Thursday, March 25, 2010
Man Versus Afghanistan - The Atlantic
Read what General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has to say...
Robert D. Kaplan has the story in Atlantic Magazine:
"'Look, this isn’t easy,' he sighed. 'Afghanistan for years got worse and worse, and the coalition sometimes lagged behind the reality of the situation.' Because the country is so decentralized, he explained, it is extraordinarily complex, with a different tribal and sectarian reality in each district. But then he ticked off ways the war could be won. 'The insurgency is only fundamentally effective in the Pashtun belt. The critical part of the population is where the water and the roads are. People near water are more important economically: along the Helmand and Kabul rivers. You secure these areas, and you take the oxygen out of the insurgency.' He continued, talking about developing a corps of Afghan-area experts within the United States military akin to the American 'China hands' of the early and mid-20th century, and 'British East India Company types' who went out for years and learned the local languages. His command sergeant major, Mike Hall of Avon Lake, Ohio, said that when McChrystal selected his team of generals and colonels to come with him to command the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in June 2009, he more or less told them to 'get out of the deployment mentality—that they would be in-country for 18 months, two and a half years, for the duration, however long it took to win.'
McChrystal believes that the 'ideological piece' of alQaeda is 'truly scary': that a new brand of totalitarianism—alQaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a 'huge moral defeat' to it."
