Demonstration Project

Joe.
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We’ve ALWAYS been able to overpower an opponent in a head-to-head conflct. The real trick is to keep your gains when you can’t tell who the enemy is.
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Our opponents have learned to keep away from direct confrontations, to keep from losing too many, then come back later and gum up the works.
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This has been happening for a very long time.
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Are we trying to win (whatever that means at this time), or just trying to find some way to get the f**k out of there, with some semblance of our honor and pride intact?
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The end game is always going to be the same. The Afghans will inherit whatever we leave behind and make the best of it. The sooner we realize that, the better – while there is something of value to THEM to leave them.
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Too many young men and women are dying to try to save the egos and reputations of the tired old men (and their offspring) who got us into this int he first place.
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Oh, and control of the oil, mustn’t forget that.

How nice.
No kids, their mothers or fathers in terror were slaughtered today in our demonstration of how to do it.
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Those who have never been tortured
Gleefully discuss its merits
To he who never stared at own death
A massacre is a demonstration

“Marjah is a discrete battle space”

It is much more than that, Mr. Klein.

It is the TAPI corridor:

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/right-of-way/

“It is, to be sure, a new kind of warfare–a major battle as demonstration project”

Nothing “new” about this, but Michael Aquino would be proud:

“A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP themes; its source makes it credible. As Livy once said: “The terror of the Roman name will be such that the world shall know that, once a Roman army had laid siege to a city, nothing will move it — not the rigors or winter nor the weariness of months and years — that it knows no end but victory and is ready, if a swift and sudden stroke will not serve, to preserve until that victory is achieved.”

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/target-audience/

afguy, you put it very nicely. Exhibit 1 would be Viet Nam. We know that there were almost 60,000 Americans killed and about 250,000 soldiers of the puppet regime. On the winning side, it is estimated that there were about 1 million killed. This is just the combatants. We won’t even get into civilian deaths on both sides.
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Of course, Afghanistan is referred to as Russia’s Viet Nam.

formerly,
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General Giap wrote the book on how to do it, after “fine-tuning” the process against the French (and us).
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But, as we’ve ALL heard, Afghanistan is NOTHING like Vietnam because, well, just because it isn’t…
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The Soviets expended themselves in Afghanistan over 10 years without success, ansd I suspect they were a whole lot more ruthless than we have been or are prepared to be.
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I think this is now more about salvaging pride than actually “winning”. We just hope now that, after we leave, they don’t totally hate our guts for a few generations or so.
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That would be a victory… of sorts.

“Demonstration Project”

Yup demonstrate that we can win the battle but ,loose their war.
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Look I do not know what the answer is, but I am willing to bet we can not afford it. These people have nothing, so they have nothing to loose. It is not like their society is will come down around them. It is not like their infrastructure will be destroyed. It not like their government will surrender, or their economy will suffer, or their safety will suffer. See Joe they have very little of any of these things. Nothing to loose

It is, to be sure, a new kind of warfare–a major battle as demonstration project
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Yeah…I’m going to go ahead and not believe this until I hear an actual military expert make a case for it.
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As noted blog whore Michael Fury pointed out above, people have known about psychological warfare for millennia. Look at Sun Tzu.

Joe Klein:

This year, culminating in the next Obama policy review in December, should tell us a great deal about what can and can’t be accomplished.

You must be aware that, when you refer to each of these new consensus “evaluation periods” that the Serious Foreign Policy Community beard-strokingly declares, that this is the essence of what is now known as “The Friedan Unit.”
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You should perhaps think to yourself about how it sounds to casually refer to “a major battle as demonstration project” –a demonstration project in which the fathers, brothers, sons and husbands of a hostile indigenous population will be maimed and die.

Will this show of force intimidate the Taliban? And, more important, will the governance that follows the battle prove satisfactory?

You might want to give some thought to how those two concepts are completely unrelated in the ways that occur to you. If I’m taking your meaning correctly, by “governance that follows the battle,” you mean the “government in waiting” carpetbaggers selected to rule a foreign-sacked town by the kleptocracy in Kabul.
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The psychologies of the various parties –the extra, super, bonus confidence of US forces (it’s not that our kids were demoralized in an unmovable morass, it’s always that they were given extra confidence), Talebanis’ intimidation levels (who will do the polling amongst them that might measure that goal’s success?), “the fence-sitters and the fearful among the Afghan people” (whose homes, livelihoods and lives will inevitably be destroyed by the campaign)– seem to pale in significance next to the fragile attitudes of politically connected analysts back home here in the States –your psychology, Joe Klein.
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It is more than a little disturbing that Shanker can write

“Perhaps no other feature [than the pre-campaign, market-research polling "American officials" say they conducted] of the offensive now under way…speaks so clearly to its central characteristic: it is a campaign meant to shift perceptions as much as to alter the military balance“

, as if it’s plausible that we could conduct some kind of “Toyota dealers’ Fall savings campaign” to get the Afghan locals to buy into their new corrupt masters from Kabul, as if we were trying to get them to purchase zero-down, zero-financing for the first year SUV’s while clearance prices last.

The size of the onslaught was a departure from past practice, too. The allied force is so large as to be described by one senior American adviser as “overwhelming to the point of saturation.”
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And the operation was advertised, almost in neon lights, so far in advance and in such detail that there was none of the element of surprise that combat commanders usually prize.

Apparently Shanker didn’t think of getting a second opinion on the advisability of telling a guerrilla force as loudly as possible that it was time again for them to melt away into the friendly countryside.
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So we’re meant not to actually fight anybody, just to pound the town with pre-occupation shock and awe ordinance, and yet to “win big” in some bizarre psychological terms. That’s the essence of the new campaign, to declare some kind of victory, then install some corrupt Karzai bureaucrats, and then hope that the people who told pollsters that they “harbor some friendly feelings for the Americans” were comforted by the leafleted announcement that their homes would be bombed. The hope is that the leaflets might be enough warning for locals to trust that the “risk that the commanders accepted, hoping that civilians, at least, would be able to stay relatively safe” taken on their behalf were carefully considered, and that American commanders’ concerns about their dead and maimed relatives were sincere.
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Is this some sort of a sick joke? Is Mao laughing in hell somewhere? Is Shanker really this credulous? Is he paid to do PR for McChrystal, or something? It’s ludicrous that he would simply “report” these things as if they truly were some mystical, “new and improved” occupation. The single-sided presentation of the new McChrystal “doctrine” is delinquent in the extreme, Joe Klein. How do you not acknowledge that?
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The most disturbing section of Shanker’s piece is the part in which he casually and uncritically remarks on the key role the military now plays in shifting domestic perceptions of its various enterprises.
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How can Shanker blithely write:

All of those characteristics are explained by the psychological goal of this campaign, a shift of perceptions…Even domestically, the operation is supposed to show Americans that the buildup ordered by President Obama can have swift and positive results.

, and call himself a journalist with a straight face?
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The name for that sort of domestic psychological operation used to be propaganda, Joe Klein, didn’t it?
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I was under the impression that the First Amendment’s enumeration of freedom of the press was supposed to discourage this sort of state-sponsored manipulation of public perception. Shanker treats admissions of the domestic political goals of a military campaign in a foreign land as if it were yet another intriguing facet of an exciting, hopeful step toward victory. It’s, unbelievable, actually, that this is the state of American journalism and governance.
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The piece describes a coordinated military and domestic political strategy to create and propagate a new “the Surge worked” narrative, so that ordinary folks are persuaded during hard times to keep the enterprise going a little longer, so there are minimal electoral consequences for politicians who sign off on this set of government priorities (and its price tag).
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And you, an American journalist, respond to this casual revelation by writing about “The obvious hope“?
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How do you read a piece like Shanker’s without commenting on how Soviet this all is, Joe Klein?
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I’m truly baffled.

Joe Klein:
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LOL

You must be aware that, when you refer to each of these new consensus “evaluation periods” that the Serious Foreign Policy Community beard-strokingly declares, that this is the essence of what is now known as “The Friedman Unit.”

No, there isn’t a term in the lefty blogosphere called “The Friedan Unit,” describing some gender equality metric laid out in “The Feminine Mystique” (as far as I am aware).
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Unlike you, I can’t edit my posts.
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Hope you at least chuckled a little bit at the idea of a “Friedan Unit,” Joe Klein, as you read another tedious manifesto from a coffee-deprived commenter.

For those who still remember the old sixties movie [the first or one of the first on the wide screen] on ‘How the West was Won.’ Well, this Post tells you ‘How the West was Lost.’

http://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/time-will-tell/

So are you Michael Fury’s other personality, or what?

No sir, we have Not always been able to overpower an opponent.
And an exploratory (and demonstration) in this war is called for to the Nth degree. There are no “repeat” wars. Ever.
None were the same as any other. Trying to describe this as Viet Nam is like describing the jungles as a desert with trees. The aim there was to avoid a direct confrontation with an unknown power…China.
Every move we made was a response to China.
Korea was similar. But, again, different as night and day. The weapons being used in Korea were WW2 weaponry, and yet it was all directly confrontational.
WW2 was a mix of making allies with the enemy and then competing against other allies for position.
Technology advanced from WW1 to Afghanistan in hundred-fold ways.
And the neighbor this time has nuclear capabilities, and, thanx to Bush junior, the means to deploy same.

Other considerations are more simplistic. We have drones at our disposal, they have suicide bombers.
We have an arena, they have the world.
The present government, though stated by some to be a “puppet” government, is calling for us to quiet down our attacks and criticizing our every move.
The more successful we get, the more critical the two surrounding governments get.
Another third consideration is India. Their weight in the arena could be enormously telling. And, no doubt will be should Pakistan throw in their ‘might’…
No. This is like no other war before.
And, no other war later will mimic this one.

Yes, we could win this by turning Afghanistan into a moonscape and flatten everything in sight.
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Unfortunately, we would have about two countries willing to talk to us when it was over and several generations of new enemies to deal with.
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I think it could be said that we are trying not to antagonize “the rest of the Arab world” right now, because very few are 100% (or even 10%) behind what we are doing. A lot of misgivings out there.
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We don’t have the manpower to fight on many more fronts right now. Like Israel, we have a limited conventional military capability (unless we insitiute a draft, at which point I think support for these actions will evaporate quickly, because calling up a bunch of young Wall Street securities traders to serve is political suicide).
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The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Uh…guys?
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The Times piece said that the overwhelming force used against a town whose Taliban occupiers had been long been warned to escape was meant to bolster the Administration’s efforts at persuasion in terms of the public’s opinions of the value of the enterprise.
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That’s the real news: that the campaign is meant to change hearts and minds here, so that it can go on, and in exchange the Administration can have their turn at a Surge.

My understanding is that the only reason for the US military intervention in Afghanistan is to punish those responsible for the evil crimes of 9/11 , and not to force any western moral values nor to support a government with questionable legitimacy. The present military operation in Afghanistan seems not to be consistent with this objective nor with the noble American values -indeed universal values – including the protection of the complete, not just selective , human rights for all .
The present operations seem more consistent with the policies of the previous US administration which resulted in the killing or dislocation of millions of innocent humans in the world

the campaign is meant to change hearts and minds here, so that it can go on -SZ
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Yeah, that’s what is going on. Similar to The Surge in Iraq, which accomplished none of its goals in Iraq (no reconciliation between Sunni and Shia, rampant violence, government corruption, no resolution with the Kurds, etc), but accomplished its goal here: a media declaration of “success”.
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Joe wants to talk about a policy review in December, meanwhile, we’ll still be knee-deep in base construction:
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$2.7 billion (has been spent) on construction over the past three fiscal years. Now, if its request is approved as part of the fiscal 2010 defense appropriations bill, (the military) would spend another $1.3 billion on more than 100 projects at 40 sites across (Afghanistan). (link)
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$4 billion and counting in December when the “review” happens- like there’s any chance we’ll leave. McChrystal will have some very good reasons why it is important to pursue the toothless Taliban and Joe will tell us how smart he is.