The Other War

wwworry · Apr 7, 2004

THE OTHER WAR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

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A year and a half later, the Taliban are still a force in many parts of Afghanistan, and the country continues to provide safe haven for members of Al Qaeda. American troops, more than ten thousand of whom remain, are heavily deployed in the mountainous areas near Pakistan, still hunting for Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Hamid Karzai, the U.S.-backed President, exercises little political control outside Kabul and is struggling to undercut the authority of local warlords, who effectively control the provinces. Heroin production is soaring, and, outside of Kabul and a few other cities, people are terrorized by violence and crime. A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last weeks international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a terrorist breeding ground unless there is a significant increase in development aid.

Last month, I visited Rothstein in his office at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, where he is a senior lecturer in defense analysis. A fit, broad-shouldered man in his early fifties, he served more than twenty years in the Army Special Forces, including three years as the director of plans and exercises for the Joint Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, before retiring, in 1999. His associates depicted him as anything but a dissident. He puts boots on the ground, Robert Andrews, a former head of solic, told me, referring to Rothsteins missions in Central America, for which he earned a decoration for valor, and in the former Yugoslavia. Rothstein agreed to speak to me, with some reluctance, only after I had obtained his report independently, and he would not go into details about his research. They asked me to do this, he said of the Pentagon, and my purpose was to make some things better. All I want people to do is to look at the paper and not at me. Ill tell you the good and the bad.

The report describes a wide gap between how Donald Rumsfeld represented the war and what was actually taking place. Rumsfeld had told reporters at the start of the Afghanistan bombing campaign, Rothstein wrote, that you dont fight terrorists with conventional capabilities. You do it with unconventional capabilities. In December, the Taliban and Al Qaeda retreated into the countryside as the armies of the Northern Alliance, supported by American airpower and Special Forces troops, moved into the capital. There were many press accounts of Americas new way of waging war, including well-publicized reports of American Special Forces on horseback and of new technologies, like the Predator drones. Nonetheless, Rothstein wrote, the United States continued to emphasize bombing and conventional warfare while the war became increasingly unconventional, with Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters operating in small cells, emerging only to lay land mines and launch nighttime rocket attacks before disappearing once again. Rothstein added:
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The New Yorker was one of the first to break the story on the Niger Uranium claim amoung other things.

wwworry · Apr 7, 2004

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Instead, Rothstein wrote, the American military campaign left a power vacuum. The conditions under which the post-Taliban government came to power gave warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life. He concluded, Defeating an enemy on the battlefield and winning a war are rarely synonymous. Winning a war calls for more than defeating ones enemy in battle. He recalled that, in 1975, when Harry G. Summers, an Army colonel who later wrote a history of the Vietnam War, told a North Vietnamese colonel, You never defeated us on the battlefield, the colonel replied, That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.
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Thanatoast · Apr 7, 2004

what other war? where's this afghanistan place? isn't that where that guy who was working with saddam was from?

i forget where it was said, maybe on this board, that if the us wanted a middle eastern country to be an example to all the others, afghanistan would've been a great place to start. too bad (for them *and* us) we ditched 'em as soon as we could to chase saddam.

i'm kinda pissed that the us media let it drop. so much for the fourth estate.

zimv20 · Apr 7, 2004

Thanatoast said:

i'm kinda pissed that the us media let it drop. so much for the fourth estate.
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it's only seymour hersh and ted rall who write about it w/ any regularity.

so how about that whole thing w/ khan and his ambushed son? that was kinda creepy.

Thanatoast · Apr 7, 2004

zimv20 said:

so how about that whole thing w/ khan and his ambushed son? that was kinda creepy.
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no no, it was kirk's son that got amushed by khan. you got it backwards.

sorry, couldn't resist

zimv20 · Apr 7, 2004

"they put cleatures in our baugh-deez"

IJ Reilly · Apr 7, 2004

"From hell's heart, I stab at thee. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee."

Ah, they don't write 'em like that anymore. Thank goodness...

The Other War

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