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WINNING THE HEARTS AND MINDS? DIDN'T WE TRY THAT ONCE?
Franklin C. Spinney, Counterpunch - The centerpiece of the General Stanley McChrystal's "new" counterinsurgency strategy of "clear, hold, build" is the accelerated training and expansion of the Afghan Army and Police Forces, in addition to a major increase in the size of our forces (according to some reports, by as much as 45,000 troops). The strategic goal is to establish an expanding zone of security for the Afghan people that would enable a steady build up of aid and development efforts to improve their well being with jobs, new infrastructure, new education systems, new agricultural techniques, etc., than thereby win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. McChrystal is asking the President of the United State to approve a pathway to almost certain disaster. Consider please the following:
Of course, there is nothing new in General McChrystal's strategy, it is merely a rehash of the failed oil spot (tache d'huile) strategy, first tried by French colonialist General Louis-Hubert-Gonsalve Lyautey, and then tried again under various guises, again without lasting success, by the Americans in Vietnam.
Indeed, many readers will recall that a necessary condition of our failed Vietnam strategy was the exactly same strategic determination that we could not win the hearts of minds of the indigenous population without providing the people with a competent army and a government that could protect them from the depredations of the insurgents. In Vietnam, this idea was at the center of our early involvement. . . In the end, the US-trained Vietnamese army, like the US-installed Vietnamese government, was a corrupt Potemkin-like sham, and once it became clear that both had lost the supporting prop of American firepower, both collapsed and surrendered unconditionally in April 1975, only two months after North Vietnamese launched a final offensive, which the North Vietnamese planners had assumed it would take two years to achieve victory. . .
It is now clear that General McChrystal's staff and the Pentagon are trying to maneuver Mr. Obama onto the horns of a dilemma by leaking their demands for an immediate escalation of the war, or otherwise risking defeat
Franklin "Chuck" Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon.
Of course, there is nothing new in General McChrystal's strategy, it is merely a rehash of the failed oil spot (tache d'huile) strategy, first tried by French colonialist General Louis-Hubert-Gonsalve Lyautey, and then tried again under various guises, again without lasting success, by the Americans in Vietnam.
Indeed, many readers will recall that a necessary condition of our failed Vietnam strategy was the exactly same strategic determination that we could not win the hearts of minds of the indigenous population without providing the people with a competent army and a government that could protect them from the depredations of the insurgents. In Vietnam, this idea was at the center of our early involvement. . . In the end, the US-trained Vietnamese army, like the US-installed Vietnamese government, was a corrupt Potemkin-like sham, and once it became clear that both had lost the supporting prop of American firepower, both collapsed and surrendered unconditionally in April 1975, only two months after North Vietnamese launched a final offensive, which the North Vietnamese planners had assumed it would take two years to achieve victory. . .
It is now clear that General McChrystal's staff and the Pentagon are trying to maneuver Mr. Obama onto the horns of a dilemma by leaking their demands for an immediate escalation of the war, or otherwise risking defeat
Franklin "Chuck" Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon.
posted by TPR | 4:23 PM
1 Comments:
Actually this is worse than VietNam. At least in VietNam we had the pretext that we were "invited in" by a putatively legal government. In Afghanistan no such invitation exists. Of course, none of this matters. We are there because somehow it is opportune. Not for the average Joe, of course, but for faceless plutocrats and their handmaidens. We have sunk to a new low. We are not even worth a minimally credible lie.
Let me ask this: has the administration actually ever explained clearly why we are in Afghanistan? Or why it is so important, to the exclusion of lots of other venues in which we could easily become embroiled using presumably similar rationales?
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