General McChrystal to Afghanistan violence
General McChrystal to Afghanistan violence
Gen. Stanley McChrystal was appointed commander in Afghanistan to shake up a troubled war effort. But one of his first initiatives could wind up changing how the entire military does business.
Gen. McChrystal‘s decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.
Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan or Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what’s going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don’t have a grip on local conditions.
There was a saying that we didn’t fight in Vietnam for 10 years; we fought there for one year, 10 times. The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, continued fighting until they were killed or immobilized. That gave their forces a huge advantage.
This statement about not relying on overwhelming U.S. firepower makes details of McChrystal‘s classified report on Afghanistan even more intriguing after this portion was revealed by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday, September 23, 2009:
“The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops – boots on the ground – and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way.”
We’ll have to wait until Sunday to catch the full interview with America’s top commander in Afghanistan, but already it bodes difficult to reconcile the general’s public statements to what we now know about remarks contained in that classified assessment.
It will be interesting to see if McChrystal has anything to say that can even marginally boost support for a troop increase from CBS’s own recent poll numbers showing that fewer than one in three Americans believe the number of troops in Afghanistan should be increased.
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