Source:
NYTU.S. Is Reining In Special Forces in Afghanistan
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ROD NORDLAND
KABUL, Afghanistan — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has brought most American Special Operations forces under his direct control for the first time, out of concern over continued civilian casualties and disorganization among units in the field.
“What happens is, sometimes at cross-purposes, you got one hand doing one thing and one hand doing the other, both trying to do the right thing but working without a good outcome,” General McChrystal said in an interview.
Critics, including Afghan officials, human rights workers and some field commanders of conventional American forces, say that Special Operations forces have been responsible for a large number of the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and operate by their own rules.
<snip>
“These special forces were not accountable to anyone in the country, but General McChrystal and we carried the burden of the guilt for the mistakes they committed,” he said. “Whenever there was some problem with the special forces we didn’t know who to go to, it was muddled and unclear who was in charge.”
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/asia/16afghan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
McChrystal Consolidates Control of Special Forces in Afghanistan
By Spencer Ackerman 3/16/10 8:50 AM
Buried on page B-2 of an annex in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Aug. 30 strategic assessment of the Afghanistan war is a vague promise about how he will run it. “Draft C2 guidance for command and control of special operations forces will be issued soon,” McChrystal writes. That forthcoming order will “direct the realignment of all SOF” to his command.
As a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal has deep experience with the autonomy that special forces can enjoy on a battlefield, answering to their own chain of command. The ability of Special Operations Forces to do their own thing can contribute to high-profile successes such as the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, perhaps McChrystal’s greatest success, and also to high-profile abuses such as the torture at Camp Nama in Iraq, perhaps the biggest stain on McChrystal’s reputation (and something for which he claims not to have been aware.)
I had no luck finding out if McChrystal ever issued that guidance regarding SOF. Over the past several months, though, it appeared as if JSOC was still doing its own thing, as prominent incidents of civilian casualties implicating special forces accumulated, contradicting McChrystal’s most important strategic directives. And it also appeared as if JSOC used the pursuit of high-value terrorist targets in “remote areas” of Afghanistan as a supplementary force to McChrystal’s efforts at securing Afghan population centers.
But two chains of command in a war rarely work, especially when one command isn’t concerned with protecting a population that the other calls “strategically decisive.” And so The New York Times reports today that McChrystal has finally consolidated control of Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan. It probably helps that he has what his staff calls “established relationships through the special operations community” with Vice Adm. William McRaven, the current JSOC commander. But according to the Times, he doesn’t have total control:
<more>
http://washingtonindependent.com/79343/mcchrystal-consolidates-control-of-special-forces-in-afghanistan
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