One big question that hangs over the quick end of General Stanley
McChrystal’s mission in Afghanistan: Why would a West Point and
Kennedy School of Government graduate who runs eight miles a day,
sleeps four hours and is smart as a whip ever do something so
dumb as to talk to a Rolling Stone reporter?
Well, maybe he wasn’t so dumb after all. Reading the
accounts of McChrystal’s last months on the job, I think it is
clear the general had become so conflicted about the rules of
engagement he was imposing on his troops that he finally said
“The hell with it. Let Rolling Stone run with this story
and see what happens.”
The clues are all in the Rolling Stone article
(which the magazine — sickeningly — is billing on its website
as “the article that changed history”). The key section deals
with the new rules of engagement (ROE) that McChrystal had begun
to impose on his troops. The average infantryman was reacting
with a mounting sense of betrayal and anger. Some described the
new regimen as “being handcuffed.” Rolling Stone
reporter Richard Hastings reports one GI writing McChrystal to
ask, “Why are we not allowed to defend ourselves?”
As C.J. Chivers of the New York Times
reported in an article entitled “Warriors Vexed By Rules For War”
the new rules have shifted risks from Afghan civilians and away
from the Taliban, on to Western soldiers. They are about
everything but force protection. Although McChrystal helped
design the rules and could certainly defend them on
intellectually, seeing how they are actually playing out in the
field must have been painful for a man trained in the '70s, under
the mantra “an officer takes care of his men.” Chivers’
article appeared in the Times the same day as the story
of McChrystal’s resignation. Things were obviously coming to a
head. Even more suggestively, the first reports to emerge since
General David Patraeus replaced McChrystal say the new commander
may be revising the rules of engagement.
The new ROE generally require much more caution and many,
many more verifications from superiors before a soldier is
allowed to use lethal force. When the rules aren’t restrictive,
they are risk averse — which is just as frustrating to trained
warriors. Soldiers in Afghanistan told Hastings they now carry
cue cards reminding them to “Patrol only in areas that you are
reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves
with lethal force.” What, one wonders, would be the need to
patrol in an area where you wouldn’t at some point run
the risk of defending yourself with lethal force?
According to the new Counterinsurgency Field
Manual, penned largely by General Petraeus in 2007,
protecting civilian populations is the cornerstone of any effort
to defeat an insurgency. But there is a growing
problem in Afghanistan — one that McChrystal may not have
foreseen when he unfurled this winning-hearts-and-minds strategy.
According to many accounts, the Taliban are starting to game the
system. They exploit Western decency by surrounding themselves
with women and children, knowing this will slow our advance.
There are even accounts of Taliban deliberately creating civilian
casualties — which only creates more bad press and causes our
troops to become more cautious. They know once we cause civilian
casualties, we scale back.
An eloquent cri de coeur has come from Brigadier
General Moheedin Ghori, the commander of the Afghan
brigade. Ghori told the AP, “Especially in the south of Marjah,
the enemy is fighting from compounds where soldiers can very
clearly see women or children on the roof or in a second-floor or
third-floor window. They are trying to get us to fire on them and
kill the civilians.”
In an article last February entitled “Civilians in
Crosshairs Slow Troops,” Wall Street Journal reporter
Michael M. Phillips described a scene where Marine captain
Anthony Zinni spent 45 minutes on the phone with military lawyers
in Las Vegas before deciding not to
call an air strike against four Taliban planting roadside bombs
for an approaching Marine convoy. The Taliban had brought
children into the area with them. “The last thing I want to do is
kill kids,” said Zinni. But the consequence was to put his own
troops at greater risk.
This is the brave new world of warfare in which the old
school warrior McChrystal was trying to navigate. My guess is
that he had begun to find the whole thing intolerable. That’s the
only reason an otherwise seasoned warrior would ever put himself
on the firing line with a reporter from Rolling
Stone.
