Col. Douglas MacGregor appeared on Judge Napolitano’s Freedom Watch show over the weekend.
Judge Napolitano asked him if we should be spending a trillion dollars to import democracy to the Muslim world:
“Absolutely not, it’s a hopeless endeavor. This is a bottomless pit for our resources. Nothing good is going to come from it.”
Scott Horton interviews Michael Hastings June 23, 2010
Scott Horton: All right, everybody, we’re joined on the phone by Michael Hastings, freelance reporter, friend of the show, and he is the author of the article that’s turned Washington D.C. upside down this week, “The Runaway General†in Rolling Stone magazine. Welcome back to the show, Michael, how are you doing?
Michael Hastings: I’m good man. How are things on your end?
Horton: Everything’s great, I really appreciate you joining us here on the phone from, where, Kandahar this morning?
Hastings: Yeah, I’m in Kandahar right now.
Horton: And how’s things there?
Hastings: Well, we, just a few, it was a half hour, 40 minutes ago, we were hit by a number of rockets, which is a pretty regular occurrence here, and there’s pretty regular fighting all around this area right now. We spent a couple moments on the floor and in a bunker.
Horton: Jeez. Well. And I hope you’re bugging out of there this morning and going back to Kabul or somewhere safer?
Hastings: Yeah, I’m heading out of here.
Horton: Okay, right on. Well in the few minutes before you get in your armored vehicle or whatever it is and get out of there, man, let’s talk about – well, first of all, I guess, the reaction to your piece. You have Gen. McChrystal and his team, “Team America,†his closest buddies surrounding him, really opening up about how much they cannot stand the administration, and that seems to have been the thing that got Washington all upset.
Hastings: Yeah, apparently to criticize and make fun of the vice president in front of reporters, that’s generally probably not a good career move. But I think, I think what the comments point to from Gen. McChrystal’s view is a real frustration that his team has with the White House as well as a frustration he has with other civilian policy makers who are involved in the Afghanistan strategy.
Horton: Yeah, I mean, that’s really what comes across in the article is that it’s not a personal account really of McChrystal, it’s about his inability to succeed in Afghanistan, and then it seems like all the frustration, all the finger pointing goes up from there, instead of them taking responsibility, him and his “Team America.â€
Hastings: Yeah, and I think certainly if we look at, you know, President Obama’s role in selecting Gen. McChrystal, why he selected Gen. McChrystal, and what President Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan originally was – remember, in March 2009, you know, President Obama said he wanted to narrow the goals in Afghanistan, narrow them to just fighting al Qaeda. Then he selected a Gen. who proceeded to do just the opposite and expand the goals almost exponentially. We went from 50,000 troops to 150,000 troops. We went from fighting al Qaeda to building a nation on an almost unprecedented scale. So, really, I think, you know part of this hostility is the relationship between the president and the general and the fact that the president has just sort of lost control of the policy.
Horton: Yeah, well, and it doesn’t sound like the troops in Afghanistan seem to be so gung ho about this anymore either.
Hastings: No, I think, I mean I’m sure you’ve discussed counterinsurgency many times on your program, and we’ve discussed this before as well. You know, the US military is made to fight. That’s what they’re really good at, and they’re really efficient at it. And it’s very difficult to put them in situations and then tell them, you know, don’t fight. And that rubs a lot of them the wrong way and a lot of them feel that they may have to make sacrifices and they might be putting their own lives more at risk rather than, say, killing who they view are insurgents.
Horton: Yeah, well, and that’s an interesting thing too, the whole, you know, sent out there to fight with one hand tied behind their back. They’re up against people who have rifles and are willing to shoot back at them and yet then because they’re supposed to be trying to avoid civilian casualties, even though all their enemies are civilians, they’re put in a position where they have to get shot rather than shoot.
Hastings: Really, and I think, I mean I think you know this is a sort of fundamental flaw with counterinsurgency is that, you know, we spend $600 billion a year on our military but then we get involved in these wars where we can’t even use our technological edge. I mean, in a way it doesn’t make much sense. So, yeah, I mean, you know, once you take away the US and the ground troops’ air support, you’re putting a US solider on, you know, a somewhat level playing field with a Taliban fighter. And so these guys who signed up to fight are like, “What the hell, you know, like, why are we here?â€
Horton: Yeah, they imagined they were going to be a set piece battle against a different state’s military instead of patrolling around like a, you know, a SWAT cop or something. Well, now, you talk about how they changed the mission from fighting al Qaeda to building a nation and how McChrystal’s gotten his stamp on it, and I guess they had to change the mission because, he says in here, there are no al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
Hastings: Exactly. I mean, the sort of connection between nation building and fighting terrorism and fighting al Qaeda is I think, you know, a very tenuous connection at best, and so you get stuck with this momentum of the campaign you’re fighting, and it’s worse than a quagmire. They’re saying that really it’s worse than a quagmire because it’s a quagmire we knowingly walked into. Because if say al Qaeda’s in Pakistan, then what are we doing in Afghanistan?
Horton: Yeah. Well now, the centerpiece of the COIN strategy supposedly was this, or the showpiece for it I guess, was the invasion of Marjah. They were going to give the people of Marjah a “government in a box.†Did you have a chance to talk with Gen. McChrystal much about that operation?
Hastings: Well, I did talk to him about that, and he, you know, was sort of optimistically cautious as that’s the position they take. But then, you know, much later he said that Marjah was a “bleeding ulcer.†So what does that say? And I think one of the funny things about this story is that people have been saying, “Wow, how could he have said these things in private to you?” Well look at what he says in public. He’s calling one of his operations a bleeding ulcer. So what do we expect him to say in private?
Horton: Right, yeah, his centerpiece operation. At least he’s bluntly honest, this guy. Well, and look, this is not nothing here: It seems like there is, you know, a challenge to the civilian supremacy in a sense here, you have a very powerful general mocking and ridiculing the president, the vice president, the special envoy, the ambassador, everybody but the secretary of state, apparently, he thinks he’s better than them, and that’s really not how it’s supposed to be in America. Did you take that as a real challenge to civilian supremacy or as just some drunk old general is letting off some steam here?
Hastings: I think there’s a larger kind of structural issue here about – you just compare the DOD budget to the State Department budget, $600 billion to $50 billion. You know, you look at every foreign service officer – you know, there’s more people in the Army band than there are foreign service officers. You know, you could fit every foreign service officer on an aircraft carrier. You know, so you look like at just the sort of decay of the State Department and basically our foreign policy has become our defense policy. You know, the two are one. And I think that translates into the fact that a lot of the time just the leaders get the blame for all the wars, and they should take their fair share of blame, but I think we also have to start looking at the military leaders in a much more critical way than they’re accustomed to be looked at. We’re packing up here and so I’ve got to take off, but I appreciate your time and we’ll talk again soon.
Horton: Likewise. Be safe, and we’ll follow up hopefully either tomorrow or Friday or next week.
Hastings: Cool.
Horton: Take care, Michael. All right, everybody, that’s Michael Hastings with the story of the week, so far, in Rolling Stone magazine, “The Runaway General.â€
“The entire COIN strategy [the COunterINsurgency strategy engineered by Petraeus and McCrystal et.al.] is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.” –The Runaway General, Stanley McChrystal By Michael Hastings, Rolling Stone, Jun 22, 2010 10:00 AM EDT
Good riddance to McChrystal. His role in the coverup of the killing of Pat Tillman alone was enough to qualify him for the Pentagon Rogues Gallery of the new Millennium.
Petreaus is better than McChrystal because at least we get to sometimes watch him get overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of the BS he shovels on Capitol Hill.
UPDATE: So President Obama has decided the only way to resolve the Rolling Stone fiasco — which is really a COIN fiasco – is to put Big Daddy COIN in command. Anyone else feel like we’re on Ozzy’s Crazy Train?
There were two major themes that I took away from the now infamous Rolling Stone piece on Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The first is obvious: Stan the Man is an arrogant man’s man who prefers Bud Lite Lime over chardonnay, and who has surrounded himself with a “handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs,†and they are super-cool too. They get sloshed at places called “Kitty O’Shea’s†and crack jokes about wimpy Washington fops like Dick Holbrooke and Joe Biden. They are running the war, reporter Michael Hastings points out. Their swagger comes from the chief maniac himself, Stan the Man, who enthralls Hastings with such witty repartee as this:
“I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,†McChrystal says.
He pauses a beat.
“Unfortunately,†he adds, “no one in this room could do it.â€
With that, he’s out the door.
“Who’s he going to dinner with?†I ask one of his aides.
“Some French minister,†the aide tells me. “It’s fu**ing gay.â€
Swell. But aside from getting himself in a pot of boiling water fired over these and other remarks he and his aides make about the President, Biden, Holbrooke, Eikenberry, et al, McChrystal comes off as a real American ideal — that is , if you are a red-blooded, right wing cowboy who holds the military in much higher esteem than the rest of America’s civil institutions. McChrystal should at least be happy that all of his cliched mannerisms and affectations were given the famous Rolling Stone treatment — like being described as a classic fighting general who goes on regular patrols with his soldiers and whose “slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve fu***d up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.†He’s so dedicated to the war effort and his men that he has seen his wife Annie less than 30 days a year since 2003. When he does see her on their 33rd wedding anniversary, he drags her out with his “inner circle†to dinner at “the least ‘Gucci’ place his staff could find.†Then there’s the cussing and kick-assing, his 100 demerits at West Point, the anti-Parisian-doesn’t-truck-with-no-fancy-schmantzy-bureaucrats ethos. He’s lean (that’s pointed out several times) and mean, and has the temerity to tell his aides that he’s underwhelmed and disappointed with the president when he meets for the first time. Now that’s the kind of guy today’s Republicans and tea partiers would line up behind in a heartbeat.
But aside from noting that Stan and his posse are pretty much “the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan†— and don’t they know it — and more so, the unbelievable break Hastings got when McChrystal and his people said all of these crazy things about administration officials in front of him and on the record, there’s the real story.
Hastings points out what a godforesaken mess Afghanistan is, but he deftly underscores that COIN, and specifically the new rules of engagement handed down by McChrystal himself, are confusing and degrading the morale of the troops on the ground. This isn’t something that Barack Obama has done — Hastings notes early in the piece that McChrystal got nearly all the troops he needed for the 2010 surge — this is about the fundamentals of COIN, the very strategy that McChrystal and his patron Gen. David Petraeus, and friends like Gen. Raymond Odierno, own and have been pushing like a ramrod through Afghanistan since 2009.
We know Rolling Stone has a skeptical if not outright anti-war agenda. But Hastings lets the combat soldiers do the talking and I feel this is the most explosive part of the report:
One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,†the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any fu****g sense?†asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. “We should just drop a fu****g bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?â€
The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fu**, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fu****g gun on,†says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fu***d up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fu****g losing this thing.â€
McChrystal and his team show up the next day. Underneath a tent, the general has a 45-minute discussion with some two dozen soldiers. The atmosphere is tense. “I ask you what’s going on in your world, and I think it’s important for you all to understand the big picture as well,†McChrystal begins. “How’s the company doing? You guys feeling sorry for yourselves? Anybody? Anybody feel like you’re losing?†McChrystal says.
“Sir, some of the guys here, sir, think we’re losing, sir,†says Hicks.
McChrystal nods. “Strength is leading when you just don’t want to lead,†he tells the men. “You’re leading by example. That’s what we do. Particularly when it’s really, really hard, and it hurts inside.†Then he spends 20 minutes talking about counterinsurgency, diagramming his concepts and principles on a whiteboard. He makes COIN seem like common sense, but he’s careful not to bullshit the men. “We are knee-deep in the decisive year,†he tells them. The Taliban, he insists, no longer has the initiative – “but I don’t think we do, either.†It’s similar to the talk he gave in Paris, but it’s not winning any hearts and minds among the soldiers. “This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks,†McChrystal tries to joke. “But it doesn’t get the same reception from infantry companies.â€
During the question-and-answer period, the frustration boils over. The soldiers complain about not being allowed to use lethal force, about watching insurgents they detain be freed for lack of evidence. They want to be able to fight – like they did in Iraq, like they had in Afghanistan before McChrystal. “We aren’t putting fear into the Taliban,†one soldier says.
“Winning hearts and minds in COIN is a coldblooded thing,†McChrystal says, citing an oft-repeated maxim that you can’t kill your way out of Afghanistan. “The Russians killed 1 million Afghans, and that didn’t work.â€
“I’m not saying go out and kill everybody, sir,†the soldier persists. “You say we’ve stopped the momentum of the insurgency. I don’t believe that’s true in this area. The more we pull back, the more we restrain ourselves, the stronger it’s getting.â€
“I agree with you,†McChrystal says. “In this area, we’ve not made progress, probably. You have to show strength here, you have to use fire. What I’m telling you is, fire costs you. What do you want to do? You want to wipe the population out here and resettle it?â€
A soldier complains that under the rules, any insurgent who doesn’t have a weapon is immediately assumed to be a civilian. “That’s the way this game is,†McChrystal says. “It’s complex. I can’t just decide: It’s shirts and skins, and we’ll kill all the shirts.â€
As the discussion ends, McChrystal seems to sense that he hasn’t succeeded at easing the men’s anger. He makes one last-ditch effort to reach them, acknowledging the death of Cpl. Ingram. “There’s no way I can make that easier,†he tells them. “No way I can pretend it won’t hurt. No way I can tell you not to feel that. . . . I will tell you, you’re doing a great job. Don’t let the frustration get to you.†The session ends with no clapping, and no real resolution. McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren’t buying it.
A lot of people back here haven’t been buying it either. So-called population centric warfare is a fool’s errand. Trying to protect civilians while clearing out the “bad guys†only puts the the troops more at risk, civilians get hurt anyway and the Taliban, well they get to slip back into the shadows, feeding off the elaborate shakedown rackets and a seemingly endless source of support from the population we hope to protect. A vicious cycle. So what is the alternative? McChrystal put his finger on it a bit. Classic counterinsurgency, like what was practiced by the British in the Boer Wars, engaged in pacification, putting women and children in concentration camps. And, as Stan alluded to, just wiping people out. Breaking them down. I don’t think that is what the American people want.
So, the other alternative is disengagement, withdrawal. COINdinista Andrew Exum has already picked up on this from his own reading of the COIN criticisms in the Rolling Stone piece:
Disengagement from Afghanistan? Okay, but what would the costs and benefits of that disengagement be? I am frustrated by the reluctance of the legions of counterinsurgency skeptics to be honest about — or even discuss — the costs and benefits of alternatives. Some do, but not many.
Yes. I wish for that debate to happen. Like right now.
In the meantime, I do not see this Hastings report as a bad thing. It puts the war squarely in the laps of the COINdinistas, where it should be. On it’s current trajectory, the war will fail and the people who own the strategy should be held responsible for it. This might sound like a no-brainer, but the hawks are already trying to fob this mess off on Obama and the White House as the primary puppetmasters of this clusterf***k. I think it’s good to remind the American people that there are a few generals and a posse of “killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs†who made sure they were “in charge†from the very beginning.
Cross-posted at The American Conservative.
Last week I wrote about GIYUS — the “online public diplomacy platform of Israel†as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Word document) describes it—and the powerful role it can play in shaping the results of online polls and changing the direction of message board discussions.
Yesterday GIYUS sent out an alert about a forum on The Christian Science Monitor’s website. GIYUS appears to have driven a lot of traffic to the discussion–which is titled “Israeli blockade of Gaza: What would you change?“–and has inundated the forum with pro-blockade comments.
Comments in favor of the blockade are consistently receiving “thumbs up†votes and those in opposition to the blockade, and the IDF’s lethal attack on the flotilla, are getting voted down.
As an example, here is the comment which is currently the most highly ranked.
“Johnny Gee†wrote:
I would stress the strongest support as possible for the beleaguered Israelis, who are threatened from every direction and by every mode, including missles [sic], suicide murderers, and of course arms from the sea. Remember, the Israelis are the canary in the coalmine – the real target of the Islamic fundamentalist murderers is the US, Europe, and the world.
“Sam from Oregon†didn’t have the same appeal to GIYUS users and has found his comment voted to the bottom of the thread.
Sam wrote:
I would eliminate all US financial and military support to Israel. Israel is not “too big to failâ€, and if they can’t figure out a way to make nice with their neighbors, then they deserve to fail. The US habit of unconditional support for everything Israeli is the primary cause of middle east unrest. It’s time for US military adventures to come to an end. Bring home the troops, and use all the money for improving US infrastructure, education, and health care.
