This Article by Wired has been making Internet rounds for a few days now. For those not in on them Wired has provided us, the news-consuming American public, with our sometimes-weekly-but-right-now-monthly update on the occupation of Afghanistan. NATO's American-led war effort has recently passed the precocious age of 9 years and is showing us all how a big kid plays with an advanced military arsenal: by annihilating a whole village.
I recommend reading the whole article but I'll block quote some juicy bits here and get to my take.
An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.
But it’s the latest indication that Gen. David Petraeus, the counterinsurgency icon, is prosecuting a frustrating war with surprising levels of violence. Some observers already fear a backlash brewing in the area.
Lt. Col. David Flynn, commander of Combined Joint Task Force 1-320th, made a fateful decision in October.
His men had come under relentless assault from homemade bombs emanating from the village, where a Taliban “intimidation campaign [chased] the villagers out” to create a staging ground for attacking the task force. With multiple U.S. amputations the result of the Taliban hold over Tarok Kolache, Flynn’s men were “terrified to go back into the pomegranate orchards to continue clearing [the area]; it seemed like certain death.”
After two failed attempts at clearing the village resulted in U.S and Afghan casualties, Flynn’s response was to take the village out. He ordered a mine-clearing line charge, using rocket-propelled explosives to create a path into the center of Tarok Kolache.
And that was for starters, Broadwell writes. Airstrikes from A-10s and B-1s combined with powerful ground-launched rockets on Oct. 6 to batter the village with “49,200 lbs. of ordnance” — which she writes, resulted in “NO CIVCAS,” meaning no civilians dead.
Now call me a cynic, but I'm hesitant to believe that one could drop 50,000 lbs of heavy ordinance on a residential community, even a small "Taliban-controlled" one, with "NO CIVCAS"
But my CIVCAS-related skepticism is besides the point, even. These are counter-insurgency operations in Kandahar Province, one of the most unwelcoming places in all of Asia, and I expect the military to kill some Afghan peasants just as much as I expect them to cover their asses about it later. My real issue it that the SOP for our military in Afghanistan is, after a brief hiatus, back to dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of explosives onto a god dammed village and calling it a day.
The Afghan occupation is led by Iraq-Occupation and counter-insurgency mastermind General David Petraeus. Some of you may remember how Petraeus got the job after previous Commander Gen. Stan McCrystal ran his dumb fucking mouth off about Joe Biden and some shit and was promptly sacked by Obama for such. When Petraeus was given command (which I'm pretty sure is a demotion from running CENT-COM) I can recall thinking "Oh good, at least someone with a record of getting shit done is in charge." This was the man who was able to salvage something resembling a country out of the darker days of Iraq circa 2007, so this means progress right?
Apparently not. Gen. McCrystal was originally given a mission to tone down airstrikes, build hospitals, earn the trust of respected local leaders, and generally try to make the American Army look less like an occupying force. That approach seems to have been such an enormous failure in the handful of months it was implemented that it broke down the very General in charge of it and made him into a catty, unobservant asshole. Not more than six months after that little experiment in nation-building NATO seems to be back on board with a strategy that's the tactical equivalent of opening your beer can with a shotgun. My favorite quote from the article sums up nicely our government's level of self-awareness in prosecuting this travesty of a police action:
As Broadwell tells it, the villagers understood that the United States needed to destroy their homes — except when they don’t. One villager “in a fit of theatrics had accused Flynn of ruining his life after the demolition.”
Sorry to rant guys but I hope you can forgive my initial poor judgment and post-hindsight feelings of smug satisfaction since I'm just a scruffy 20-something blogger with a chip on his shoulder and not the fucking President of the United States or Supreme Allied Commander of NATO operations in Afghanistan or something else important.
1 comment:
I know there's a dick joke in there somewhere.
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