Is Obama's New Afghan Commander a Violator of the Geneva Conventions?

By Tom Hayden, TheNation.com. Posted May 20, 2009.

The Wall Street Journal suggested that McChrystal was the kind of commander who would "fight the kind of complex counter-insurgency warfare" that Gates wants to see in Afghanistan, because his command of special operations forces in Iraq had involved "units that specialize in guerilla warfare, including the training of indigenous armies".

But these explanations for the choice of McChrystal equate his command of the special operations forces with expertise on counter-insurgency, despite the fact that McChrystal spent his past five years as a commander of special operations forces focusing overwhelmingly on counter-terrorism operations, not on counter-insurgency.

Whereas counter-insurgency operations are aimed primarily at influencing the population and are primarily non-military, counter-terrorism operations are exclusively military and focus on targeting the "enemy".

As commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from April 2003 to August 2008, he was pre-occupied with pursuing high-value al-Qaeda targets and local and national insurgent leaders in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan - mostly through targeted raids and airstrikes.

It was under McChrystal's command, in fact, that JSOC shifted away from the very mission of training indigenous military units in counter-insurgency operations that had been a core mission of special operations forces.McChrystal spent an unusual five years as commander of JSOC, because he had become a close friend of then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld came to view JSOC as his counter to the covert operations capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency, which he hated and distrusted, and Rumsfeld used JSOC to capture or kill high-value enemy leaders, including Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda's top leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

In 2005, JSOC's parent command, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), was directed by Rumsfeld to "plan, synchronize and, as directed, conduct global operations against terrorist networks in coordination with other combatant commanders". That directive has generally been regarded as granting SOCOM the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe.

Under that directive, McChrystal and JSOC carried out targeted raids and other operations against suspected Taliban in Afghanistan which were not coordinated with the commander of other US forces in the country. General David Barno, the US commander in Afghanistan, has said that he put a stop to targeted airstrikes in early 2004, but they resumed after he was replaced by McKiernan in 2005.

US airstrikes which have caused hundreds of civilian deaths have become a major political issue in Afghanistan and the subject of official protests by Afghan President Hamid Karzai as well as by the lower house of the Afghan parliament. Many of the airstrikes and commando raids that have caused large-scale civilian deaths have involved special operations forces operating separately from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization command.

Special operations forces under McChrystal's command also engaged in raiding homes in search of Taliban suspects, angering villagers in Herat province to the point where they took up arms against the US forces, according to a May 2007 story by Carlotta Gall and David E Sanger of the New York Times.

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Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He served 18 years in the California legislature, where he chaired labor, higher education and natural resources committees. He is the author of ten books, including "Street Wars" (New Press, 2004). He is a professor at Occidental College, Los Angeles, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics last fall.

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