“The Operators” (2012) by Michael Hastings is a book about US General Stanley McChrystal and the War in Afghanistan. McChrystal was fired in 2010 because of Hastings’ article about him in the Rolling Stone. Hastings himself died under mysterious circumstances three years later.
The media-military-industrial complex: Hastings was given a behind-the-scenes look at McChrystal, his top men, and the war for several weeks in April 2010. Like most US reporters, Hastings was expected to write a puff piece. The Rolling Stone, known for writing about music and rock stars, surely would not print anything more hard-hitting than the New York Times. But it did.
Hastings:
“The access I’d gotten was unprecedented. But what do you do with it? Bury the story? Write a puff piece to ensure further access? Or write what actually happened?”
Most upset by his honesty were not the politicians or the generals, who by and large took their lumps, but fellow reporters.
“I wasn’t to be trusted because I tried to tell the truth.”
The war was senseless, at least for the US by 2010, but it was kept creaking along by lies and feel-good fictions.
In the middle of his tale of warlords, generals, ambassadors, helicopters and hotel rooms, Hastings tells the story of a boy born in 1987, Corporal Michael Ingram Jr, and how he died in Afghanistan in 2010. It is not heroic. It is not tragic. It is sad. Beyond words. He is dead and somehow his death is supposed to be worth a war few in the US understand.
The stated aim of the war in 2001, of not allowing “safe haven” for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan because of 9/11, is long forgotten by 2010. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden simply moved across the border to Pakistan – and yet the war goes on and on. And on. The US president and the US generals understand the war through the limited lens of personal ambition.
A power unto itself: General McChrystal, and General Petraeus afterwards, cow the presidents of the US and Afghanistan into keeping the war going – even though both presidents, Obama and Karzai, want the US out of Afghanistan. The US military becomes a power unto itself. In part because the president and the press in the US do not stand up to it. The president because he wants to seem “tough”. The press because it is hooked on “access”. Given a choice, the US military would stay in Afghanistan forever.
Matthew Hoh, one of the few US State Department officials in Afghanistan with a detectable conscience, wrote in his resignation letter in 2009:
“Our support for [the Afghan] government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam: an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.”
The main thing the US learned from the Vietnam War: to avoid a draft.
– Abagond, 2017.
See also:
- military-industrial complex
- The propaganda model – of the US press
- Vietnam War
- The Time of Illusion
- Pentagon Papers
- 1967: what Chomsky and Martin Luther King Jr said
- Afghanistan
- 9/11
- Osama bin Laden
- Petraeus
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Well, good morning Abagond, have a problem with Afghanistain war.
First, the target is Osama Bin Laden and second the Taliban abused of US demands of deliver him to US.
The real unnecessary attack is against Iraq.
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@ Becca Camarto
Since Bin Laden is supposedly dead and the Taliban scattered, why is our country still spending blood and treasure in Afghanistan?
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