Moved to Opinion because of Snowy Thing's in-line commentary.
The commander of NATO's international security force in Afghanistan sacked a senior U.S. Army general Friday for making disparaging comments about the Afghan government. Supposedly alongside the guy whose sister was bit by a moose.
Gen. John R. Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force, said Major Gen. Peter Fuller was relieved of duty, effective immediately, for making "inappropriate public comments." Mind you, moose bites can be pretty nasty.
Fuller, who was helping train and equip Afghan security forces, made less-than-diplomatic comments about the Afghan government and its leaders to a Politico reporter, including claims that some Afghan leaders are "isolated from reality." They may not be isolated from reality per se. Maybe they're just isolated from THIS reality.
Politico quoted Fuller as criticizing Afghan President Hamid Karzai for saying Afghanistan would side with Pakistan against America in war. AH. So we're actually supposed to be happy about that?
"Why don't you just poke me in the eye with a needle?" Fuller said. "You've got to be kidding me. I'm sorry, we just gave you $11.6 billion, and now you're telling me, 'I don't really care'?" It's like Louisiana, you can't buy the politicians, you can only rent them.
U.S. officials have said Karzai's remarks were misunderstood. General Fuller apparently feels otherwise. I suspect the unnamed officials may have the disjoint reality problem as well.
Politico reported Fuller also as saying, in reference to Karzai, "when they are going to have a presidential election, you hope they get a guy that's more articulate."
He told Politico he recently told the Afghans: "I said, 'You guys are isolated from reality.' The reality is, the world economy is having some significant hiccups. The U.S. is in this (too). If you're in a very poor country like Afghanistan, you think that America has roads paved in gold; everybody lives in Hollywood. They don't understand the sacrifices that America is making to provide for their security. And I think that's part of my job, to educate 'em." My opinion? If they're so goddamn concerned about how goddamn wealthy we allegedly are, they can actually get the hell to work and build a FUNCTIONING CIVIL SOCIETY. We can't do it for them, and throwing money at the problem only makes it worse if they insist on dividing themselves into honorless serfs and a Warlord Class. Because, IMHO, it's never _only_ the Warlord Class that decides that everyone who can't enforce the existence of their honor with the point of an AK-47 is apparently without honor. The people start out doing it to each other, down at the atomic social level, and the Warlord Class only takes advantage of the situation, after re-establishing their family's rights. It doesn't help that half the country is kept illiterate because of their gender and THEN handed the job of raising the next generation. They teach their kids to fight from an early age, but they teach them, as a collective society, to all be victims of their aggressive neighbors.
What diminishing (thanks to the left) 'riches' the United States has inherited weren't because someone gave us a pile of damn foreign-aid gold at some point, or because we conquered all the parts of Mexico that had all the good roads. Come to Louisiana and I'll show you how untrue that is. It's because we were taught habits of success, both personally and with respect to other people. Especially, respecting other people. I don't think you can expect to be too successful if you're continually screwing other people over and too busy guarding against retribution to ever get any real work done. You can't have any self-respect if you're too busy being scared of all the people you've disrespected for being the wrong clan/tribe/branch of your in-laws.
In a statement, Allen said, "These unfortunate comments are neither indicative of our current solid relationship with the government of Afghanistan, its leadership, or our joint commitment to prevail here in Afghanistan. The Afghan people are an honorable people, and comments such as these will not keep us from accomplishing our most critical and shared mission - bringing about a stable, peaceful and prosperous Afghanistan." Again, I wonder about the Disjoint Reality bit.
Also, I wonder when the government is going to acknowledge that WE are an honorable people who deserve better than junk like Gunwalker... but I digress. If everyone in Afghanistan is so damn honorable, why the hell do we have to shoot people? Does that mean that by definition we're dishonorable? Or does he mean to speak like Marc Antony, and say thus are they all honorable men?
Spokesmen for both the International Security Assistance Force and the training mission said Fuller was quoted accurately. It's only Karzai's words that are figments of our imagination. If only Karzai were a figment of our imagination as well. Maybe he is but I need to spend more time at the Temple meditating before I'm freed from the illusion of Karzai's existance.
"Gen. Fuller was not misquoted," said Col. David Johnson, a spokesman for the American-led training mission. "What was reported by Politico is accurate." Why not just say he was misunderstood like the crackhead you've put in charge of the political leadership of the country?
Fuller was on his way back to Afghanistan from Washington on Friday and could not be reached for comment.
ISAF issued a statement earlier Friday that said, "These unfortunate comments are clearly MG Fuller's personal opinions. However, they in no way represent the policies or positions of the International Security and Assistance Force." I guess the people who actually leave the air conditioning could not be reached for comment.
An ISAF official said it is expected that senior commanders will speak with Fuller on his return to ask him for further details. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has been made aware of Fuller's comments, according to spokesman George Little. WE'RE GOING TO TE-ELL! WE'RE GOING TO TE-ELLL!"
Fuller was the deputy commander of the NATO training mission in charge of programs. That put him in command of $11 billion in equipment, supplies, training and contracts. Not any more. Maybe he'll be replaced by someone who knows to act like they're made of money.
On the same day as the Politico article, Fuller gave a news conference in Washington where he spoke about many of the same topics as in the article but took a much more positive tone toward the Afghan government.
At a National Press Club event, the general said the Afghan National Security Forces was drawing recruits.
"We're having more people come that want to serve their country than we can accept," Fuller said. "We deny about 1,500 people a month that are coming in." Probably because they flunked the test for the proper order of Pillage-then-Burn. But hey, we're made of money.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain ||
11/05/2011 00:00 ||
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#1
That was kind of stunning news, but you will know that only the competent will be sacked anymore. It's the system after a Democrat Congress.
#4
I fully support the General's comments. But - it is correct to relieve him - because the manner in which he delivered the message - and the content of that message - are really not compatible with the position entrusted to him.
With all that said: had the US Defense administration done nothing, General Fuller's comments would have become known to - at most - a couple of hundred people - and perhaps a couple of dozen of these might have paid significant attention, or remembered what he said.
Now - hundreds of thousands - if not millions of people (the news was on the front page of one of Bangkok's two main English-language newspapers yesterday) - are pouring over and discussing the General's comments.
I have yet to hear or read a comment by anyone who is not in the US administration in favor of Karzai and his cohorts.
Afghanistan is a tar baby - in the truest sense of the Uncle Remus tale. We need to stop pouring blood and treasure into that black hole - pronto.
#5
9 years of training and $10B of equipment and infrastructure and the Afghan National Army has about 170k troops, of which perhaps 40% are both reliably loyal and competent. One problem is literacy, which is only about 50% in the ANA.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
11/05/2011 22:02 Comments ||
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Book Description (From Amazon)
Did you know that Mohammad was a drunken, imbecilic pimp? Mohammad's very intelligent and beautiful daughter Fatima was the brains and moving force surrounding the founding of Islam. Mohammad, Mecca's village idiot and town drunk, did not have the brains or sobriety to run his saloon & brothel right; never mind a religion. Fatima was the puppet mistress who controlled her father and set up the lucrative new religion. This religious satire is at odds with orthodox Islam in a very humorous way
[Dawn] THE `war on terror` and the long-drawn-out violence that shows no signs of giving respite has taught Paks a number of important lessons. One of these is that violence seems to grow in proportion to the amount of violence used.
It could be that the approach is faulty. However, ars longa, vita brevis... those whose job it is to plan strategy are offended when they are cautioned and advised to find other methods of dealing with the situation.
Was it also a case of a `war on terror` when the Faqir of Ipi launched his jihad in Wazoo against the British who conducted military operations there for almost six years? Was it a clash of civilisations in 1893 when an Abdur Rehman Khel Mahsud gang killed Kelly, a British SDO in Balochistan? ...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it... The commissioner of Dera Ismail Khan ... the Pearl of Pashtunistan ... , Bruce, ordered a Mahsud jirga to surrender the five murderers. They were incarcerated and delivered to the commissioner and sentenced to seven years` imprisonment each. Jaggar, on the advice of Mulla Powindah, reacted to the British success and killed some of the maliks who had obtained the arrest of the offenders, in the same manner as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain have been eliminating maliks since 2003.
Bruce wanted to punish the Mahsud by sending an expedition, but the government of India refused, arguing that since the Durand Agreement was under negotiation, an expedition was imprudent. Pakistain did the same in 2003-04, citing the war in Afghanistan as the reason for the soft handling of repeated tribal intransigence.
In the first case the government of India`s poor decision in the matter of Jaggar led to years of trouble; what could have led to the containment of the Mahsuds ended in creating a precedent of violence and challenge to the state that continues to fester.
Likewise, failure to deal with Waziristan in the post-November 2001 period caused much pain nationally and internationally. The reason behind the creation of the problem was to bypass the principle that the tribal areas are best handled by political authorities. This was ignored on the presumption that with the presence of the Pakistain military in Fata that would prevent attacks on US forces in Afghanistan, the political handling of the tribes was unimportant.
The results of this flawed assumption lie before us. The jihad boy problem has not gone away even though we have more control over territory. This is a flash in the pan and it is a moot point whether stability can be expected to last. Clearly, there is no substitute to the political handling of the tribes; this is not a task that can be dealt with cursorily, from a security perspective alone.
The result of such a policy disconnect was that not only were the hard boyz (rustics) radicalised by the presence of Al Qaeda and Uzbek cadres, their presence also jeopardised peace inside Pakistain. The lack of vigour in implementing a zero-tolerance policy against foreigners led to the creation of TTP safe havens and fiefdoms.
In short, poor policy diagnosis led to incorrect remedies. Holding the current disempowered and allegedly corrupt political system responsible for the consequences of decisions made by those at the helm of affairs in 2001 is therefore unfair.
The tragedy of Pak statecraft has been that one institution creates a problem and then expects another institution to solve it. Statecraft solutions are often quite complex, but in terms of what to do they can be quite simple. Civil administration is a civilian task and the military should not override it.
The handling of Jaggar a century ago has many similarities with how we handled the TTP and Al Qaeda in Waziristan in 2003. In both cases the elimination of the threat was the mandate of the political agent rather than being the responsibility of the military, as it was assumed in our case. Because we decided to give a low priority to enhancing security in Fata and instead prioritised border control (dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease), many difficulties were created for the Pak state.
On the one hand we lost control within Fata and on the other, the presence of gangs within our territory led to Western accusations that Pakistain is complicit in supporting some of the Taliban groups. This was the result of the compulsion of coexistence rather than complicity.
The examples above show that historically, Fata and much of eastern and southern Afghanistan have functioned best as loosely administered areas through the influence of local elders and administrators. Both countries have, during their peaceful periods, relied mostly on political rather than military management of the areas.
If it is more advisable to fight anti-state elements in Fata through non-military means, why did Pakistain and the US rely so heavily on a military approach? The answer lies in the realm of speculation, but one would not be wrong in holding the Pentagon responsible for designing and then leading an approach that was made on the presumption that US-Isaf military dominance with Pak military support would result in victory.
It is thus not surprising to read Gen McCrystal`s confessions, made to The New York Times ...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize... recently, that the US was not well-informed about the ground realities (read: tribal dynamics) of the war in Afghanistan even after spending so many years in the country. It appears that after 10 years and the expenditure of more than $460bn on the Afghan war, the dynamics on the ground are not too different from what they were when the Jaggar episode took place.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/05/2011 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Wazoo
