McChrystal to resign if not given resources for Afghanistan

Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal's team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read "troops") to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan:

Adding to the frustration, according to officials in Kabul and Washington, are White House and Pentagon directives made over the last six weeks that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, not submit his request for as many as 45,000 additional troops because the administration isn't ready for it.

In the last two weeks, top administration leaders have suggested that more American troops will be sent to Afghanistan, and then called that suggestion "premature." Earlier this month, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that "time is not on our side"; on Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates urged the public "to take a deep breath."

In Kabul, some members of McChrystal's staff said they don't understand why Obama called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" but still hasn't given them the resources they need to turn things around quickly.

Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he'd stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy.

"Yes, he'll be a good soldier, but he will only go so far," a senior official in Kabul said. "He'll hold his ground. He's not going to bend to political pressure."

On Thursday, Gates danced around the question of when the administration would be ready to receive McChrystal's request, which was completed in late August. "We're working through the process by which we want that submitted," he said.

The entire process followed by the military in implementing a change of course in Afghanistan is far different, and bizarrely so, from the process it followed in changing strategy in Iraq.

For Afghanistan, the process to decide on a course change began in March of this year, when Bruce Reidel was tasked to assess the situation. This produced the much-heralded yet vague "AfPak" assessment. Then, in May, General David McKiernan was fired and replaced by General McChrystal, who took command in June. General McChrystal's assessment hit President Obama's desk at the end of August, almost three months after he took command. And yet now in the last half of September, the decision on additional forces has yet to be submitted to the administration.

Contrast this with Iraq in the fall of 2006. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was fired just one day after the elections in early November. The Keane-Kagan plan for Iraq was submitted to President Bush shortly afterward, and encompassed both the assessment of the situation and the recommended course of action, including the recommended number of troops to be deployed to deal with the situation. General David Petraeus replaced General George Casey in early February 2007, and hit the ground running; the surge strategy was in place, troops were being mustered to deploy to Iraq, and commanders on the ground were preparing for and executing the new orders. The first of the surge units began to arrive in Iraq only weeks later, in March.

Today, the military is perceiving that the administration is punting the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and the military is even questioning the administration's commitment to succeed in Afghanistan. The leaking of the assessment and the report that McChrystal would resign if he is not given what is needed to succeed constitute some very public pushback against the administration's waffling on Afghanistan.

“U.N. LAWYERS TARGET U.S. TROOPS”

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=337473733467144

“Justice: As if fighting a war in Afghanistan isn’t hard enough, ambitious global prosecutors have rolled into Kabul looking to charge U.S. troops. Intentional or not, such legalism will sap U.S. morale as it did in Vietnam.

At about the time NATO’s new secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, warned NATO’s European members against an early pullout, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the top prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, whose body is charged with looking for international war criminals, announced he was looking for new “clients” from anyone with a grievance in Afghanistan.

At a briefing Wednesday in The Hague, Moreno-Ocampo said he had launched a new war crimes inquiry, seeking information about “torture” especially — a European obsession — and had already mined the human rights groups for stories. He added he was also “very open” to more information from foreign governments.

Oh, he’d been evenhanded in his Monday-morning battlefield quarterbacking of course, promising he’d prosecute both Taliban and NATO troops as moral equals.

But it doesn’t take a genius to know what the spotlight-loving attorney (who once launched his own reality TV show back in Argentina) is really after: Americans in the dock as war criminals.

The atmosphere that makes a prosecutor like Moreno-Ocampo ambitious enough to go after Americans instead of a real monster like, say, Fidel Castro, can only occur when the West’s will has weakened, as Rasmussen warned.

After all, if a war to defend our civilization can be reduced to a series of police-brutality cases, then Afghanistan isn’t about victory.

This is underscored by Washington’s conflicting aims.

Though our president has rightly boosted the number of troops in Afghanistan, he’s created a climate of doubt by declaring the war on terror an “overseas contingency operation” and stating he doesn’t believe in “winning.” It’s poison for morale and gives momentum to the kind of bureaucratic, legalistic and defeatist thinking that preceded our bitter pullout in Vietnam.

Moreno-Ocampo’s entry into Afghanistan is a sign that legalism has begun to overtake victory as a goal, at a time when our Taliban foes still believe in victory.

On the battlefield, our troops are increasingly constrained by legalistic rules of engagement.

Case in point: On Tuesday, four U.S. Marines and seven of their Afghani allies walked into a well-planned ambush and were killed in the Kunar province near the Pakistani border.

“We are pinned down. We are running low on ammo. We have no air. We’ve lost today,” Marine Maj. Kevin Williams, 37, told his Afghan counterpart, responding to the latter’s repeated demands for helicopters, McClatchy Newspapers reported.

Rules of engagement condemned them to die because they couldn’t get air cover.

According to McClatchy: “U.S. commanders, citing new rules to avoid civilian casualties, rejected repeated calls to unleash artillery rounds at attackers dug into the slopes and tree lines — despite being told repeatedly that they weren’t near the village.”

Meanwhile, all pullout talk condemned those U.S. troops, too.

Ground intelligence sources who might have warned them were reportedly more fearful of Taliban retaliation than convinced that American troops would be able to defend them, given the weakening will of the West. They opted to survive.

Now, the latest legalistic block against winning is an international prosecutor looking for NATO troops to prosecute.

Back in 2002, President Bush told the ICC that there wouldn’t be any of that, and he rescinded the U.S. signature from the Rome Statute that would have opened the door to that. Today, there’s a legal battle going on at the ICC to make U.S. troops subject to doing it and there’s no signal from the White House that it will stop it.

Don’t think Moreno-Ocampo won’t do it. His history as a prosecutor suggests an affinity for publicity over justice, which is just what the anti-American crowd wants.

(snip)Someone like that won’t hesitate for a minute to make a big show of putting U.S. troops in the dock for “war crimes” no matter what the impact in Afghanistan. That’s defeat.
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Then there is this little tidbit:

0’s Giant Ego is too busy trying to be king of the World. He has no time to be bothered with what could be avoidable deaths of American servicemen.

Besides, he’s proving his qualifications to head up the “Security Council” (excuse my utter hysterical laughter!) to the America hating dweebs at the U.N..:

“Obama to seal US-UN relationship”

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2334897/posts

Though I’ve never worked with Stan McCrystal, I don’t doubt his resolve. After all, he’s SOF!

From www.blackfive.net:

“But it seems that as we change our strategy to a population-centric one, which by nature means fewer force on force encounters, we are also ramping up our ability to operate on the dark side. Remember now, that McChrystal was the Commander of JSOC, our Department of Dirty Tricks, to the extent that we have one. He led them in all our efforts in Iraq to capture or ventilate huge numbers of bad guys.

I was talking with David Bellavia recently and he said that what people don’t remember or simply didn’t know, is that we killed terrorists and militia members in bunches during the Surge. As the Sons and Daughters of Iraq stood up, they began telling us where the bad guys were. Once we knew that, we sent in any number of task force types to scarf them up or send them along to their 72 goats. These were McChrystals’ boys and they were extremely busy. While we were bust securing the populace by day, at night the sheepdogs were clearing the rabid animals out, and they were not coddling them, that’s for sure.”

I noticed that the Commander’s Summary that the Washington Post published has a Glossary (Annex H) that has al Qaeda and SOCCENT defined. However, these terms do not appear in the summary. There is a Special Ops Annex somewhere. Hopefully the WH is reading this appendix closely.

Stan the Man knows his business, and it ain’t being Mr. Nice Guy to the bad guys. Protect the innocent and destroy the enemy!

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