In a shocking move to invigorate the war effort in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced this week the dismissal of the top US and NATO-ISAF commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan. He selected Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal to take over.“With the new strategy, and with some changes and adjustments in our military approach, my hope would be that by the end of this year we will begin to see a change in momentum,” Gates told the House of Representatives when explaining the dismissal of Gen. McKiernan.
What Gates meant by “adjustments in our military” is, of course, to do with the method of conduct of the war in Afghanistan. The US Army has been fighting the insurgency in this country on a conventional basis with some degree of special operations. The emphasis, of course, has been on the conventional methods of capturing and holding territory and trying to reduce support for the insurgents from Pakistan.
This has been the Pentagon policy in general terms. However, with the designation of a rather different kind of general there is no doubt that the emphasis will change toward unconventional warfare, meaning special operations campaigns along with the conventional ones.
This fact is already evident from the designation of Lt. Gen. McChrystal, who is above all a special operations officer, to command the US as well as NATO forces in the very near future.
Gen. McChrystal, who has spent most of his military career in various special operation forces, including the Army Rangers, commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for five years, serving first as the commanding general of the JSOC from September 2003 to February 2006, and then as commander of the JSOC Command Forward, from February 2006 to August 2008. Nominally assigned to Fort Bragg, N.C., he spent most of his time in Afghanistan, at the US Central Command's forward headquarters in Qatar and in Iraq.
As the chief of what some call “the most secretive force in the US military,” McChrystal maintained a pretty low profile until June 2006, when his forces eliminated Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the infamous leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders and operatives, thus paving the way for the demise of most militant insurgent groups, which in turn led to a significant decrease in violence.
According to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, beginning in late spring 2007, the JSOC and the US intelligence agencies launched a new series of deadly covert operations that coincided with the troop surge of 2007. Woodward reported that McChrystal employed “collaborative warfare” to integrate a range of tools from signal intercepts to human intelligence to find, target and kill insurgents. Woodward's sources claimed that it was the JSOC, not the much-praised troop surge that was responsible for the fall in violence in 2007-08. Asked for comment, President George W. Bush said simply, “The JSOC is awesome.”
Woodward's claim and Bush's characterization of the JSOC may well explain the drop in violence in Iraq better than the “surge factor” by itself. Of course, we will not be able to corroborate this fully for some time to come and maybe never because most of the information in this regard will stay classified forever.
Nevertheless, Gate's choice of Lt. Gen. McChrystal as the top future military man in Afghanistan, with his background in Iraq, tells us that special operations will play a much more robust and decisive role in Afghanistan in the coming months.
With the emphasis more on special operations, the war in Afghanistan may become a very significant theater of modern warfare, where special operations may decide the outcome. If that happens, a new chapter will certainly open in modern warfare for sure. That is why Lt. Gen. McChrystal's appointment is so significant.
