Stenography And Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

Derrick Crowe's post below is an excellent piece exploring the scandalous details emerging about the killing and coverup of three Afghan women, two of them heavily pregnant, by U.S. special forces. The whole affair fits a consistent pattern of "collateral deaths"; one that includes night raids, air strikes and overzealous convoy guards alike. As Prairie Weather writes: "It's gotten to the point where first we hear about the atrocity, then we hear (U.S. forces) did it. Then we hear they didn't do it.  Then there's a pause (week? year? decade?).  Finally the concession:  yes, they did it. "

So what, I wondered, did self-proclaimed "progressive" and national security blogger for ultra-proggie website Firedoglake have to say about it all? Would this coverup of an atrocity have shaken his confidence in and cheerleading for the COIN clique at the Pentagon? Not a bit of it.

His piece for FDL echoes the one he wrote for the Washington Indie and the Windie piece is pretty weak tea:

Last month, McChrystal, himself a former Special Operations commander, took greater control over the Special Operations chain of command in Afghanistan. McChrystal�s move was an attempt to end a semi-autonomous war effort that can too often place a giant asterisk on his strategy of prosecuting the war through protecting the civilian population. One area he apparently left untouched is detention operations. Will there be further clarifications in the future about ultimately-untrue statements about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan?

That's it. It's not McChrystal's fault or a failing of COIN tactics, it's all the fault of a few loose cannons. At FDL, he suggests this atrocity - and subsequent cover-up - would never have happened if McChrystal's move to gather more power for himself had just been faster.

The trouble is, McChrystal's words about "population protection" don't fit his actions.

Since he took over as top commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal has not only refused to curb [Special Forces] raids but has increased them dramatically. And even after they triggered a new round of angry protests from villagers, students and Afghan President Hamid Karzai himself, he has given no signal of reducing his support for them.

Two moves by McChrystal last year reveal his strong commitment to night raids as a tactic. After becoming commander of NATO and U.S. forces last May, he approved a more than fourfold increase in those operations, from 20 in May to 90 in November, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times Dec. 16. One of McChrystal's spokesmen, Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, acknowledged to IPS that the level of night raids during that period has reflected McChrystal's guidance.

Then McChrystal deliberately protected night raids from political pressures to reduce or even stop them altogether. In his "initial assessment" last August, he devoted an entire annex to the subject of civilian casualties and collateral damage, but made no mention night raids as a problem in that regard.

As a result of McChrystal's decisions, civilian deaths from night raids have spiked, even as those from air strikes were being reduced. According to United Nations and Afghan government estimates, night raids caused more than half of the nearly 600 civilian deaths attributable to coalition forces in 2009.

Those raids, which also violate the sanctity of the Afghan home, have become the primary Afghan grievance against the U.S. military. As long ago as May 2007, Carlotta Gall and David Sanger described in the New York Times how night raids had provoked an entire village in Herat province to become so angry with the U.S. military that men began carrying out military operations against it.

By 2008, the targets of the SOF raids had shifted from higher-level and mid-level al Qaeda and Taliban officials to low-level insurgents, especially those working on manufacturing and planting IEDs, the organization's main form of attack against foreign military personnel. That shift accelerated as the number of raids ballooned under McChrystal.

The inevitable botched raids killing large numbers of civilians brought a new wave of protests. After a December 2009 raid killed at least 12 civilians in Laghman province, according to an investigation by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, students at Nangarhar University blocked the highway between Jalalabad and Kabul for several hours.

In late January, a new directive was announced to the press addressing the night raids issue. The text of the directive has not been released in full, but excerpts released Mar. 5 include an acknowledgement by McChrystal that "nearly every Afghan I talk to mentions them as the single greatest irritant."

But the January directive fell well short of forcing changes in the way the raids were carried out to stop civilian deaths. Instead, it called for putting Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in the lead on all night raids, and notifying Afghan government officials, ANSF and "local elders" in advance of any raid - "wherever possible" and "whenever possible", respectively.

SOF commanders are supposed to justify any operation that does not apply these standards, according to Sholtis. But those commanders have long argued that telling village elders about such raids in advance would result in their targets being tipped off.

It is unlikely that they would be denied permission after invoking that risk.

The two Afghan men killed in the Gardez incident were an Afghan police chief and his brother the district attorney, fingered as militants by "reliable information" that turned out not to be reliable after all. Only determined reporting by Jerome Starkey of the London Times has forced the military authorities to move beyond simple denial. And before they tried some honesty they tried smearing Starkey. The entire chain of command is complicit, it's not just some "bad apples" (if you prefer the Bush/Abu Graib era terminology) running amuck.

And my conclusion from all this is that the progressive journalist Spencer Ackerman is so far up the Pentagon COIN clique's collective ass that he can't even see daylight, let alone his progressive ideals. He's going to fit right in.