Word: mcchrystal
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...commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, U.S. General Stanley McChrystal has inherited a 7½-year war that appears to be getting worse. Yet U.S. Congressmen have given him only a year to turn it around. In a wide-ranging interview with TIME magazine on the back porch of his office at ISAF headquarters in downtown Kabul, McChrystal discussed his new approach to the Afghan fight, why the military alone can't be a solution and what he's currently reading on his new Kindle...
...TIME: Tell me how the operation in Helmand is going. General McChrystal: It's too early to predict success. They just started. (See pictures of the U.S. Marines' new offensive in Afghanistan...
Operation Khanjar - Pashto for "dagger" - is the first test of the Obama Administration's new strategy for Afghanistan. No longer treated as a concern secondary to Iraq, the Afghanistan theater will see the number of American soldiers serving there increase by 17,000 by this fall. And under McChrystal, they'll be waging a different kind of war. Limited troop availability in the past meant that while NATO forces could clear an area of insurgents, they were unable to hold the terrain. Now the plan is for the Marines to set up combat posts in villages to provide the residents...
Aware of the danger, McChrystal has made the protection of civilians the central tenet of his new approach to fighting the Taliban, even going so far as to limit the use of aerial bombardment to the most extreme circumstances - a turnabout for U.S. ground forces that have grown dependent on air support. McChrystal has also declared - in a soon-to-be-released tactical directive - that soldiers should hold their fire if there is even the slightest risk of a civilian presence in the target zone. "Suppose the insurgent occupies an enemy home or village and engages you from there with...
...make the fight harder in the short term, but it is winning kudos from Afghans. "Already I am hearing a lot of positive feedback [about the Helmand operation]," says Afghanistan's Interior Minister, Hanif Atmar. "What was actually very well received and welcomed by the Afghan people was that [McChrystal] placed a benchmark for his success: he would like to measure his success in terms of how much he has protected the population, how much security he is providing them...