Barack Obama set aside time in his busy schedule addressing IOC officials in Denmark in hopes of obtaining the Olympics for his favourite city of Chicago, to meet with his newly-appointed head of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. General McChrystal is turning out to be a bit of an irritant to the good president. He was dispatched to Afghanistan to solve the problem of the successfully growing insurgency.

His counter-insurgency plan was to have succeeded in eliminating the growing threat from a newly-confident Taliban. So 25 minutes was spared the general aboard Air Force One in transit back to the U.S. to address the president's concerns. Certainly to closely question the general's loose mouth in delivering a speech in London that saw him unilaterally rejecting Vice-President Joe Biden's take on the matter.

Forget the 40,000 new troops that the general and just incidentally, the Pentagon strongly feel are required to make any inroads on success in Afghanistan. Concentrate instead on strategic drone strikes better known as targeted assassinations in Pakistan. And use the current troop strength to better train and [psychologically] equip the Afghan military and police force to fend for themselves.

Sounds good. Why didn't the general think of that himself. What, he did? Amazing. And he didn't think he could commit to that course of action without additional troops? Bloody inconvenient. That will not play well on the U.S. street. The electorate will think twice about how they vote in future; they always do with these inconvenient little realities.

It doesn't help an awful lot that Afghans don't like their current government. That they view the August election results askance. That the corruption in the country is endless and proliferating handsomely. Or that corruption is endemic in the Afghan National Police. And that the average Afghani views these stalwart representatives of their country's security forces with utter contempt.

But Joe Biden and White House chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and National Security Advisor General James Jones simply do not favour, in their collective wisdom born of great experience and reading of the cards, an increased U.S. bootprint in the dusty valleys and rocky mountainsides of Afghanistan. Less than a year has passed since Mr. Obama felt that the country needed more resources and troops.

Meanwhile, from the experiences of other countries' troops in the country, it doesn't appear that the locals in Kandahar have all that much respect for the efforts of institutional rehabilitation being undertaken at great cost, and the value of the lives of Canadian troops whose endeavours to win the 'hearts and minds' of the population have met with mixed results. Village elders unwilling to forewarn of roadside IED placements.

Afghan kids with toy laser pointers flashing them at Canadian soldiers passing in vehicles. Imagine, troops mistaking those laser points for Taliban ambushes and unleashing all the self-protective fury and power at their command. Imagine, instead of hitting snipers, wiping out the lives of mischievous kids who get a hysterical bang out of causing existential concern among the foreign soldiers.

Imagine all that good will on every side of this incredible sinking bog of human aspirations.

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posted by Pieface @ Sunday, October 04, 2009

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