General Nicholson's optimistic speech — about Afghanistan — Haven't we heard this thoroughly disproven nonsense before?

29 November 2017

Theme — looking good is not the same as being competent

CENTCOM's Afghanistan War commander, General John W. Nicholson, has a fitly handsome, personable demeanor in his speech-making. He is the kind of soldier that one is eager to hold in trusting regard.

Unfortunately, General Nicholson's adherence to prevailing strategic vacuity makes him sound inept.

When a war zone commander demonstrates a pronounced lack of grasp on reality and history — as well as an inability to understand simple and contextually appropriate questions from the press — why would (or should) anyone listen?

To wit

Evaluate the following Foreign Policy magazine synopsis of General Nicholson's most recent comments.

The general was speechifying about the optimistic future of the United States' demonstrably long-failed war in Afghanistan:

After 16 years of war, the United States and its Afghan partners “have turned the corner” and “momentum is now with Afghan security forces,” the top U.S. general there told reporters on Tuesday.

Gen. John Nicholson . . . said the Trump administration’s plan to beef up the U.S. battlefield presence is a “game-changer” that puts Kabul’s battered forces “on a path to a win.”

Nicholson is at least the eighth top commander in the last decade to forecast a pathway to victory in a war that has dragged on nearly all century, and his optimistic forecasts contrast starkly with deteriorating Afghan government control and a resurgent Taliban.

Nevertheless, Nicholson said that over the next two years, U.S. troops will work to double Afghanistan’s special operations forces, dial up airstrikes, and deploy more than 1,000 U.S. troops into combat alongside Afghan forces for the first time since the end of official combat operations in early 2015.

The renewed pressure will force the Taliban to “reconcile, face irrelevance, or die,” Nicholson said, promising that “we will be here until the job is done.”

Curiosity aroused

I watched a significant portion of General Nicholson's talk. The viewing confirmed the above-quoted summary. And it added another dose of disingenuousness:

[Addressing] the issue of civilian casualties. First, I'd say that we go to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties . . . .

We disagree with some of these [UNAMA] numbers regarding aerial casualties.

An example of why we would disagree — for example, would be an allegation occurs in a particular place at a particular time. We go back and review and find that we did not drop a munition on that day and that location, for example.

This might be one of the reasons that we might disagree.

Hmmm

Notice a few things.

With regard to General Nicholson's example of disagreement with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan's higher (than our) numbers for civilian-killing collateral damage, he provided no concrete instances of such. No findings that munitions had not launched at the times and places that UNAMA alleges.

Instead, the good general speculated that such a thing "might" occur.

One would think that, in preparing his speech, the illustrious 4-star would have had his staff dig up some verifiable examples of United Nations' error.

'We weren't there. We didn't do it. I will show you.'

But no. General Nicholson either (i) did not bother reviewing the record, or (ii) no such UNAMA mistakenness occurred.

A telling omission of proof in my customarily evidence-seeking view.

Additionally — if you are of analytically even subtler mind

Consider the fact that UNAMA, using Afghan sources, probably has access to people on the ground in the places that they name. We, we can pretty safely presume, do not.

The U.S. military has no strongly held motivation to discover civilian deaths and maimings. Such would simply make us look like butchers. Can't have that, can we?

We also lack the military dominance to drop purported investigators onto the presumably hostile ground, where these strikes occurred.

And, even if we did have those resources — assuming that you were one of the infiltrated investigators — wouldn't you be primarily concerned with keeping your American self alive in dangerous territory? As opposed to building a rapport with the non-English-speaking locals — so as to flesh out what you already suspect is a make-us-look-bad mistake that your aerial colleagues might have made?

Then, there's the still further consideration regarding what happens after mistakes or intentional violations of orders occur. Do we really think that pilots are reliably going to report these errors to their superiors, when those "oopses" just might not be discovered?

And are we foolishly confident that (even if the pilots do tattle on themselves) their squadron commander is going to do error reporting that makes his or her command look bad?

Uh uh.

Cover-up is the first impulse of any organization. Especially so, the American military which has vanishing amounts of actual oversight. We do what we can get away with.

General Nicholson's misleading comment (about supposedly legitimate disagreements with UNAMA's civilian casualty figures) was evasively self-serving.

More on the abuse of language

If you have the steel stomach to watch General Nicholson's speech at length, you will notice his repeated use of CENTCOM-ese.

CENTCOM-ese is American military "speak" that was designed to drain intelligible meaning out of the English language. It favors the gilt wings of unintelligible pomposity.

(If you ever want to stoke suicidal impulses, read thousands of pages of that stuff.)

Military good faith?

Or is General Nicholson's anti-historical pap just brain-washing aimed at keeping the flow of money, other people's blood, and American professional advancement flowing?

For more about that, see here.

Is it maybe just stupidity? — contrary to what I wrote just days ago

One wonders.

When a reporter (three times) asked General Nicholson what percentage of air strikes were disapproved (for civilian safety reasons) each day — our alpha Afghanistan commander could not get his mind around the civilian safety concept underlying the question.

If you want a visual demonstration of someone portraying air-headed cluelessness for an embarrassingly long period, General Nicholson wins the prize. See the above cited video beginning at about 27:00 minutes.

The hapless general continued to struggle with the concept of airstrike safety supervision, even after the stoically mild reporter reworded the question into its simplest form:

What percentage of air strikes do you approve on a daily basis?

[video at 27:00]

General Nicholson finally responded in inadvertently theme-forgetting fashion:

There's no percentage to attach to that.

We use munitions whenever they're necessary to defeat the Taliban, the ISIS, or whomever we see on the battlefield.

[video at 27:40]

The general's reply obliterated the entirety of his previous civilian-protecting focus

It takes a practiced form of witless disregard to decisively wreck one's own claims from one minute to another.

Some might label such a blatant form of intellectual inconsistency, stupidity.

General Nicholson, by the way, is the same person who dropped the "mother of all bombs" on Afghanistan in a display of military crassness that arguably backfired tactically and strategically — even according to its own declared purpose.

Knot-cutting finesse is, I infer, not one of General Nicholson's most visible qualities.

The moral? — Our military commanders physically look respect-worthy, but that's pretty much it

Intellectual integrity and piercing insight are not among their armaments. So to speak.

Former Colonel Andrew Bacevich's dismissive view of these high-ranking people is arguably justified.

PeteFree.com

General Nicholson's optimistic speech — about Afghanistan — Haven't we heard this thoroughly disproven nonsense before?