Democracy Now/Juan Cole: "Petraeus' Real Failure Was the CounterInsurgency in Afghanistan"

Juan Cole: Real Petraeus Failure Was Counterinsurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan


"....I was opposed to General Petraeus becoming head of the CIA in the first place, because one of the CIA’s charges is to evaluate policy, and one of the big policies that needs to be evaluated is the troop escalation, what is called the "surge," in Afghanistan, the big counterinsurgency program that Petraeus put into place and then shepherded through as commander on the ground.

And the CIA can’t properly evaluate that program if its head is the author of the program.

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(the counter-insurgency).... "was doomed to fail, because the way that Petraeus and his colleagues conceived of a counterinsurgency program was they had this mantra: "take, clear, hold and build."

So they would take a village, clear it of Taliban, hold it for some months to reassure the local people, "Taliban are not coming back; you don’t have to be afraid of reprisals if you cooperate with us," and then build up local police, local security. At one point, General McChrystal talked about bringing "a government in a box" from Kabul. I mean, this entire project was so fantastic and unconnected to reality. I mean, Kabul barely has a government itself, much less having boxes full of them to send around to the provinces.

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...... it was overambitious. In order for this kind of thing to succeed—and I doubt it could succeed, I mean—and it required convincing Pashtun villagers that they should like us better than their cousins, right? And how likely was that? But if it were going to succeed, it would require a lot more troops than were committed to it. So, you had that famous Marjah campaign, remember? And then they said they were going to do Kandahar, and then the whole thing petered out, and we never heard anything more about it. And Vice President Biden was opposed to this plan. He thought, you know, if terrorism crops up, if you get explosions going off killing villagers or whatever, send in a SWAT team to deal with that, and instead of trying to kind of reformulate Afghanistan....

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....But the tragedy here, I take away, is that even with someone like Petraeus, who had a Ph.D. in international studies, is an intelligent, competent man, I think, often was trying to do the right thing, was put in an impossible situation—that the days when a great power can successfully occupy a Global South country were over with. And the Project for the New American Century simply wouldn’t come to terms with that reality....

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.....the Project for the New American Century was thought up by the neoconservative movement in the late 1990s. They felt that the Soviet Union had fallen, the U.S. was now the sole superpower, what the French call a "hyperpower," and that it could act with impunity. So if it wanted to invade and occupy Iraq and reformulate Iraq and put a government in and exploit Iraq’s natural resources, like the petroleum, that it could do so without opposition.....

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/11/12/juan_cole_real_petraeus_failure_was