Bill Distler, a war vet on disability who organizes anti-war action in Washington State, and has written here before, tells me he has been working on this article for about six weeks but now’s the time to get it out into the conversation, before Obama tells us what he’s made up his mind to do.

General McChrystal has Plans for Afghanistan

by Bill Distler

Obama and McChrystal on Air Force One, 11/2/2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

The New York Times Magazine recently had a long article about General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The article examined the general’s counterinsurgency plan for “success”. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently claimed that General McChrystal is the world’s foremost counterterrorism expert because in Iraq he led a program “killing thousands of bad guys.” Mr. Krauthammer’s intended compliment turns out to be proof of General McChrystal’s unfitness to represent the United States.

A picture in the Times article showed the general with Ranger and Special Forces patches on his sleeve. He must be strong and brave, and that’s fine. But for our country, the more important questions are: is he compassionate and is he wise? Because strength and bravery without compassion and wisdom are worse than useless, they are destructive.

What comes across most strongly in the Times article is that the general wants to win. He says he wants to win the military struggle by protecting the civilian population from the Taliban, by building up the Afghan Army and Police so that they can take over from our soldiers, and by convincing Taliban fighters to come over to the government side. The government side today is dominated by the same corrupt, murderous warlords that Afghans were originally glad to be rid of when the Taliban forced them out in the mid-1990′s. General McChrystal’s plan creates a choice between two evils. With either choice, the Afghan people lose.

If the main U.S. goal is to get the population on our side, why have we waited eight years to start? General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 – 85,000 more troops shows that winning over the people is just a sound bite for him. The plan offers nothing to the Afghan people except more fighting and dying. Is General McChrystal wise enough to use the power of life and death he has over millions of Afghans? The answer appears to be “No”.

If we build up the Afghan security forces, that will put people under the control of corrupt forces working for the Afghan government, one of the most corrupt and brutal governments in the world. The criminals, warlords and drug-runners surrounding President Hamid Karzai are, according to Ann Jones in a recent article, as cruel and anti-woman as the Taliban, but less disciplined. U.S. analysts and military commanders love to talk about “stabilizing” the country, but what are they planning on stabilizing: misogyny, injustice, hunger, homelessness, and early death?

If any one thing shows that winning over the population is only a sound bite, it is the lack of language and cultural training for our soldiers in Afghanistan. For eight years, this factor has been ignored. From my experience in Vietnam, I know that you can’t stop people based on a hunch or on ignorance of their culture, point guns at them, and shout loudly in English, demanding information, and expect to make friends. Is the military afraid that if our soldiers learn Afghan languages they might develop some sympathy for the Afghan people?

The Afghans are credited with doing the fighting in the 1980′s that brought down the Soviet Union. Even though we supplied the money and weapons for that fight, when it was over, our government left several million amputees and disabled people, including children, to fend for themselves in a ruined country.

Over the last eight years we have spent over $200 billion, 90% of which has been for military spending. Most of the 10% that was supposed to be for aid and reconstruction has been misspent or stolen. The fighting itself creates wounded and dying people, but are we providing for those who are suffering? Spending for civilians should be increased until all civilians are cared for, no matter what the cost. What kind of policy is it that claims to be protecting people while leaving them to die of exposure, wounds, and starvation? Our government has been bleeding Afghanistan for 30 years and General McChrystal offers nothing except more bleeding.

Has General McChrystal ever been ambushed? Has he carried a dying friend to a medevac after his unit was hit by friendly fire? Has he used his field bandage to try to stop the flow of blood from a friend who was mortally wounded by a land mine? Has he ever come within half a second of firing into a group running from a village before someone shouted, “Stop shooting, they’re women and children”? Has General McChrystal ever come within inches of shooting another soldier in the back of the head because he didn’t see him in front of him during a firefight? Has he ever made a mistake that cost someone else his life? All of these things happen in war. Many of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have seen similar things. Civilians know the reality of war even better than our soldiers, because if it’s hard to see your friends die right in front of you, it must be harder to watch your family members die in a war that could be stopped if we put our minds to it.

The media do not help our understanding by ignoring the people who know the reality of war. For every soldier that dies or is medevaced out, there are probably ten children who were killed or died later from their wounds. They were not medevaced out but most likely lay in pain, waiting for their wounds to heal without medical attention. The children of Afghanistan have suffered the wounds of war for thirty years. That is the real story of Afghanistan. If our government meant what it said about winning over the civilian population, it would stop killing children, most of whom were not born until after 9/11. If the American people believe that we make war on other countries in order to help them, then the actions of our government prove otherwise. General McChrystal, by asking for more troops instead of asking for more humanitarian aid, is following a policy that will lead to the failure of our stated goals in Afghanistan.

I believe that most witnesses to war who are still capable of thinking clearly would tell you that war is a moral hellhole and anyone who advocates war is a moral minus sign on this planet. Advocates for war, like General McChrystal, can be talked to, and treated as redeemable human beings, but for God’s sake, they cannot lead the discussion and we cannot let them lead humanity into hell.

President Obama needs a peace council. He could include a few Afghan families who would give him an idea of what thirty years of war feels like. I had nine months of war and it was too much for me. Can the American people sympathize with generations of children growing up with war all around them?

We have a responsibility to think seriously when our country is at war. Should we leave it to the “experts” who are fixated on “winning”, or should we take the side of democratic groups in Afghanistan who will try to end the war and save lives? Millions of children, some of them our own, are depending on us to think and act for peace.