US General Stanley McChrystal said that US and other NATO troops must make a “cultural shift” away from being a force designed for high intensity combat and instead make protecting Afghan civilians their first priority.
The newly arrived four-star commander said on Wednesday he hoped to install a new military mindset by drilling into troops the need to reduce the number of Afghan civilians killed in combat.
McChrystal is expected to formally announce new combat rules within days that will order troops to break away from fights — if they can do so safely — if militants are firing from civilian homes.
PHOTO: AP
One effect of the new order will be that troops may have to wait out insurgents instead of using force to oust them, he said.
“Traditionally American forces are designed for conventional, high-intensity combat,” McChrystal said during a visit to Camp Leatherneck, a new US Marine base housing thousands of newly deployed Marines in southern Helmand Province.
“In my mind what we’ve really got to do is make a cultural shift,” he said.
Because the military is such a big organization, the new message will take “constant repetition,” he said.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has pleaded with US and NATO forces for years to reduce the number of villagers killed in combat.
Karzai has long said that such deaths turn civilians away from the government and international forces and toward the Taliban, a point McChrystal underscored.
“When you do anything that harms the people, you just have a huge chance of alienating the population,” he said. “And so even with the best of intentions, if our operation causes them to lose property or loved ones, there is almost no way somebody cannot be impacted in how they view the government and us, the coalition forces.”
Thousands of Marines this spring have poured into Helmand — the nation’s most violent province and the world’s largest producer of opium poppies. Southern Afghanistan is the center of the Taliban-led insurgency, which has made a violent comeback in the last three years.
McChrystal, who took command of all US and NATO troops in Afghanistan last week, was making his first visits to regional commanders to outline the new combat rules.
He said later that US troops may have been overconfident in the early years of the Afghan conflict after the Taliban regime fell so easily. He said the US may have “oversimplified” the Afghan challenge as a result.
Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, the Marine commander at Camp Leatherneck, said his forces were already following McChrystal’s new commands.
“Our focus from the very beginning has not been Taliban. It’s been civilians,” he said. “We’ve paid a lot of attention to avoiding civilian casualties ... We have a lot of combat vets, a lot of Iraq vets. And I think we learned early on the importance of trust and support of the locals.”
“There will be plenty of opportunities to kill Taliban, and we’re pretty good at that. But the focus here, the reason we’re here, is the people, not the Taliban,” he said.
The Pentagon has asked the general for a 60-day review of the Afghan war, a review that could result in a recommendation to shift troops to new locations in Afghanistan. McChrystal said he didn’t yet know if he would request more troops.
The Pentagon abruptly pulled McChrystal’s predecessor — General David McKiernan — out of Afghanistan one year into a two-year assignment.
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