Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy: Protect the cities and cede the countryside to the Taliban; Update: Who feeds whom?

Admiral Mullen said in a letter to Senators Collins and Snowe (meant for me) that the ROE had not in fact changed with the ISAF Commander back in June 2009; The Rules of Engagement had only been ‘clarified’. Ganjgal is but one example of how that ‘clarification’ is being brought into question. The current investigation, if not buried by the Army, ISAF, SecDef or higher, is going to yield what we already know; that the rules are intentionally vague to offer maximum cover for those who have implemented them while exposing the decision makers on the ground and all at the expense of those prosecuting the war, O-5 and below. It is already painfully obvious to all, especially those on the ground, that before June we were blowing crap up and providing Air and Arty when needed and now; American lives are inferior to Afghan by our own rules and the UN has prosecutors in Kabul, gleaning after-action-reports looking for evidence they can use to prosecute Marines and Soldiers.

What has ruffled our little man’s feathers today, along with those of thousands of his countrymen? A rumor that a Koran burned during a US operation against Taliban forces. But hey: Let’s say it was true. Let’s just say a Koran was incinerated during some US operation. BIG WHOOP.

But that’s just Occidental Me.

For Islamic Him, it’s protest-time, and didn’t he get that nice banner ready quickly?

Gen.McChrystal should ask this upstanding citizen of tomorrowland, just as he asks every other Afghan, What do you need? This time, the answer is very easy — Islam. And whaddya know, he already has it!

From the NYT’s long magazine story about Gen. Stanley McChrystal — sonorously titled “His Long War” — a perfect illustration of the circular crash course commanders have ordered US troops to run according to a dizzy-making “strategy” to make them like us.

First, the article set-up. Afghanistan. McChrystal. Dust. Setting down in his Black Hawk helicopter in an Afghan town surrounded by bodyguards and commanders, stripping off his protective gear to walk the streets … “What do you need here?” he repeatedly asks villagers like some glorified door to door salemans … Story pulls back to McC’s “the assesment” (incompletely described as usual), McC’s troop “surge,” McC’s nation-building “blueprint” (no mention that the US already nation-built for 30-some years to no avail).

Now, the anecdote:

It begins with some Marines walking 12 miles down the road from Garmsir, the town Gen. McChrystal had visited a fews days earlier, asking the townspeople, “What do you need?” as mentioned above.

Someone send this photo to Gen. McChrystal. It answers his question to local villagers: “What do you want?”

When enemy action kills our troops, it’s unfortunate. When our own moral fecklessness murders those in uniform, it’s unforgivable.

In Afghanistan, our leaders are complicit in the death of each soldier, Marine or Navy corpsman who falls because politically correct rules of engagement shield our enemies.

Mission-focused, but morally oblivious, Gen. Stan McChrystal conformed to the Obama Way of War by imposing rules of engagement that could have been concocted by Code Pink:

* Unless our troops in combat are absolutely certain that no civilians are present, they’re denied artillery or air support.

Gen. McChrystal in London last week:

“We don’t win by destroying the Taliban,” he said. “We don’t win by body count. We don’t win by the number of successful military raids or attacks, we win when the [Afghan] people decide we win.”

That would be the Afghan people, naturally, McChrystal’s unseemly and increasingly unhinged obsession. He continued:

“Why isn’t the situation better after eight years?” he said. “Afghans’ expectations have not been met. … ..

McChrystal said a clear change in “mindset” was needed because many current tactics are counterproductive and producing hostility and skepticism among Afghan civilians who must be convinced the coalition forces will improve their safety and quality of life.

Guess what, General? The United States of America has already tried improving Afghan safety and quality of life, and on a colossal scale, and it just didn’t stick. And back then, between 1946 and 1979, there was no Taliban “insurgency” complicating the social work of nation-building.

The document is fascinating, just as the work of zealots is always fascinating. As a high priest of the politically correct orthodoxy, McChrystal has laid out a strategy to combat Taliban jihad in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan without once mentioning Islam, and forget about jihad (fireable offense No. 1).

The resulting black hole leads the commander to conclude, for example, that the reason the 99 percent-plus Muslim people of Afghanistan are “reluctant to align with us” is due to the “perception” — eight years and untold billions in largesse after we entered the country — “that our resolve is uncertain.” Nothing so simple as what a member of the Afghan parliament recently told the Economist: “The Taliban tell them the Koran says they have to fight the Crusaders and they believe them.”

No, it’s all our fault. Seizing on the Left’s all-time favorite villain, the general blames us — our troops — for the Afghan people not liking us. And that, according to the report, is why we’re losing this war (fireable offense No. 2).

To win what McChrystal describes not as a battle in the war on global jihad (fireable offense No. 3), but rather as “the struggle to gain the support of the (Afghan) people,” (fireable offense No. 4), he writes that we must “connect with the people” — the same “people,” he acknowledges, who “can often change sides and provide tacit or real support to the insurgents” (fireable offense No. 5).

Turning battle-hardened Marines into Miss Congenialities who “must be seen as guests of the Afghan people” doesn’t mean our men have to wear swimsuits, but they do have to take off their armor (fireable offense No. 6). “Pre-occupied with protection of our own forces,” McChrystal writes, “we have operated in a manner that distances us — physically and psychologically — from the people we seek to protect.”

Frankly, McChrystal is “pre-occupied” with what he calls “population protection” in a manner that “distances” him — psychologically and emotionally — from the men and women under his command (fireable offense No. 7).

One of the platitudes on war in Afghanistan is that we must remain to prevent al Qaeda from returning to Taliban safe havens, just as though the Taliban offered the only potential safe havens to al Qaeda in the world. Sorry, folks: what we know as “al Qaeda” is everywhere — from Gaza to Thailand to Mumbai to Madrid to Yourtown, USA, all of which seems somehow disconnected to the national security debate.

Al Qaeda is also, of course, in London.