Fred Branfman: When Rolling Stone Calls the Shots, It’s Time to Negotiate
[Fred Branfman is a book author, journalist and anti-war activist. In addition to being published in Truthdig, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Playboy, the New Republic and other publications.]
It is amazing how little commentary there has been on the key issue raised by the McChrystal Affair: Should U.S. war policy be made by Rolling Stone? The very fact that it took a magazine article for President Barack Obama to remove Gen. Stanley McChrystal provides the strongest possible reason for allowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban.
One point must be understood above all: McChrystal was not fired because he disrespected civilian authority, despised his administration colleagues and was running a dysfunctional operation. He was ousted because he allowed the public to find out—the one unforgivable sin for a U.S. executive branch long accustomed to operating its wars with little public or congressional knowledge or accountability, behind a PR curtain maintaining the myth that U.S. foreign and military policy is conducted democratically....
Petraeus’ failure to act before the scandal occurred means he failed as CentCom commander. One of his major responsibilities was obviously to assemble and deploy a smoothly functioning team to conduct military and political warfare in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater—one of the most sensitive arenas in which the U.S. has operated since the end of World War II.
Petraeus’ failure is matched, of course, by that of Obama and his top advisers. Neither Petraeus nor Obama should have needed a magazine profile in order to reorganize a team that was clearly broken....
The lesson of the McChrystal affair is stark: America is losing, badly. As the New Statesman reported June 22: “The Taliban have now advanced ... to the very gates of Kabul [and] control more than 70 per cent of the country. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai’s government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.” The U.S. has been unable to successfully wage Petraeus’ “COIN” counterinsurgency strategy in southern Afghanistan because this strategy requires a competent local government, not the criminal syndicate of relatives, cronies and warlords presided over by Karzai....
Read entire article at Truthdig
It is amazing how little commentary there has been on the key issue raised by the McChrystal Affair: Should U.S. war policy be made by Rolling Stone? The very fact that it took a magazine article for President Barack Obama to remove Gen. Stanley McChrystal provides the strongest possible reason for allowing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistan to negotiate a settlement with the Taliban.
One point must be understood above all: McChrystal was not fired because he disrespected civilian authority, despised his administration colleagues and was running a dysfunctional operation. He was ousted because he allowed the public to find out—the one unforgivable sin for a U.S. executive branch long accustomed to operating its wars with little public or congressional knowledge or accountability, behind a PR curtain maintaining the myth that U.S. foreign and military policy is conducted democratically....
Petraeus’ failure to act before the scandal occurred means he failed as CentCom commander. One of his major responsibilities was obviously to assemble and deploy a smoothly functioning team to conduct military and political warfare in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater—one of the most sensitive arenas in which the U.S. has operated since the end of World War II.
Petraeus’ failure is matched, of course, by that of Obama and his top advisers. Neither Petraeus nor Obama should have needed a magazine profile in order to reorganize a team that was clearly broken....
The lesson of the McChrystal affair is stark: America is losing, badly. As the New Statesman reported June 22: “The Taliban have now advanced ... to the very gates of Kabul [and] control more than 70 per cent of the country. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai’s government has control of only 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.” The U.S. has been unable to successfully wage Petraeus’ “COIN” counterinsurgency strategy in southern Afghanistan because this strategy requires a competent local government, not the criminal syndicate of relatives, cronies and warlords presided over by Karzai....