Friday, December 03, 2010
WikiLeaks OR LuckyLeaks?
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Should Pakistan react WikiLeaks or remain unchanged?
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Friday, September 24, 2010
Forgotten Sister Afia?
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In the New York jail, Dr Aafia said, six masked men stripped her, tied her hands behind her back and made a video film. A woman covered her with a blanket while she was being taken back to her cell. She even stopped seeing her counsel to avoid being stripped every time she was taken out for a meeting. She was later shifted to the Federal Medical Centre, Carswell, Texas, for tests and treatment.
Aafia Siddiqui: Victimized by American Depravity
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by Stephen Lendman / April 1st, 2010
Today marks the close of another sad chapter in the life of our sister, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. Today she was unjustly found guilty. Though she was not charged with any terrorism-related offense, Judge Berman permitted the prosecution’s witnesses to characterize our sister as a terrorist – which, based on copious (exculpatory) evidence, she clearly is not. Today’s verdict is one of the many legal errors that allowed the prosecution to build a case against our sister based on hate, rather than fact. We believe that as a result, she was denied a fair trial, and today’s verdict must be overturned on appeal.
Who's Afraid of Aafia Siddiqui?
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She went to MIT and Brandeis, married a Brigham and Women's physician, made her home in Boston, cared for her children, and raised money for charities. Aafia Siddiqui was a normal woman living a normal American life. Until the FBI called her a terror.
Friday, September 03, 2010
Monday, August 09, 2010
Protester Throws Shoes At Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari During UK Visit
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Facing domestic criticism for his trip during a time that his nation battles deadly floods, the Pakistani president's U.K. trip had also been fraught because it came so soon after British Prime Minister David Cameron accused Pakistan of exporting terror. The remarks outraged many Pakistanis and caused a diplomatic row, in part because they were made during Cameron's visit to India, Pakistan's nuclear rival.
IRMINGHAM, England — Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari wrapped up his to Britain by addressing a political rally Saturday, facing criticism and protesters for touring overseas as floods killed more than 1,500 people in his country.
One heckler threw a shoe at Zardari during the event, missing the president, while outside the convention center police cordoned off more than 100 protesters.
Zardari told supporters his trip to Britain had been a success, and that he had raised tens of thousands of pounds for flood victims at home. Some 2,000 people crowded into the Birmingham convention center to listen to the visiting leader and other speakers from his Pakistan People's Party.
Facing domestic criticism for his trip during a time that his nation battles deadly floods, the Pakistani president's U.K. trip had also been fraught because it came so soon after British Prime Minister David Cameron accused Pakistan of exporting terror. The remarks outraged many Pakistanis and caused a diplomatic row, in part because they were made during Cameron's visit to India, Pakistan's nuclear rival.
"We have a good relationship with the British government and the problem has been resolved with the help of British Pakistani MPs (lawmakers,)" he said Saturday at the rally where posters of his slain wife, Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, covered the walls. He was flanked by his daughter, Asifa, who wore a white head scarf.
Some protesters raised placards that read "U.S.A. out of Pakistan and Afghanistan." Many Pakistanis are angry about U.S.-led forces within Pakistan and increasing military operations in the frontier and tribal border areas.
"Too many Pakistani civilians have lost their lives because of this foreign-led war," said a protester who identified himself as Iqbal Najid, 32.
The Telegraph reports that the shoes aimed at Zardari came from an elderly man:
Mr Zardari, who is under criticism for visiting Britain while Pakistan is suffering from devastating floods, was in the middle of a speech when an elderly man in the 1,000 strong crowd hurled both shoes at him. The gesture is considered a traditional insult in Islam. An unidentified man was later ejected by police and security officials from the meeting...
Earlier in the day Zardari's son and co-chairman of the PPP, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, appealed for donations to help Pakistani flood victims in London.
Pakistan flood survivors struggling
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Survivors of Pakistan's worst floods on record seek food and shelter, as concerns grow over the spread of water-borne diseases.
More than 1,000 people have been killed and and more than a million are displaced.Friday, July 30, 2010
U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks, 18 Mar 2008
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This document is a classified (SECRET/NOFORN) 32 page U.S. counterintelligence investigation into WikiLeaks. ``The possibility that current employees or moles within DoD or elsewhere in the U.S. government are providing sensitive or classified information to WikiLeaks.org cannot be ruled out. It concocts a plan to fatally marginalize the organization. Since WikiLeaks uses ``trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers, the report recommends ``The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the WikiLeaks.org Web site. [As two years have passed since the date of the report, with no WikiLeaks' source exposed, it appears that this plan was ineffective]. As an odd justification for the plan, the report claims that ``Several foreign countries including China, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe have denounced or blocked access to the WikiLeaks.org website. The report provides further justification by enumerating embarrassing stories broken by WikiLeaks---U.S. equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable U.S. violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay.
Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010
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25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary, an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.
The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers, and mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related details.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Pakistan's E-Govternment - a joke!
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ABOUT EGD
In October 2002 the Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) was established in pursuance to a decision of the federal cabinet. Converting the former Information Technology Commission, the Government formed the EGD as a cell within the Ministry of Information Technology.
Vision
Efficient and Responsive Public Sector to bring in Transparency in Government processes.
Mission
Our aim is to help public sector organizations in increasing efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness with the use of Information and Communication Technology. We are committed to build a robust e-government framework to make the government more responsive in delivering the public services to citizens and businesses. Major focus of E-government includes Infrastructure development of government departments, implementation of wide area networks, maximum usage of technology in delivering public services. The objectives of e-government are to
• Create more accountability and transparency in the public sector
• Modernize public services in which joined-up Government institutions communicate and work more effectively and efficiently
• Increase responsiveness of Government sector in delivering public services
• Bring Government close to citizen by providing them with easier access to information through personnel computers ,kiosks, telephone and other resources.
http://www.e-government.gov.pk/ that has too non-functional as to be...
In October 2002 the Electronic Government Directorate (EGD) was established in pursuance to a decision of the federal cabinet. Converting the former Information Technology Commission, the Government formed the EGD as a cell within the Ministry of Information Technology.
Vision
Efficient and Responsive Public Sector to bring in Transparency in Government processes.
Mission
Our aim is to help public sector organizations in increasing efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness with the use of Information and Communication Technology. We are committed to build a robust e-government framework to make the government more responsive in delivering the public services to citizens and businesses. Major focus of E-government includes Infrastructure development of government departments, implementation of wide area networks, maximum usage of technology in delivering public services. The objectives of e-government are to
• Create more accountability and transparency in the public sector
• Modernize public services in which joined-up Government institutions communicate and work more effectively and efficiently
• Increase responsiveness of Government sector in delivering public services
• Bring Government close to citizen by providing them with easier access to information through personnel computers ,kiosks, telephone and other resources.
http://www.e-government.gov.pk/ that has too non-functional as to be...
A new curroption scandle in FBI !!!
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FBI Director Robert Mueller will likely be asked about a cheating scandal that may have taken place among hundreds of FBI agents when he testifies in front of Congress on Wednesday.
The investigators are being investigated.
The Justice Department is trying to find out if hundreds of FBI agents cheated on a test on new rules governing the bureau to conduct surveillance and when agents are permitted to open cases without evidence, according to the Associated Press.
Authorities are suspicious because some agents took the open-book test in groups, which is prohibited. Others also finished the extensive test in a suspiciously short amount of time.
"There are similar stories for practically every office, demonstrating the pervasive confusion and miscommunication that existed," Konrad Motyka, president of the FBI Agents Association wrote to the Justice Department in a letter dated on May 18.
Motyka suggested the agents not be punished. He said the problem was due to a lack of communication about the rules.
When the FBI received more freedom to open investigations and obtain information in recent years, it promised Congress that it would instruct and test agents on what they were—and were not— allowed to do.
For example, for the first time the FBI was allowed to conduct surveillance without proof that a crime took place. They were also granted permission to consider race when opening early investigations.
Improprieties about the testing came up as early as last year when Assistant Director Joseph Persichini, head of the FBI's Washington D.C. office, which examines congressional wrongdoing and crime in the capital, retired during an investigation alleging that he cheated during an open-book test in 2009.
The latest probe seems limited to the D.C. office. Depending on the result of the investigation, the agents could be disciplined or even canned from their jobs.
Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, is scheduled to testify on Wednesday before Congress. The alleged cheating scandal is expected to come up.
The Justice Department is trying to find out if hundreds of FBI agents cheated on a test on new rules governing the bureau to conduct surveillance and when agents are permitted to open cases without evidence, according to the Associated Press.
Authorities are suspicious because some agents took the open-book test in groups, which is prohibited. Others also finished the extensive test in a suspiciously short amount of time.
"There are similar stories for practically every office, demonstrating the pervasive confusion and miscommunication that existed," Konrad Motyka, president of the FBI Agents Association wrote to the Justice Department in a letter dated on May 18.
Motyka suggested the agents not be punished. He said the problem was due to a lack of communication about the rules.
When the FBI received more freedom to open investigations and obtain information in recent years, it promised Congress that it would instruct and test agents on what they were—and were not— allowed to do.
For example, for the first time the FBI was allowed to conduct surveillance without proof that a crime took place. They were also granted permission to consider race when opening early investigations.
Improprieties about the testing came up as early as last year when Assistant Director Joseph Persichini, head of the FBI's Washington D.C. office, which examines congressional wrongdoing and crime in the capital, retired during an investigation alleging that he cheated during an open-book test in 2009.
The latest probe seems limited to the D.C. office. Depending on the result of the investigation, the agents could be disciplined or even canned from their jobs.
Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, is scheduled to testify on Wednesday before Congress. The alleged cheating scandal is expected to come up.
Pakistan world leader in porn searches: Google
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By Junaid A.. Ranjha:
Lahore:
Pakistan has banned content on more than a dozen websites because of offensive and blasphemous material. The Muslim country, which has laws on dress codes, ranks as the top country to proportionally search for certain sex-related terms, writes Kelli Morgan at FoxNews.com.
The Muslim country, which has banned content on at least 17 websites to block offensive and blasphemous material, is the world’s leader in online searches for pornographic material, FoxNews.com has learned.
“You won’t find strip clubs in Islamic countries. Most Islamic countries have certain dress codes,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “It would be an irony if they haven’t shown the same vigilance to pornography.”
So here’s the irony: Google ranks Pakistan No. 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches per person for certain sex-related content.
Pakistan is top dog in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004, “donkey sex” since 2007, “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009, “rape sex” since 2004, “child sex” between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, “animal sex” since 2004 and “dog sex” since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.
The country also is tops — or has been No. 1 — in searches for “sex,” “camel sex,” “rape video,” “child sex video” and some other searches that can’t be printed here.
Google Trends generates data of popular search terms in geographic locations during specific time frames. Google Insights is a more advanced version that allows users to filter a search to geographic locations, time frames and the nature of a search, including web, images, products and news.
Pakistan ranked No. 1 in all the searches listed above on Google Trends, but on only some of them in Google Insights.
“We do our best to provide accurate data and to provide insights into broad search patterns, but the results for a given query may contain inaccuracies due to data sampling issues, approximations, or incomplete data for the terms entered,” Google said in a statement, when asked about the accuracy of its reports.
The Embassy of Islamic Republic of Pakistan did not reply to a request for an interview.
In addition to banning content on 17 websites, including islamexposed.blogspot.com, Pakistan is monitoring seven other sites — Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, MSN and Hotmail — for anti-Islamic content, the Associated Press reported in June.
But it’s not to censor the Pakistani people, Reynolds said. It’s to shut out the rest of the world.
“[It] could lead to conversion, which would undermine the very order of the state,” he said. “Part of protecting the society is making sure that there is no way it could be undermined in terms of foreign influences.”
Pakistan temporarily banned Facebook in May when Muslim groups protested the page containing blasphemous material. The page remains on Facebook, but Pakistani users are unable to view it, said Andrew Noyes, manager of Facebook’s Public Policy Communication.
And while Pakistan is taking measures to prevent blasphemous material from being viewed by its citizens, pornographic material is “certainly” contradictory to Islam, too, Reynolds said.
The country’s punishment for those charged with blasphemy is execution, but the question remains what — if anything — can be done about people who search for porn on the Web. “It’s a new phenomenon,” Reynolds said.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/12/data-shows-pakistan-googling-pornographic-material/
The Muslim country, which has banned content on at least 17 websites to block offensive and blasphemous material, is the world’s leader in online searches for pornographic material, FoxNews.com has learned.
“You won’t find strip clubs in Islamic countries. Most Islamic countries have certain dress codes,” said Gabriel Said Reynolds, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Notre Dame. “It would be an irony if they haven’t shown the same vigilance to pornography.”
So here’s the irony: Google ranks Pakistan No. 1 in the world in searches for pornographic terms, outranking every other country in the world in searches per person for certain sex-related content.
Pakistan is top dog in searches per-person for “horse sex” since 2004, “donkey sex” since 2007, “rape pictures” between 2004 and 2009, “rape sex” since 2004, “child sex” between 2004 and 2007 and since 2009, “animal sex” since 2004 and “dog sex” since 2005, according to Google Trends and Google Insights, features of Google that generate data based on popular search terms.
The country also is tops — or has been No. 1 — in searches for “sex,” “camel sex,” “rape video,” “child sex video” and some other searches that can’t be printed here.
Google Trends generates data of popular search terms in geographic locations during specific time frames. Google Insights is a more advanced version that allows users to filter a search to geographic locations, time frames and the nature of a search, including web, images, products and news.
Pakistan ranked No. 1 in all the searches listed above on Google Trends, but on only some of them in Google Insights.
“We do our best to provide accurate data and to provide insights into broad search patterns, but the results for a given query may contain inaccuracies due to data sampling issues, approximations, or incomplete data for the terms entered,” Google said in a statement, when asked about the accuracy of its reports.
The Embassy of Islamic Republic of Pakistan did not reply to a request for an interview.
In addition to banning content on 17 websites, including islamexposed.blogspot.com, Pakistan is monitoring seven other sites — Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, MSN and Hotmail — for anti-Islamic content, the Associated Press reported in June.
But it’s not to censor the Pakistani people, Reynolds said. It’s to shut out the rest of the world.
“[It] could lead to conversion, which would undermine the very order of the state,” he said. “Part of protecting the society is making sure that there is no way it could be undermined in terms of foreign influences.”
Pakistan temporarily banned Facebook in May when Muslim groups protested the page containing blasphemous material. The page remains on Facebook, but Pakistani users are unable to view it, said Andrew Noyes, manager of Facebook’s Public Policy Communication.
And while Pakistan is taking measures to prevent blasphemous material from being viewed by its citizens, pornographic material is “certainly” contradictory to Islam, too, Reynolds said.
The country’s punishment for those charged with blasphemy is execution, but the question remains what — if anything — can be done about people who search for porn on the Web. “It’s a new phenomenon,” Reynolds said.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/07/12/data-shows-pakistan-googling-pornographic-material/
What PDDC says regarding the report?
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The Ministry of Special Initiative said a report published by The News on Saturday titled “Rs 7 billion more for clean drinking water on PM’s verbal approval” is baseless.
It said in a press release: “The Ministry for Special Initiatives wants to make it clear that neither any approval was sought nor any approval was given by the Prime Minister. In fact, the project director was not even present during that presentation and his claim is totally baseless. The project director has also falsely accused that the prime minister was “quoted” during the Contract Award Committee meeting as having given this approval. The fact is that the prime minister was never quoted during this meeting. The meeting was chaired by the federal minister for special initiatives and attended by additional chief secretary, Balochistan; secretary local government, Punjab; member P&D, Punjab; secretary public health, Sindh; secretary Local Government, Balochistan. The minutes of the meeting also prove this fact.
“The revised PC-I of the project is yet to be prepared as per instruction of the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) that had directed that revised PC-I should be put before ECNEC after tenders for Punjab had been finalised.
“It would be pertinent to note that the press release of the meeting issued by the Prime Minister’s Media Office carried by the press on May 09 said, ‘The PM, however, noted with concern that the project was initiated in haste, without proper feasibility study and due consultative process with provincial and district governments. He underscored the need for developing a sense of ownership of the programme, taking all the stakeholders on board.’ “The prime minister had issued such instructions from time to time before as well. In compliance of these directions of the prime minister, various committees comprising of senior officers from each province and concerned federal ministries were formed for pre-qualification of firms and award of tender. Since the project is to be implemented by the provinces, the Ministry of Special initiatives gave complete autonomy to these committees, particularly the provincial representatives. All decisions were taken with consensus and in case of any difference of opinion, the majority view always prevailed.”
Rauf Klasra adds: The clarification deals with the allegation of the director project and does not contradict the story. I stand by the story.
It said in a press release: “The Ministry for Special Initiatives wants to make it clear that neither any approval was sought nor any approval was given by the Prime Minister. In fact, the project director was not even present during that presentation and his claim is totally baseless. The project director has also falsely accused that the prime minister was “quoted” during the Contract Award Committee meeting as having given this approval. The fact is that the prime minister was never quoted during this meeting. The meeting was chaired by the federal minister for special initiatives and attended by additional chief secretary, Balochistan; secretary local government, Punjab; member P&D, Punjab; secretary public health, Sindh; secretary Local Government, Balochistan. The minutes of the meeting also prove this fact.
“The revised PC-I of the project is yet to be prepared as per instruction of the Central Development Working Party (CDWP) that had directed that revised PC-I should be put before ECNEC after tenders for Punjab had been finalised.
“It would be pertinent to note that the press release of the meeting issued by the Prime Minister’s Media Office carried by the press on May 09 said, ‘The PM, however, noted with concern that the project was initiated in haste, without proper feasibility study and due consultative process with provincial and district governments. He underscored the need for developing a sense of ownership of the programme, taking all the stakeholders on board.’ “The prime minister had issued such instructions from time to time before as well. In compliance of these directions of the prime minister, various committees comprising of senior officers from each province and concerned federal ministries were formed for pre-qualification of firms and award of tender. Since the project is to be implemented by the provinces, the Ministry of Special initiatives gave complete autonomy to these committees, particularly the provincial representatives. All decisions were taken with consensus and in case of any difference of opinion, the majority view always prevailed.”
Rauf Klasra adds: The clarification deals with the allegation of the director project and does not contradict the story. I stand by the story.
Pakistan Diary Development Company: PDDC- lacks capability, commitment to
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Public-private venture for upgrading livestock sector ends up as grazing ground for misappropriations, embezzlements
By Junaid A. Ranjha:
Lahore:
The Pakistan Dairy Development Company set with a vision to modernise the dairy sector of the worlds fifth largest milk producers has turned out to be a wanton waste of public resources, taxpayers money and foreign grants. The PDDC under its current management neither has the capability nor the commitment to work for the development of livestock sector in the country, says the Ministry of Special Initiatives, the parent ministry of PDDC, in its report sent to the Prime Minister s Secretariat.The multi billion rupees project with primary objective to develop the dairy sector of the country proved to be a sanctuary for foreign consultants and an investing arm for the local dairy processing company reveals The News investigation on Tuesday. The reports prepared by the Ministry of Special Initiatives (MoSI) and the Planning Commission (PC) and interviews of PDDC staff reveal that the management of the PDDC diverted its resources and allocations for the provision of cool tanks to the top milk processing units in the country. The PDDC provided 1,140 cool tanks to a particular dairy processing company s supply chain of milk producers whereas these tanks were supposed to be provided to small dairy farmers on highly subsidised rates, an insider of PDDC told this correspondent.
The MoSI report states that out of the established cooling tanks, only 25 ordinary small farms have benefited from this scheme while the rest have been provided to multi-national processors through PDDC s funding. The company also mobilized major chunk of allocations for developing an infrastructure to set up dairy processing units for a former federal minister, the PDDC source further added.Secretary Special Initiatives, Abdul Shafiq refused to comment on the issue after repeated attempts to get ministry s side on the questions raised by two separate reports of MoSI and PC.The Pakistan Dairy Development Company commonly known as Dairy Pakistan is a public-private joint initiative to bring about long-term structural change in the dairy industry in Pakistan.
Pakistan is the fifth largest milk producer in the world, the PDDC project was envisioned to turn Pakistan into one of the top five dairy processing countries. Dairy Pakistan is embarking on the White Revolution - a phased plan targeting all the key players in the dairy sector.The implementation of White Revolution was designed in three phases - Horizon one, two and three.The Prime Minister has allocated Rs2 billion for Horizon I. The Horizon II costing Rs5.86 billion will focus on increasing productivity of rural areas and create a link between the value-chain.The White Revolution has PSDP funding of Rs2.654 million for Horizon-II that aims to develop community farms, milk pockets, military farm upgrades, bulk milk vending, training of master trainers for management practices, rural contractors, biogas program, regulation development program and breeding farms.The company has spent Rs182.59 million in 2008-09 with throw-forward amount of Rs2.471 billion and has an allocation of Rs100m for the current fiscal 2009-10. For the year 2007-08, Rs500m were allocated for the project, out of which Rs313m were released whereas Rs200m were utilised.The reports of PC and MoSI clearly state that the project failed to achieve its set targets and some of the interventions have not been reported even to date.The MoSI in its report dispatched to the PM s secretariat says that the PDDC management lacks the capability and commitment to work for the development of livestock sector.The PC report lays bare the facts that PDDC was assigned to establish 100 community farms at the cost of Rs542m but it has set up only seven farms. For milk pockets development with cost of Rs408m that include four HTST plants and 25 small plants none of them were developed even after spending Rs1.32m.The company was to upgrade military farms with cost of Rs284m but no break through has been reported and this component of the project has been put on hold. The setting up of five pasteurisation plants with associated vending outlets at a cost of Rs331m is still in the initial stage, the PC report added.About training of 300 master trainers and training of 8,250 farmers with cost of Rs406m, the report said that no progress has been made for master trainers while only 500 farmers were trained.Linking of finance program of executing middlemen with cost of Rs116m is yet to be initiated, it said, adding that creation of rural businesses contractors for equipment and servicing, only a single unit is operational and 10 application in process.For the establishment of biogas program with cost of Rs61m, the report highlighted that only 215 plants have been installed, said the report and no progress have been made to produce 200 heifers with cost of Rs506m.
The MoSI report states that out of the established cooling tanks, only 25 ordinary small farms have benefited from this scheme while the rest have been provided to multi-national processors through PDDC s funding. The company also mobilized major chunk of allocations for developing an infrastructure to set up dairy processing units for a former federal minister, the PDDC source further added.Secretary Special Initiatives, Abdul Shafiq refused to comment on the issue after repeated attempts to get ministry s side on the questions raised by two separate reports of MoSI and PC.The Pakistan Dairy Development Company commonly known as Dairy Pakistan is a public-private joint initiative to bring about long-term structural change in the dairy industry in Pakistan.
Pakistan is the fifth largest milk producer in the world, the PDDC project was envisioned to turn Pakistan into one of the top five dairy processing countries. Dairy Pakistan is embarking on the White Revolution - a phased plan targeting all the key players in the dairy sector.The implementation of White Revolution was designed in three phases - Horizon one, two and three.The Prime Minister has allocated Rs2 billion for Horizon I. The Horizon II costing Rs5.86 billion will focus on increasing productivity of rural areas and create a link between the value-chain.The White Revolution has PSDP funding of Rs2.654 million for Horizon-II that aims to develop community farms, milk pockets, military farm upgrades, bulk milk vending, training of master trainers for management practices, rural contractors, biogas program, regulation development program and breeding farms.The company has spent Rs182.59 million in 2008-09 with throw-forward amount of Rs2.471 billion and has an allocation of Rs100m for the current fiscal 2009-10. For the year 2007-08, Rs500m were allocated for the project, out of which Rs313m were released whereas Rs200m were utilised.The reports of PC and MoSI clearly state that the project failed to achieve its set targets and some of the interventions have not been reported even to date.The MoSI in its report dispatched to the PM s secretariat says that the PDDC management lacks the capability and commitment to work for the development of livestock sector.The PC report lays bare the facts that PDDC was assigned to establish 100 community farms at the cost of Rs542m but it has set up only seven farms. For milk pockets development with cost of Rs408m that include four HTST plants and 25 small plants none of them were developed even after spending Rs1.32m.The company was to upgrade military farms with cost of Rs284m but no break through has been reported and this component of the project has been put on hold. The setting up of five pasteurisation plants with associated vending outlets at a cost of Rs331m is still in the initial stage, the PC report added.About training of 300 master trainers and training of 8,250 farmers with cost of Rs406m, the report said that no progress has been made for master trainers while only 500 farmers were trained.Linking of finance program of executing middlemen with cost of Rs116m is yet to be initiated, it said, adding that creation of rural businesses contractors for equipment and servicing, only a single unit is operational and 10 application in process.For the establishment of biogas program with cost of Rs61m, the report highlighted that only 215 plants have been installed, said the report and no progress have been made to produce 200 heifers with cost of Rs506m.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
US nonsense on Pak nuclear issue
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Nothing can be as demeaning as Prime Minister Gilani’s declaration that Pakistan would abide by “US sanctions on Iran.” While UN sanctions under Chapter VII are obligatory for all member states, why should Gilani lay the country prostrate before the US? And this at a time when we are being cornered on all fronts, especially the nuclear, by this “ally”!
China and Pakistan have been cooperating in the field of civilian nuclear technology for many years now and since China became a member of the IAEA all the civilian reactors given by China have been subject to IAEA safeguards. Unlike in the case of India, after the Indo-US nuclear deal, Pakistan continues to go by the normal safeguards agreement for Non-NPT states. In India’s case it may be recalled, the US managed to get an India-specific safeguards agreement from the IAEA for those reactors that the US will either be providing fuel for or helping construct. Moreover, it is India that will decide which reactors will come under these loose safeguards and according to a unique provision - not present in any other IAEA safeguard model - India can opt out of the safeguards when it sees fit! The US also got country-specific export exceptions for India from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), which goes contrary to not only the NPT but also the NSG’s own guidelines. Ironically, the NSG first came into being in 1975 as a reaction to the 1974 Indian nuclear test where the explosive device used plutonium from a Canadian-supplied reactor. Even at that time, Canada irrationally chose to penalise Pakistan by immediately withdrawing aid to the KANUPP reactor despite it being under IAEA safeguards.
Now once again, the US is threatening to victimise Pakistan and try and sabotage the civilian nuclear deal with China - which is similar to and a continuation of past cooperation under IAEA scrutiny. The chosen forum for the present pressure on Pakistan is the upcoming NSG meeting in New Zealand. However, both China and Pakistan need to remember that the NSG is merely a ‘club’ of suppliers of nuclear technology where membership is by choice and there is nothing internationally and legally binding with regard to its decisions. So Pakistan and China are under no obligation to give in to unreasonable country-specific demands targeting Pakistan’s civilian nuclear programme - after all, China’s membership of the NSG is voluntary and while it can explain its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, it is under no compulsion to abandon it at the behest of the NSG. Another Muslim state, Iran, is also going to be targeted at the New Zealand NSG meeting.
China and Pakistan have been cooperating in the field of civilian nuclear technology for many years now and since China became a member of the IAEA all the civilian reactors given by China have been subject to IAEA safeguards. Unlike in the case of India, after the Indo-US nuclear deal, Pakistan continues to go by the normal safeguards agreement for Non-NPT states. In India’s case it may be recalled, the US managed to get an India-specific safeguards agreement from the IAEA for those reactors that the US will either be providing fuel for or helping construct. Moreover, it is India that will decide which reactors will come under these loose safeguards and according to a unique provision - not present in any other IAEA safeguard model - India can opt out of the safeguards when it sees fit! The US also got country-specific export exceptions for India from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG), which goes contrary to not only the NPT but also the NSG’s own guidelines. Ironically, the NSG first came into being in 1975 as a reaction to the 1974 Indian nuclear test where the explosive device used plutonium from a Canadian-supplied reactor. Even at that time, Canada irrationally chose to penalise Pakistan by immediately withdrawing aid to the KANUPP reactor despite it being under IAEA safeguards.
Now once again, the US is threatening to victimise Pakistan and try and sabotage the civilian nuclear deal with China - which is similar to and a continuation of past cooperation under IAEA scrutiny. The chosen forum for the present pressure on Pakistan is the upcoming NSG meeting in New Zealand. However, both China and Pakistan need to remember that the NSG is merely a ‘club’ of suppliers of nuclear technology where membership is by choice and there is nothing internationally and legally binding with regard to its decisions. So Pakistan and China are under no obligation to give in to unreasonable country-specific demands targeting Pakistan’s civilian nuclear programme - after all, China’s membership of the NSG is voluntary and while it can explain its nuclear cooperation with Pakistan, it is under no compulsion to abandon it at the behest of the NSG. Another Muslim state, Iran, is also going to be targeted at the New Zealand NSG meeting.
Prime Minster of Pakistan: Gilani Backtracks
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Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani backtracked on Tuesday from a statement that Islamabad would abide by US sanctions on Iran that could affect a $7.6 billion Pakistani-Iranian gas pipeline project. On Monday, Gilani said Pakistan would respect US sanctions that are expected to be put into law shortly, part of Washington's opposition to an Iranian nuclear programme it suspects is being used for weapons.
Gilani said on Tuesday, however, he wanted to clarify and "get it right". "As far as the US is concerned, we're not bound to follow it," he said while speaking at a ceremony in Islamabad. "If these are UN (sanctions) then according to international laws, we'll consider them." US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke warned Islamabad on Sunday against over committing to the natural gas pipeline project because of the expected effects of the sanctions.
Pakistan is desperate for new energy sources, saddled with expensive generation and a daily shortage of as much as 5,000 megawatts. Frequent outages hamper industry and have sparked street protests against the government. The pipeline, expected to be completed by 2015, originally would have terminated in India. However, New Delhi has been reluctant to join given its long-running rivalry with Pakistan.
APP adds: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Tuesday said Pakistan was not bound to follow the US restrictions placed on Iran, but would consider implementing the UN sanctions under its international obligations. Addressing a luncheon in honour of parliamentarians the Prime Minister clarified his remarks made on Monday at Garhi Khuda Bux about the impact on the over seven billion dollars Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project, if sanctions were imposed by the US or the UN on Iran.
In his address to the parliamentarians Prime Minister Gilani said all state institutions need to work within their constitutional ambit for achieving the greater good, for serving the masses and in the larger interest of the country. Prime Minister Gilani said the people of Pakistan have elected its representatives for a period of five years with a view to solve their problems.
Gilani said the government has never claimed that there were no problems or it knew the solution to all ills, but said that it was learning from experience and its mistakes. He said the government has good ties with the opposition, the media and all other pillars of the state and believes that the country can progress and move forward by adhering to the policy of reconciliation and consensus.
He recalled that the government responded forcefully when its writ was challenged by extremists in Swat and Malakand. He said the government with the support of all political forces in the country forged a strong policy against the militants and the entire nation stood as one. He pointed that the recent budget by the federal and the provincial governments have been prepared in difficult circumstances but keeping in view the global economic condition and the ground situation tough decisions have been taken, in the larger national interest. He said efforts were being made to maintain the pace of national progress.
He hoped that the parliamentarians would continue to guide the government on issues of good governance and legislation. The Prime Minister mentioned the achievements of his governments that included the 7th NFC Award, the 18th Amendment to restore the constitution to its original form, the Benazir Income Support Programme, Agaz-e-haqooq-e-Balochistan and the Gilgit-Baltistan empowerment package.
Gilani said his government was committed to address the issues of law and order, terrorism, unemployment and poverty by allocating more resources. "We have to inevitably take tough decisions, and positive results were coming," he added. He said the parliamentarians should stand united by rising above their party and personal affiliations to find a solution to the ills afflicting the society. He said his government has distributed development funds to all the parliamentarians without any discrimination.
He expressed satisfaction at the performance of the parliament and said it has come up to the expectations of the people of Pakistan. He said supremacy of the parliament needs to be ensured. He said certain elements wanted conflict between the government and the judiciary but said all such attempts would fail. He dispelled such impressions and said his government enjoyed good ties with all state institutions.
He said the judiciary was trying to bring about social justice in the society. Gilani said his government was following in letter and spirit all the rules and regulations and has nothing to hide. "We are not law breakers, we are the law makers."
Gilani said on Tuesday, however, he wanted to clarify and "get it right". "As far as the US is concerned, we're not bound to follow it," he said while speaking at a ceremony in Islamabad. "If these are UN (sanctions) then according to international laws, we'll consider them." US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke warned Islamabad on Sunday against over committing to the natural gas pipeline project because of the expected effects of the sanctions.
Pakistan is desperate for new energy sources, saddled with expensive generation and a daily shortage of as much as 5,000 megawatts. Frequent outages hamper industry and have sparked street protests against the government. The pipeline, expected to be completed by 2015, originally would have terminated in India. However, New Delhi has been reluctant to join given its long-running rivalry with Pakistan.
APP adds: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Tuesday said Pakistan was not bound to follow the US restrictions placed on Iran, but would consider implementing the UN sanctions under its international obligations. Addressing a luncheon in honour of parliamentarians the Prime Minister clarified his remarks made on Monday at Garhi Khuda Bux about the impact on the over seven billion dollars Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project, if sanctions were imposed by the US or the UN on Iran.
In his address to the parliamentarians Prime Minister Gilani said all state institutions need to work within their constitutional ambit for achieving the greater good, for serving the masses and in the larger interest of the country. Prime Minister Gilani said the people of Pakistan have elected its representatives for a period of five years with a view to solve their problems.
Gilani said the government has never claimed that there were no problems or it knew the solution to all ills, but said that it was learning from experience and its mistakes. He said the government has good ties with the opposition, the media and all other pillars of the state and believes that the country can progress and move forward by adhering to the policy of reconciliation and consensus.
He recalled that the government responded forcefully when its writ was challenged by extremists in Swat and Malakand. He said the government with the support of all political forces in the country forged a strong policy against the militants and the entire nation stood as one. He pointed that the recent budget by the federal and the provincial governments have been prepared in difficult circumstances but keeping in view the global economic condition and the ground situation tough decisions have been taken, in the larger national interest. He said efforts were being made to maintain the pace of national progress.
He hoped that the parliamentarians would continue to guide the government on issues of good governance and legislation. The Prime Minister mentioned the achievements of his governments that included the 7th NFC Award, the 18th Amendment to restore the constitution to its original form, the Benazir Income Support Programme, Agaz-e-haqooq-e-Balochistan and the Gilgit-Baltistan empowerment package.
Gilani said his government was committed to address the issues of law and order, terrorism, unemployment and poverty by allocating more resources. "We have to inevitably take tough decisions, and positive results were coming," he added. He said the parliamentarians should stand united by rising above their party and personal affiliations to find a solution to the ills afflicting the society. He said his government has distributed development funds to all the parliamentarians without any discrimination.
He expressed satisfaction at the performance of the parliament and said it has come up to the expectations of the people of Pakistan. He said supremacy of the parliament needs to be ensured. He said certain elements wanted conflict between the government and the judiciary but said all such attempts would fail. He dispelled such impressions and said his government enjoyed good ties with all state institutions.
He said the judiciary was trying to bring about social justice in the society. Gilani said his government was following in letter and spirit all the rules and regulations and has nothing to hide. "We are not law breakers, we are the law makers."
Can Obama afford to fire McChrystal?
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Success of Afghan offensive trumps 'firing offense,' some analysts say
The general's relationship with the press contrasts significantly with that of Gen. David Petraeus, who spent a far larger segment of his career in Washington and is far more practiced in dealing with reporters and the civilian leadership. Petraeus's staff officers also tended to have extensive Washington experience, as well as background fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. "Petraeus and his staff would never put itself in this situation," said Cohen.
WASHINGTON - Is Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal someone the president can afford to fire?
Even some of McChrystal's staunchest backers in Afghanistan said the derisive comments the general and his staff made about the Obama administration to a Rolling Stone reporter leave him open to dismissal.
"I say this as someone who admired and respects Stan McChrystal enormously. The country doesn't know how much good he's done. But this is a firing offense," said Eliot A. Cohen, who served as a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the latter days of the Bush administration.
The sentiment that McChrystal and his staff had crossed an almost sacred line in criticizing the civilian chain of command was almost universal. McChrystal quickly apologized for his remarks and was summoned to Washington to further explain them. "This is clearly a firing offense," said Peter Feaver, a former official in the Bush White House and strong backer of a fully resourced counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
But relieving McChrystal of his command on the eve of a major offensive in Kandahar, which White House and Pentagon officials have said is the most critical of the war, would be a major blow to the war effort, said military experts. The president has set a July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, creating massive pressure on the military and McChrystal to make progress in stabilizing Afghanistan this summer and fall when troop levels are at their peak.
"My advice is to call him back to Washington, publicly chastise him and then make it clear that there is something greater at stake here," said Nathaniel Fick, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. "It takes time for anyone to get up to speed, and right now time is our most precious commodity in Afghanistan." If Obama believes the current counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan is the right one, then he cannot afford to jettison McChrystal, Fick said.
Much of McChrystal's career was spent in the military's secretive special operations community, which has little experience dealing with the press and often views outsiders — even those within the military — with suspicion. Some of the most damaging statements in the Rolling Stone article were from McChrystal's staff officers, who are also drawn heavily from the special operations community.
| Video: Gen. McChrystal comes under fire |
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates issued a statement saying that McChrystal made "a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment" in the Rolling Stone profile. It was Gates's decision to recall McChrystal to Washington to discuss the incident with him, according to the statement. The general is also expected to be summoned to the White House.
One big question will be whether the current team in Afghanistan, which includes Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and special representative Richard Holbrooke, can continue to function as a team. There have been repeated reports of tension among the three men going back to last year's review of the war strategy.
The statements by McChrystal criticizing both Eikenberry and Holbrooke could make the relationship difficult to repair. "I think the administration really needs to think about the whole team they have got," Cohen said. "It is a dysfunctional team."
If White House officials are contemplating ousting McChrystal, they are likely to consider the damage that would do to the relationships McChrystal has built with senior Afghan and Pakistani officials. In Kabul, McChrystal has earned a reputation for his candid, unscripted style and a strong work ethic; Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday issued a statement in support of the general.
Meanwhile, a strong working relationship with the top U.S. general and Islamabad is seen as a central part of the war strategy.
A senior Pakistani government official said Monday that many in Pakistan already believe the Americans lack a long-term strategy in Afghanistan. The possibility of McChrystal's being removed only deepens Pakistan's skepticism about chances for a U.S. victory in Afghanistan, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive policy assessment.
"Now, the person who helped craft that strategy, if he's not on the scene, how will you take this process forward?" the official added.
The statements by McChrystal and the reaction from the White House also reflect a deeper tension between the civilians and the military that dates back to last fall. Recently those tensions were revisited in a book, by Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter, in which senior administration officials seemed to question the military's tactics in boxing in the civilian leadership. "It was a foolish interview that McChrystal gave," Feaver said. "But this is the umpteenth round going back and forth."
The tension isn't unique to the Obama administration. President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also faced criticism from uniformed military and retired generals who called for Rumsfeld's ouster in 2006. Some military analysts said that the increasing politicization of the military is a product of the fact that such a small portion of the force is being summoned for repeat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The strain has created a sense of entitlement and frustration with a civilian world that hasn't made significant sacrifices.
"A lot of the blame falls on the military," Fick said. "The military has been too willing to look the other way when officers make political statements."
Londoño reported from Kabul. Staff writer Karin Brulliard in Islamabad, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
© 2010 The Washington Post Company
Top 10 excerpts from explosive Rolling Stone article about McChrystal
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WASHINGTON - As Gen. Stanley McChrystal makes the long trip back to Washington, pundits are weighing in on whether a Rolling Stone magazine article about the “Runaway General” could be grounds for the man in charge of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan to step down from his post.
WASHINGTON - As Gen. Stanley McChrystal makes the long trip back to Washington, pundits are weighing in on whether a Rolling Stone magazine article about the “Runaway General” could be grounds for the man in charge of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan to step down from his post.
Below is a roundup of the top 10 excerpts from that article, which is slated to come out this Friday.
- “Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”
“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite me?” - Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect…. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later…. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s a guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.
- Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. “I found that time painful,” McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. “I was selling an unsellable position.”
- The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to re-take the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a “bleeding ulcer.”
- In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side…. Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, “turn up, have a meeting with [President Hamid] Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.”
- “Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke,” [McChrystal] groans. “I don’t even want to open it.”
- By far the most crucial — and strained — relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador.
- “We’ve shot an amazing number of people,” McChrystal recently conceded.
- “Bottom line?” says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers’ lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing.”
- McChrystal may have sold President Obama on counterinsurgency, but many of his own men aren’t buying it.
Stanley McChrystal: The runaway general
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Stanley McChrystal: The runaway general
The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan." The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile
When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. "I want the American people to understand," he announced in March 2009. "We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan." He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn't know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.
Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.
The most striking example of McChrystal's usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president's palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai's staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan's defense minister, who persuaded Karzai's people to wake the president from his nap.
McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The "Prison on the Hudson," as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition called "rat fucking," which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream. "It was pretty out of control," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls "huge talent" and "wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism," also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
But however strategic they may be, McChrystal's new marching orders have caused an intense backlash among his own troops. Being told to hold their fire, soldiers complain, puts them in greater danger. "Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."
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."
But facts on the ground, as history has proven, offer little deterrent to a military determined to stay the course. Even those closest to McChrystal know that the rising anti-war sentiment at home doesn't begin to reflect how deeply fucked up things are in Afghanistan. "If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it would become even less popular," a senior adviser to McChrystal says. Such realism, however, doesn't prevent advocates of counterinsurgency from dreaming big: Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised, the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even further. "There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of U.S. forces next summer if we see success here," a senior military official in Kabul tells me.
 MSNBC.com |
Stanley McChrystal: The runaway general
Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan never takes his eye off real enemy
By Michael Hastings
Rolling Stone
updated 8:11 p.m. ET June 22, 2010
Editor's note: This article, as it appears in Rolling Stone magazine, contains profanity.
“How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.
"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.
McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.
"Hey, Charlie," he asks, "does this come with the position?"
McChrystal gives him the middle finger.
The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel's thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the "most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine." The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too "Gucci." He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
"What's the update on the Kandahar bombing?" McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general's assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.
"We have two KIAs, but that hasn't been confirmed," Flynn says.
McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you've fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.
"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."
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 fucking gay."
| Video: Gen. McChrystal comes under fire |
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"
| Video: McChrystal profile author surprised at fallout |
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."
From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military's preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.
As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn't send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of "mission failure." The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president's ass.
Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. "I found that time painful," McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. "I was selling an unsellable position." For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. "The entire COIN strategy 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.
In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words "victory" or "win," Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.
| Video: White House won’t confirm McChrystal’s job security |
Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it's going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win," says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. "This is going to end in an argument."
The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O'Shea's, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie's 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the "least Gucci" place his staff could find. His wife isn't surprised. "He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear," she says with a laugh.
The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for "I Suck at Fighting" or "In Sandals and Flip-Flops.") McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg's offices in New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It's a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war. By midnight at Kitty O'Shea's, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal's top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. "Afghanistan!" they bellow. "Afghanistan!" They call it their Afghanistan song.
McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. "All these men," he tells me. "I'd die for them. And they'd die for me."
The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal's team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. "It jeopardizes the mission," says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. "The military cannot by itself create governance reform."
Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama's top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a "clown" who remains "stuck in 1985." Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, "turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it's not very helpful." Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal's inner circle. "Hillary had Stan's back during the strategic review," says an adviser. "She said, 'If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.' "
McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. "The Boss says he's like a wounded animal," says a member of the general's team. "Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he's going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He's a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can't just have someone yanking on shit."
At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. "Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke," he groans. "I don't even want to open it." He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.
"Make sure you don't get any of that on your leg," an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.
By far the most crucial – and strained – relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry – a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 – can't stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He's also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO's allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill – a move that effectively increased McChrystal's influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. "In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight," says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.
The relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal's strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as "not an adequate strategic partner," and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be "sufficient" to deal with Al Qaeda. "We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves," Eikenberry warned, "short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."
McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. "I like Karl, I've known him for years, but they'd never said anything like that to us before," says McChrystal, who adds that he felt "betrayed" by the leak. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, 'I told you so.' "
| Video: McChrystal profile author surprised at fallout |
This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. "He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"
Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.
| Video: Obama: McChrystal 'showed poor judgment' |
The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents – a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination – a record that his classmates boasted made him a "century man." One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. "I'd come visit, and I'd end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area," recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.
McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular: As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In "Brinkman's Note," a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he's able to infiltrate the White House: "The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman's failure, I had succeeded."
After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. "We really felt we were a peacetime generation," he recalls. "There was the Gulf War, but even that didn't feel like that big of a deal." So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime – nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path: Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don't go into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.
In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far – especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. "He was very focused," says Annie. "Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don't think his personality has changed in all these years."
By some accounts, McChrystal's career should have been over at least two times by now. As Pentagon spokesman during the invasion of Iraq, the general seemed more like a White House mouthpiece than an up-and-coming commander with a reputation for speaking his mind. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made his infamous "stuff happens" remark during the looting of Baghdad, McChrystal backed him up. A few days later, he echoed the president's Mission Accomplished gaffe by insisting that major combat operations in Iraq were over. But it was during his next stint – overseeing the military's most elite units, including the Rangers, Navy Seals and Delta Force – that McChrystal took part in a cover-up that would have destroyed the career of a lesser man.
After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire. (McChrystal would later claim he didn't read the recommendation closely enough – a strange excuse for a commander known for his laserlike attention to minute details.) A week later, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman's death. "If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman's death become public," he wrote, it could cause "public embarrassment" for the president.
"The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true actions," wrote Tillman's mother, Mary, in her book Boots on the Ground by Dusk. McChrystal got away with it, she added, because he was the "golden boy" of Rumsfeld and Bush, who loved his willingness to get things done, even if it included bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Nine days after Tillman's death, McChrystal was promoted to major general.
Two years later, in 2006, McChrystal was tainted by a scandal involving detainee abuse and torture at Camp Nama in Iraq. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, prisoners at the camp were subjected to a now-familiar litany of abuse: stress positions, being dragged naked through the mud. McChrystal was not disciplined in the scandal, even though an interrogator at the camp reported seeing him inspect the prison multiple times. But the experience was so unsettling to McChrystal that he tried to prevent detainee operations from being placed under his command in Afghanistan, viewing them as a "political swamp," according to a U.S. official. In May 2009, as McChrystal prepared for his confirmation hearings, his staff prepared him for hard questions about Camp Nama and the Tillman cover-up. But the scandals barely made a ripple in Congress, and McChrystal was soon on his way back to Kabul to run the war in Afghanistan.
The media, to a large extent, have also given McChrystal a pass on both controversies. Where Gen. Petraeus is kind of a dweeb, a teacher's pet with a Ranger's tab, McChrystal is a snake-eating rebel, a "Jedi" commander, as Newsweek called him. He didn't care when his teenage son came home with blue hair and a mohawk. He speaks his mind with a candor rare for a high-ranking official. He asks for opinions, and seems genuinely interested in the response. He gets briefings on his iPod and listens to books on tape. He carries a custom-made set of nunchucks in his convoy engraved with his name and four stars, and his itinerary often bears a fresh quote from Bruce Lee. ("There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.") He went out on dozens of nighttime raids during his time in Iraq, unprecedented for a top commander, and turned up on missions unannounced, with almost no entourage. "The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal," says a British officer who serves in Kabul. "You'd be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like 'Who the fuck is that?' And it's fucking Stan McChrystal."
It doesn't hurt that McChrystal was also extremely successful as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite forces that carry out the government's darkest ops. During the Iraq surge, his team killed and captured thousands of insurgents, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. "JSOC was a killing machine," says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. McChrystal was also open to new ways of killing. He systematically mapped out terrorist networks, targeting specific insurgents and hunting them down – often with the help of cyberfreaks traditionally shunned by the military. "The Boss would find the 24-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with 16 computer monitors humming," says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq and now serves on his staff in Kabul. "He'd say, 'Hey – you fucking muscleheads couldn't find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.' "
Even in his new role as America's leading evangelist for counterinsurgency, McChrystal retains the deep-seated instincts of a terrorist hunter. To put pressure on the Taliban, he has upped the number of Special Forces units in Afghanistan from four to 19. "You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight," McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he'll add, "I'm going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though." In fact, the general frequently finds himself apologizing for the disastrous consequences of counterinsurgency. In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.
Despite the tragedies and miscues, McChrystal has issued some of the strictest directives to avoid civilian casualties that the U.S. military has ever encountered in a war zone. It's "insurgent math," as he calls it – for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies. He has ordered convoys to curtail their reckless driving, put restrictions on the use of air power and severely limited night raids. He regularly apologizes to Hamid Karzai when civilians are killed, and berates commanders responsible for civilian deaths. "For a while," says one U.S. official, "the most dangerous place to be in Afghanistan was in front of McChrystal after a 'civ cas' incident." The ISAF command has even discussed ways to make not killing into something you can win an award for: There's talk of creating a new medal for "courageous restraint," a buzzword that's unlikely to gain much traction in the gung-ho culture of the U.S. military.
| Video: Gen. McChrystal comes under fire |
In March, McChrystal traveled to Combat Outpost JFM – a small encampment on the outskirts of Kandahar – to confront such accusations from the troops directly. It was a typically bold move by the general. Only two days earlier, he had received an e-mail from Israel Arroyo, a 25-year-old staff sergeant who asked McChrystal to go on a mission with his unit. "I am writing because it was said you don't care about the troops and have made it harder to defend ourselves," Arroyo wrote.
Within hours, McChrystal responded personally: "I'm saddened by the accusation that I don't care about soldiers, as it is something I suspect any soldier takes both personally and professionally – at least I do. But I know perceptions depend upon your perspective at the time, and I respect that every soldier's view is his own." Then he showed up at Arroyo's outpost and went on a foot patrol with the troops – not some bullshit photo-op stroll through a market, but a real live operation in a dangerous war zone.
Six weeks later, just before McChrystal returned from Paris, the general received another e-mail from Arroyo. A 23-year-old corporal named Michael Ingram – one of the soldiers McChrystal had gone on patrol with – had been killed by an IED a day earlier. It was the third man the 25-member platoon had lost in a year, and Arroyo was writing to see if the general would attend Ingram's memorial service. "He started to look up to you," Arroyo wrote. McChrystal said he would try to make it down to pay his respects as soon as possible.
The night before the general is scheduled to visit Sgt. Arroyo's platoon for the memorial, I arrive at Combat Outpost JFM to speak with the soldiers he had gone on patrol with. JFM is a small encampment, ringed by high blast walls and guard towers. Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram's death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal's new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. "These were abandoned houses," fumes Staff Sgt. Kennith Hicks. "Nobody was coming back to live in them."
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 fucking sense?" asks Pfc. Jared Pautsch. "We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?"
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. "Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking 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 fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don't understand it themselves. But we're fucking losing this thing."
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.
| Video: Obama: McChrystal 'showed poor judgment' |
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."
"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."
"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?"
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."
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.
When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."
In mid-May, two weeks after visiting the troops in Kandahar, McChrystal travels to the White House for a high-level visit by Hamid Karzai. It is a triumphant moment for the general, one that demonstrates he is very much in command – both in Kabul and in Washington. In the East Room, which is packed with journalists and dignitaries, President Obama sings the praises of Karzai. The two leaders talk about how great their relationship is, about the pain they feel over civilian casualties. They mention the word "progress" 16 times in under an hour. But there is no mention of victory. Still, the session represents the most forceful commitment that Obama has made to McChrystal's strategy in months. "There is no denying the progress that the Afghan people have made in recent years – in education, in health care and economic development," the president says. "As I saw in the lights across Kabul when I landed – lights that would not have been visible just a few years earlier."
It is a disconcerting observation for Obama to make. During the worst years in Iraq, when the Bush administration had no real progress to point to, officials used to offer up the exact same evidence of success. "It was one of our first impressions," one GOP official said in 2006, after landing in Baghdad at the height of the sectarian violence. "So many lights shining brightly." So it is to the language of the Iraq War that the Obama administration has turned – talk of progress, of city lights, of metrics like health care and education. Rhetoric that just a few years ago they would have mocked. "They are trying to manipulate perceptions because there is no definition of victory – because victory is not even defined or recognizable," says Celeste Ward, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who served as a political adviser to U.S. commanders in Iraq in 2006. "That's the game we're in right now. What we need, for strategic purposes, is to create the perception that we didn't get run off. The facts on the ground are not great, and are not going to become great in the near future."
| Video: Rolling Stone: McChrystal quotes on the record |
Back in Afghanistan, less than a month after the White House meeting with Karzai and all the talk of "progress," McChrystal is hit by the biggest blow to his vision of counterinsurgency. Since last year, the Pentagon had been planning to launch a major military operation this summer in Kandahar, the country's second-largest city and the Taliban's original home base. It was supposed to be a decisive turning point in the war – the primary reason for the troop surge that McChrystal wrested from Obama late last year. But on June 10th, acknowledging that the military still needs to lay more groundwork, the general announced that he is postponing the offensive until the fall. Rather than one big battle, like Fallujah or Ramadi, U.S. troops will implement what McChrystal calls a "rising tide of security." The Afghan police and army will enter Kandahar to attempt to seize control of neighborhoods, while the U.S. pours $90 million of aid into the city to win over the civilian population.
Even proponents of counterinsurgency are hard-pressed to explain the new plan. "This isn't a classic operation," says a U.S. military official. "It's not going to be Black Hawk Down. There aren't going to be doors kicked in." Other U.S. officials insist that doors are going to be kicked in, but that it's going to be a kinder, gentler offensive than the disaster in Marja. "The Taliban have a jackboot on the city," says a military official. "We have to remove them, but we have to do it in a way that doesn't alienate the population." When Vice President Biden was briefed on the new plan in the Oval Office, insiders say he was shocked to see how much it mirrored the more gradual plan of counterterrorism that he advocated last fall. "This looks like CT-plus!" he said, according to U.S. officials familiar with the meeting.
Whatever the nature of the new plan, the delay underscores the fundamental flaws of counterinsurgency. After nine years of war, the Taliban simply remains too strongly entrenched for the U.S. military to openly attack. The very people that COIN seeks to win over – the Afghan people – do not want us there. Our supposed ally, President Karzai, used his influence to delay the offensive, and the massive influx of aid championed by McChrystal is likely only to make things worse. "Throwing money at the problem exacerbates the problem," says Andrew Wilder, an expert at Tufts University who has studied the effect of aid in southern Afghanistan. "A tsunami of cash fuels corruption, delegitimizes the government and creates an environment where we're picking winners and losers" – a process that fuels resentment and hostility among the civilian population. So far, counterinsurgency has succeeded only in creating a never-ending demand for the primary product supplied by the military: perpetual war. There is a reason that President Obama studiously avoids using the word "victory" when he talks about Afghanistan. Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge.
This article originally appeared in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010.
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