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 Greetings! You are reading an article from The Mudville Gazette. To reach the front page, with all the latest news and views, click the logo above or "main" below. Thanks for stopping by! December 11, 2009 Number Three (updated)By GreyhawkAnd the Lord spake "Pakistan officially denied that any such attack took place," they add, but "A senior U.S. counterterrorism official confirmed that the al-Qaida operative was high-ranking but did not identify him." As I was reading that, I seemed to recall frequent announcements that we had killed "al Qaeda's number three man" on multiple occasions - maybe it's been a while. But then I got to this bit... The U.S. has long targeted men who held al-Qaida's No. 3 role as director of international operations. Five of them, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is facing trial in New York, have been killed or captured since 9/11. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are symbolic importance as al-Qaida's top two leaders, but the No. 3 man is viewed as the group's operational leader.More from Bill Roggio:
Elsewhere: Rachel Maddow has discovered that a) Presdent Obama isn't the first sitting US President to get a Nobel Peace Prize and b) there's a super-secret drone war in Pakistan that he doesn't talk much about: However, having Noah Shachtman as her guest made it worth watching. His recent efforts have gotten him on Lieutenant General David Deptula's (Air Force Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) email list. Air power is not threatening to pull the rug out from under OEF-A [Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan]. Instead, when Afghan people were polled about the reasons for their growing disillusionment with Kabul, insecurity and corruption overwhelmingly dominated their complaints; "too many innocent people being killed" barely registered. Intuitively, that makes sense in a country of a thousand villages separated by thousand of mountains and valleys, where tribal institutions are the paramount determinant of communication -- not the International Herald Tribune or the New York Times, or CNN or Twitter... I can believe that the average Afghan could give a damn if a tribe five valleys away takes a drone strike (but would change his mind rather quickly if one hit closer to home) but besides being a bit callous, the Very "Joe Biden-esque", sez I.   Sources tell CBS News the al Qaeda operative believed killed in a drone strike in Pakistan this week is Saleh al-Somali, who was in charge of external operations for the group. He was considered one of a half dozen top Qaeda operatives. "Saleh al Somali is al Qaeda's latest external operations chief," A senior US intelligence official told The Long War Journal. "He was part of the original al Qaeda cadre. He goes all the way back to Mogadishu." And (update two) Lt General Deptula responds:
And my conclusion is different, and I'm relieved (to say the least) to learn the USAF isn't working (or thinking) at cross-purposes to COMISAF. No upside to that. To say the original misquote had me baffled is an understatement. "Your article yields great insight into the care that is taken by the Air Force and Allied ground forces to ensure the minimal loss of life--on both sides--as the ISAF seeks to achieve peace in the region" references Noah's original story on the topic - and it should be read in full, too. Posted by Greyhawk / December 11, 2009 11:38 AM | Permalink 2 Comments |
November 26, 2010America@war [Greyhawk]
I think anyone who's ever pondered the "comment" option - once only available on blogs and bulletin boards, now ubiquitous on almost any web site - will appreciate this:
The so-called faculty of writing is not so much a faculty of writing as it is a faculty of thinking. When a man says, "I have an idea but I can't express it"; that man hasn't an idea but merely a vague feeling. If a man has a feeling of that kind, and will sit down for a half an hour and persistently try to put into writing what he feels, the probabilities are at least 90 percent that he will either be able to record it, or else realize that he has no idea at all. In either case, he will do himself a benefit. That's wisdom from the past, captured for posterity at the US Naval Institute, shared via the web on the institute's 137th anniversary. From their about page:
"The Naval Institute has three core activities," among them, History and Preservation: The Naval Institute also has recently introduced Americans at War, a living history of Americans at war in their own words and from their own experiences. These 90-second vignettes convey powerful stories of inspiration, pride, and patriotism. Take a look at the collection, and you'll see it's not limited to accounts from those who served on ships at sea, members of the other branches are well-represented. I'm fortunate to have met USNI's Mary Ripley, she's responsible for the institute's oral history program (and she's the daughter of the late John Ripley, whose story is told here). She also deserves much credit for their blog. ("We're not the Navy nor any government agency. Blog and comment freely.") We met at a milblog conference - Mary knew (and I would come to realize) that milbloggers are the 21st-century version of exactly what the US Naval Institute is all about. Once that light bulb came on in my head, I mentioned a vague idea for a project to her - milblogs as the 21st century oral history that they are. "Put that in writing," she said (of course - see first paragraph above!) - and here's part of the result. Shortly after the first tent was pitched by the American military in Iraq a wire was connected to a computer therein, and the internet was available to a generation of Americans at war - many of whom had grown up online. From that point on, at any given moment, somewhere in Iraq a Soldier, Sailor, Airman or Marine was at a keyboard sharing the events of his or her day with the folks back home. While most would simply fire off an email, others took advantage of the (then) relatively new online blogging platforms to post their thoughts and experiences for the entire world to see. The milblog was born - and from that moment to this stories detailing everything from the most mundane aspects of camp life to intense combat action (often described within hours of the event) have been available on the web... And et cetera - but since you're reading this on a milblog, you probably knew that. And you know that milblogs aren't just blogs written by troops at war, that many friends, family members, and supporters likewise documented their story of America at war online in near-real time, as those stories developed. The diversity in membership of that group is broad, the one thing we all have in common is the impulse to make sense of the seemingly senseless, and communicate the tale - for each of us that impulse was strong enough to overcome whatever barriers prevent the vast majority of people from doing the same. Everyone at some point has some vague idea they believe should be shared - we were the people who, from some combination of internal and external urging, found and spent those many half hours persistently trying to write it down. But where will all that be in another 137 years? Or five or ten, for that matter. That's something I've asked myself since at least 2004 - when I wrote this:
Membership in the ghost battalion has grown in the years since, and an ever growing majority of those abandoned-but-still-standing sites are vanishing. Have you checked out Lt Smash's site lately? How about Sgt Hook's? If you're a long-time milblog reader you know the first widely-read milblog from Operation Iraq Freedom and the first widely-read milblog from Afghanistan are both gone from the web. If you're a relative newcomer to this world you may never even have heard of them - or the dozens upon dozens of others who carried forth the standard they set down. If you have a vague notion that something should be done about that, (a notion I've heard expressed more than once...) then you and I and the good folks at the US Naval Institute are in agreement. Preserving the history documented by the milbloggers is just one of the goals of the milblog project, the once-vague idea that we're now making real. And it's a big idea, if I say so myself - too big to explain in one simple blog post, so stand by for more. Likewise, it's too big a task to be accomplished by just one person. So if you're a milblogger (and exactly what is a milblogger? is a topic for much further discussion on its own) I'm asking for your help. All I'll really need is just a little bit (maybe just one or two of those half hours...) of your time, and your willingness to tell the tale. We've already made history, it's time to save it. (More to follow...) Posted 4:02 PM | Permalink |
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The Mudville Gazette is the on-line voice of an American warrior and his wife who stands by him. They prefer to see peaceful change render force of arms unnecessary. Until that day they stand fast with those who struggle for freedom, strike for reason, and pray for a better tomorrow.
 
 
 Furthermore, I will occasionally use satire or parody herein. The bottom line: it's my house. I like having visitors to my house. I hope you are entertained. I fight for your right to free speech, and am thrilled when you exercise said rights here. Comments and e-mails are welcome, but all such communication is to be assumed to be 1)the original work of any who initiate said communication and 2)the property of the Mudville Gazette, with free use granted thereto for publication in electronic or written form. If you do NOT wish to have your message posted, write "CONFIDENTIAL" in the subject line of your email. Original content copyright © 2003 - 2011 by Greyhawk. Fair, not-for-profit use of said material by others is encouraged, as long as acknowledgement and credit is given, to include the url of the original source post. Other arrangements can be made as needed. Contact: greyhawk at mudvillegazette dot com  Tending Distant Far from hearth and home, watching What tales we'll tell When things grim Some distant sunset, vision fading Saluting fallen friends whose names - Greyhawk, Baghdad, December 2004 |
Being #3 of al Qaeda is like being the drummer of Spinal Tap
Greyhawk, the comments attributed to me on "Danger Room, 10 Dec 09, 3:04" and identified in your posting "Number Three" were not my comments, but rather those from folks in Georgetown’s Security Studies Program.
Noah left out some important points I did make...in particular...
"The international community must hold the Taliban accountable for their criminal actions regarding the intentional use of placing civilians in harm's way. The tactics that the Taliban are employing in this regard are in violation of the international Laws of Armed Conflict--the tactics that the Allied air forces are using to apply force from the air are not. Your article yields great insight into the care that is taken by the Air Force and Allied ground forces to ensure the minimal loss of life--on both sides--as the ISAF seeks to achieve peace in the region."
I think if the remarks incorrectly cited to me were correctly attributed to the researcher's in Georgetown’s Security Studies Program and my actual remarks were printed as I wrote them then your conclusion would be different.
Reducing civilian casualties is critical to the strategy and my position is not "contrary to McChrystal's" in any way. My position is to ensure the world knows that the Taliban are the number one cause of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
Noah just printed a correction on Danger Room and can be found at: General: Blame Taliban, Media for Furor Over Afghan Civilian Deaths (Corrected)
Source: wired.com
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/12/us-general-blame-taliban-media-for-afghan-civilian-deaths/
General: Blame Taliban, Media for Furor Over Afghan Civilian Deaths (Corrected)
• By Noah Shachtman
• December 10, 2009 |
• 3:04 pm |
Top commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal has issued strict new guidelines on air strikes, to keep civilians from getting killed. “It is literally how we lose the war or in many ways how we win it,” he recently said.
But many in the Air Force see the civilian casualty problem may be more a product of media hype and Taliban human shielding than of errant U.S. bombs. “It is curious that it appears there is more ink spent on casualties from air attacks than there is on the criminality and violation of the ethical tenets of Islam that occurs daily as a result of Taliban actions,” writes Lieutenant General David Deptula, the Air Force’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.
Deptula e-mailed me last night, in response to my story on the American air war. Here’s what he wrote…
First, the number one cause of civilian casualties in Afghanistan is the Taliban — not air power. Human Rights Watch has verified that the Taliban kills three to four times more civilians than ISAF [NATO's International Security Assistance Force] air and ground forces combined. More often than not, these deaths are deliberate. Because the Taliban cannot directly affect Allied force application from the air, they try to accomplish the same effects by purposely mingling with non-combatants and civilians in an attempt to draw attacks on those positions. This is done to create the conditions where Allied commanders put restrictions on themselves to limit the most effective instrument of power that causes the Taliban their greatest concern.
The reason that there is so much public focus on air power and casualties is that every air-delivered weapon is filmed. We know where every weapon was aimed, and where it hit. That is not the case with the Taliban, or surface-to-surface fires. Air power is the most accurate means of large-scale force application compared to other means such as mortar and artillery fire. Over 95% of the weapons we have delivered from Predators hit exactly where they were aimed, for instance.
There are some folks at Georgetown’s Security Studies Program who are doing work on this subject. Looking at the available polling data, they have some surprising results in the Afghan reactions to civilian casualties. Basically, there appears to be an almost complete lack of indication to support the conventional wisdom, popularized in the media, that air attacks have been provoking deep hostility toward the U.S. and the Kabul government. Air power is not threatening to pull the rug out from under OEF-A [Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan]. Instead, when Afghan people were polled about the reasons for their growing disillusionment with Kabul, insecurity and corruption overwhelmingly dominated their complaints; “too many innocent people being killed” barely registered.
Intuitively, that makes sense in a country of a thousand villages separated by thousand of mountains and valleys, where tribal institutions are the paramount determinant of communication — not the International Herald Tribune or the New York Times, or CNN or Twitter…
The conclusion of the initial research is that while civilian casualties from bombing are presumably hurting rather than helping, there is little reason based on the admittedly limited data available in open source to expect that drastically reducing the civilian casualty issue would produce game changing results on the political battlefield. And if doing so depended on seriously constraining military operations such that there was a significant increase in Afghans’ insecurity (or Allied causalities), it would likely be a counterproductive exchange.
It is curious that it appears there is more ink spent on casualties from air attacks than there is on the criminality and violation of the ethical tenets of Islam that occurs daily as a result of Taliban actions. The international community must hold the Taliban accountable for their criminal actions regarding the intentional use of placing civilians in harm’s way. The tactics that the Taliban are employing in this regard are in violation of the international Laws of Armed Conflict–the tactics that the Allied air forces are using to apply force from the air are not. Your article yields great insight into the care that is taken by the Air Force and Allied ground forces to ensure the minimal loss of life–on both sides–as the ISAF seeks to achieve peace in the region.
Correction: I left out the final two paragraphs in my original posting of Deptula’s note. Also, in my introduction to his message, I left the impression that the Georgetown findings were his own. That wasn’t the case. And I apologize for the errors.
nms