U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Vows to Lose War (Through the Eyes of a Child...)
BIG LIZARDS BLOG
By Dafydd
Former Lieutenent General Karl Eikenberry, now Barack H. Obama's Ambassador to Afghanistan, promises to "change tactics" so that minimizing "civilian" casualties, rather than destroying the enemy, becomes paramount:
>>> In a face-to-face meeting Tuesday with the Afghan survivors of a recent bombing in the western province of Farah, the new American ambassador to Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, promised that the coalition forces would change their tactics in order to prevent civilian casualties in the future.
Acknowledging the hurt inflicted on the Afghan people by American airpower, General Eikenberry called the May 4 aerial bombardment in Bala Baluk district a tragedy and pledged to sharply reduce the chances of civilian casualties in future operations.<<<
Lest you think this is just empty rhetoric, Ambassador Eikenberry expanded upon his theme:
>>>The American ambassador said he had been shocked when he learned about the bombing, Mr Khedmat said by telephone. "It might have happened due to a mistake, so we will not repeat it in future and we will be much more cautious about civilian life in the future," he said Mr. Eikenberry told the crowd....
General Eikenberry questioned the wisdom of dropping 2,000 pound bombs on houses when it is unknown who might be inside, and the balance between the short-term gain [!] of eliminating enemy fighters and the larger danger of alienating the general population, the former general said.
"We have to look very carefully at the military tactics that are being used," he said. "We have to avoid having tactical victories that translate into a strategic loss."<<<
Several realities here point up the risibility of enacting such restrictive rules of engagement:
* The Taliban's main tactic is to hide among civilians, specifically hoping to force us to inflict death and injury upon non-combatants.
* Technically, the Taliban themselves are "civilians," since they're not members of any official military.
* Taliban supporters in the Afghan media, in hospitals, and even in the Afghan government itself routinely exaggerate civilian casualty counts; so do Afghans who do not support the Taliban but also do not support the American presence there.
The third point above demonstrates why it's impossible to eliminate reports of civilian casualties, no matter how hesitant and tepid we become: If we fail to massacre women and children, the usual suspects will simply fabricate such incidents -- again.
As we should have learnt by now, hamstringing our troops in combat by overreacting to "atrocity" claims (real or imaginary) has very real, very predictable consequences. We're been down this road before, and it ends only one way: In a Vietnam-style snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory.
I'm shocked that the "father of the Afghan National Army" believes we can fight terrorists without inflicting civilian casualties. Certainly that was never the policy of Gen. Petraeus in Iraq; he used his army to protect civilians... but that did not mean abjuring from any combat unless we had absolute assurance that no non-combatants would be harmed.
I suspect that Eikenberry is taking his cue from his Commander in Chief; he reiterated America's, Secretary Hillary Clinton's, abject apology for not sanitizing the Afghan war so that nobody but the bad guys died (particularly since the "bad guys" dispute being the bad guys and insist that they are themselves innocent non-combatants).
This is yet another example of the adolescent "teen logic" of the Obama administration. |
