Tom Engelhardt: Advice for General Petraeus on the Rules of Engagement: It’s Neither/Nor, Not Either/Or
[Tom Engelhardt, author of the recently-published The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books, July 2010) and editor of Tomdispatch.com, writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment]
Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people,” just as the “hearts and minds” part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done. Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation.”
What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option — kill us or kill them — when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.
Read entire article at Informed Comment (Blog)
Recently, we’ve been flooded with news stories and debate about the “rules of engagement” for U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now-discredited war commander General Stanley McChrystal, we’ve been told, instituted fiercely restrictive rules of engagement to lessen the number of Afghan civilians who died or were wounded at the hands of American forces, and to “protect the people,” just as the “hearts and minds” part of counterinsurgency doctrine tells us should be done. Specifically, he made it far harder for U.S. troops under fire to call in air strikes or artillery support if civilians might possibly be in the vicinity of any firefight. Grumbling about this among those troops, according to Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter whose piece took McChrystal down, had already reached something close to fever pitch by the time the general and his special ops cronies began mouthing off in frustration in Paris.
Articles in which troops or mid-level officers claim to be “handcuffed by our chain of command” are now almost as common as implicitly critical stories about the dismal failure of McChrystal’s counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. General David Petraeus, on being given command of the war effort, turned immediately to those rules of engagement, promising not to change them, but to thoroughly review and “clarify” their “implementation and interpretation.”
What this means, we don’t yet know, but we should know one thing: the present discussion of counterinsurgency and of those rules of engagement makes little sense. They are being presented as a kind of either/or option — kill us or kill them — when it would be more accurate to say that it’s a neither/nor situation.