at-Largely: Sergeant Fury Goes Bananastan by Jeff Huber

[laststeamtrain]

Sergeant Fury Goes Bananastan
by Jeff Huber

Tom Shanker and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times tell us that General Stan McChrystal has been given “carte blanche to handpick a dream team of subordinates, including many Special Operations veterans, as he moves to carry out an ambitious new strategy that envisions stepped-up attacks on Taliban fighters and narcotics networks.”

The “ambitious new strategy” they’re referring to is the one that National Security Adviser James Jones and his White House war wonks trotted out in March. It’s a compost heap of aphoristic piffle about how we’re going to disrupt terror networks, and establish stable democratic governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and how we’ll get people all over the world to join hands on a love train “to actively assist in addressing these objectives.”

The strategy discusses “breaking the link between narcotics and the insurgency,” and proposes “crop substitution and alternative livelihood programs,” and focusing on “high level drug lords,” measures that have worked so well in South and Central America that illegal drug trafficking in the U.S. has all but disappeared. If we were serious about rubbing out the narcotics industry in the Bananastans we’d firebomb all the poppy fields, but we won’t do that. It might work, and then how would Stan the Man explain that after going through all the trouble of eliminating narcotics in the Bananastans we still have an insurgency there.

The new strategy—the one that Shanker and Schmitt label “President Obama’s new strategy”—talks about the Taliban, but it doesn’t discuss visions of “stepped-up attacks” on them. In fact, from the sound of his testimony to Congress, McChrystal plans to take the opposite approach. “The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “It will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence.” McChrystal also told the SASC that the Bananastan war is “winnable,” but he failed to mention how many shielded Afghans would constitute “winning.”

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Whatever the case, special operations has become to the new American century of war what airpower was to the old American century of war: a panacea that promises to reduce the horror of armed conflict to a tightly focused contest played out by living, breathing comic book characters against minions of evil, a struggle that the rest of us can more or less forget about because superheroes are taking care of it for us. Barack Obama named McChrystal to take over the Bananastan debacle, the Times collapsed on itself to make the general look like a two-eyed version of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield. An “ascetic,” they called him, “who is known for operating on a few hours’ sleep,” and who “usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness.” That story came from Elizabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazetti. Liz and Mark didn’t mention how many dozens of senior military officers told them that, nor did they postulate on how seldom McChrystal goes to the bathroom. How many dozens of permanent latrine orderlies would have to spill the beans on that score before the Times would publish such a figure?

As best I can discern, zero senior latrine orderlies told Shanker and Schmitt about the “corps of 400 officers” who will ably assist McChrystal in doing that voodoo that he apparently does do so well when he finally gets on that airplane he’s been standing next to for what, days by now, and soars off to his next tour of duty to unleash that “ambitious new strategy.”

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http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/06/sergeant-fury-goes-bananastan.html

[DCKit]

1. How 'bout we simply buy the raw opium directly from the farmers, then burn it?

The farmers get paid, the terror networks get no coin and we don't have to kill anyone beyond defending the operation from attack.

Why does every solution have to be the military option?