US President Obama said on Sunday that his decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan was the most difficult of his presidency so far. He also expressed his conviction that the next 12 months would tell whether the surge was working or whether a change of approach was necessary.

Andrew Exum is a former US army officer who used to work in the Pentagon and he is already certain that the approach is wrong. He is not impressed by the man who persuaded Obama to go ahead with the surge in troops: “Stanley McChrystal, the current general in Afghanistan, has tried to kill himself to victory. It doesn’t work.”

Exum is especially critical of the JSOCs (short for Joint Special Operation Command) that McChrystal operated between 2003 and 2008. These special units work in conjunction with the CIA and private security contractors such as Xe Services (formerly known as Blackwater) to pursue the goal of liquidating as many suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders as possible.

Civilian casualties are too high

Jeremy Scahill, an expert on Blackwater who has written several books, recently reiterated on Amy Goodman’s radio programme “Democracy Now” that the cost to the civilian population is far too high: “If there’s one guy that we’re trying to hit and there are 34 other people with him in the building 35 people are going to die that day.”

He deplored the fact that the strategy had been approved at the top, despite the high loss of human life: “Vice-president Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld circumvented the military chain of command and went directly into JSOC.”

Tom Engelhardt, a journalist and commentator, shares Exum’s critical standpoint “McChrystal really comes from the dark side. Cheney gave him the thumbs up. He was eager to have cross-border operations.”

Obama continues Bush policy

Secret drone attacks on Pakistan from across the border in Afghanistan might have begun under George W. Bush’s watch but Nobel Peace laureate President Obama has not put an end to them.

Indeed, in October he stepped them up despite alarming figures about civilian casualties. According to “The New Yorker” magazine, 500 Pakistani civilians were killed in the first 10 months of Obama’s presidency.

Andrew Exum explained that the fact that the drone attacks are not as precise as they are promoted to be means that they cause “the deaths of low-level fighters and of their brothers and cousins. You’re not just attacking al-Qaeda leaders.”

It was Exum’s opposition to such forms of military strategy that convinced him to resign from his post at the Pentagon. He and other critics of the war in Afghanistan think that such forms of war do nothing to quell the so-called terror but instead just fuel it further.

Author: Ralph Sina/Anne Thomas
Editor: Thomas Bärthlein