The Afghan Offensive and Michael Jackson
In case you haven't heard (the media is a little busy with other serious matters at the moment) there is a major offensive going on in Afghanistan right now and we have been suffering some limited casualties in the process. Obviously the media would be reporting on this if there wasn't something far more critical to the American people going on:
(Click on the image to enlarge it enough to see that they do at least mention something happening in Afghanistan.)
TIME magazine on-line had an interesting article describing the different approach being implemented in our current offensive:
So far, so good in the first major offensive of President Barack Obama's war in Afghanistan. For the past four days, 4,000 U.S. Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers have been fighting their way into the southern reaches of Afghanistan's Helmand River valley, hoping to clear out insurgents there. But other than in one limited area of fierce resistance, the fighting has generally been restricted to small-scale skirmishes in which few Taliban have been killed because most of the insurgents appear to have slipped away — as guerrillas tend to do when confronted by overwhelming firepower. More important to U.S. goals, however, is that no civilians have been hurt, since the purpose of the operation is to secure the local population against the Taliban.
...
Aware of the danger, McChrystal has made the protection of civilians the central tenet of his new approach to fighting the Taliban, even going so far as to limit the use of aerial bombardment to the most extreme circumstances — a turnabout for U.S. ground forces that have grown dependent on air support. McChrystal has also declared — in a soon-to-be-released tactical directive — that soldiers should hold their fire if there is even the slightest risk of a civilian presence in the target zone. "Suppose the insurgent occupies an enemy home or village and engages you from there with the clear idea that when you respond, you are going to create collateral damage," explains McChrystal. "He's going to blame that on you. Even if you kill the insurgents, what happens is you have made the insurgency wider. You are going to run into more IEDs. You are going to run into more insurgents, [and] at the end of the day, you are going to suffer more casualties."
As of today CNN is reporting some of the results of this new strategy of avoiding bad PR as part of the military strategy and tactics:
After the Marines began taking fire from insurgents in the town of Khan Neshin, in south Afghanistan near the Helmand River, the militants ran into a multiple-room compound, the U.S. military said.
Unsure of whether civilians were inside the compound, the Marines had an interpreter talk to the insurgents, said an official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly. After some time, a number of women and children left the compound, the military official said.
The released hostages told the Marines that there were no more civilians inside the compound, Pelletier said. But the Marines held their fire anyway, the official said. About 4 p.m. (7:30 a.m. ET), in the midst of the standoff, another group of women and children emerged from the compound, the official said. The Marines continued to hold their fire and wait out the insurgents, the official said.
Finally, a screaming woman emerged from the compound with a bullet wound to her hand, Pelletier said. Then, another group of women came out, covered from head to toe according to custom, he said, with a couple of children in tow. The Marines attended to the wounded woman while the others walked away.
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When the Marines went into the compound, they discovered that it empty, Pelletier said. That's when they realized the fighters had dressed up as women to escape, he said.
Hopefully this embarrassing example will not end up typifying our newly sculpted efforts there. Taliban and al Qaeda elements sending out the women and children only for it to turn out those women and children are helping the enemy gain more collateral damage by leaving some "martyrs" behind to hurt American PR. Or Taliban sneaking out of harms way by pretending to be innocent bystanders.
This new strategy has accepted as fact, even though begrudgingly, that the onus is now on us to ensure the safety of civilians that the Taliban and al Qaeda elements intentionally put in harms way... instead of the blame logically and realistically going the other way around.
The policy seems well intentioned, but in the end appears to play right into the enemy's hands in their attempts to build international pressure on us to restrain our forces and give their fighters an advantage in their asymmetrical warfare.
The whole mess has me very damn worried for our men out there who should be the tip of the spear, not the diplomatic pen. Leave the PR to the bureaucrats.
