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

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

After a series of raids by special operations forces in Afghanistan in late 2008 and early 2009 killed women and children, to mounting popular outrage, McChrystal's successor as commander of JSOC, Vice Admiral William H McRaven, ordered a temporary reduction in the rate of such commando raids in mid-February for two weeks.

However, the JSOC raids resumed at their original intensity in March. Later that month, the head of the US Central Command General David Petraeus issued a directive putting all JSOC operations under McKiernan's tactical command, but there has been no evidence that the change has curbed the raids by special operations forces.

Obama's National Security Adviser General James Jones responded to Karzai's demand for an end to US airstrikes by saying, "We're going to take a look at trying to make sure that we correct those things we can correct, but certainly to tie the hands of our commanders and say we're not going to conduct air strikes, it would be imprudent."

The airstrike in western Farah province that killed nearly 150 civilians last week, provoking protests by hundreds of university students in Kabul, was also ordered by special operations forces.

McChrystal's nomination to become director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon in May 2008 was held up for months while the Senate Armed Services Committee investigated a pattern of abuse of detainees by military personnel under his command. Sixty-four service personnel assigned or attached to special operations units were disciplined for detainee abuse between early 2004 and the end of 2007.

Captain Carolyn Wood, an operations officer with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, gave military investigators a sworn statement in 2004 in which she said she had drawn guidance for interrogation from a directive called "TF-121 IROE," which had been given to the members of Task Force 121, a unit directly under JSOC.

However, the military refused to make that document public, despite requests from the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, protecting McChrystal from legal proceedings regarding his responsibility for detainee abuses.

He was never held accountable for those abuses, supposedly because of the secrecy of the operation of the JSOC.Although he has been linked with detainee abuses and raids that kill numbers of civilians, McChrystal has not had any direct experience with the non-military elements of such a strategy.

W Patrick Lang, formerly the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, suggested in his blog on Monday that the McChrystal nomination "sounds like a paradigm shift in which Obama's policy of destroying the leadership of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan takes priority over everything else".

The choice of McChrystal certainly appears to signal the administration's readiness to continue special operations forces' raids and airstrikes that are generating growing opposition by Afghans to the US military presence.

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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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