As reported on Wired.
BY NOAH SHACHTMAN
Adm. William McRaven at a ceremony in 2011. Photo: DoD
It’s been a brutal few days in Afghanistan. On Sunday, the local government accused an American special operator of torturing an Afghan civilian. On Monday, the Hamid Karzai administration insisted that U.S. warplanes killed 17 women and children. Then, on Tuesday, three more U.S. troops were killed by an improvised bomb, bringing the total to 17 slain in this awful month alone.
But to the admiral in charge of America’s special operation forces (SOF), things are going rather well in Afghanistan.
“I think we’re making great strides in Afghanistan,” Adm. William McRaven, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, said Tuesday in Tampa. “We are achieving in the SOF world probably the best results we’ve seen in many, many years.”
The comments — made at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference, an annual gathering of nearly 7,000 operators and defense contractors — come as a bit of surprise. In recent weeks, the U.S. military hasn’t just been forced to deny allegations of civilian slaughter and torture lobbed by the Karzai team. (McRaven, for his part, said he hadn’t seen the video that the Afghans are holding up as evidence of the abuse, and therefore couldn’t comment.) They’ve had to listen to Karzai accuse the U.S. of stoking the violence there. They’ve withdrawn SOF from key districts in Wardak province after objections from the local government. And then they heard Karzai confess to taking bags of CIA cash.
The future of Afghanistan — and U.S. involvement there — is a matter of intense debate in Washington. It’s unclear how big of an American force will remain to support the local military once the U.S. combat mission ends there next year. The one sure bet is that McRaven’s SOF will be part of the mix. Perhaps that partially explains why McRaven wanted to put the best possible face on a relationship with the Afghan government that appears to be badly fraying.
“Our relations with the Afghans are great,” McRaven said. “We don’t do anything today that the Afghans aren’t in the lead on. And that’s a change. If you’re talking about the concerns the president of Afghanistan has, some of those concerns were based on an American footprint forward. Now that we have put the Afghans in the lead, we are getting less pushback from the government of Afghanistan.”
McRaven’s conference speech was meant to showcase his vision for the future of his elite troops, which McRaven sees as the connective tissue in an international network combatting arms dealers, drug kingpins and militant groups. But in a response to a question from Danger Room, McRaven talked about the country where he currently has the most forces stationed: Afghanistan.
“I’ve been going to Afghanistan every year since 2003. Most of those years for a long time. It’s easy if you’re taking a snapshot of Afghanistan — if you’re a journalist and you go in and say, ‘Oh my gosh! Look at this bad news story and look at this bad news story.’ Then that’s your perspective. My perspective is 10 years of watching developments in Afghanistan. We now have incredible Afghan security forces. We now have a very credible Afghan SOF force,” he said.
“Afghanistan is difficult. It is complex, as they say. There are still problems with corruption. There are a lot of problems out there,” he continued. “But you go into Kabul — when I was there in 2003, you couldn’t make your way around Kabul, it was a war zone — now there are paved streets. The vendors are out in force. You look outside Kabul, you see an economic boom, the buildings that are going up, the brick factories. So I think it’s very easy and kind of short-sighted to take a snapshot of Afghanistan now and make a judgment on how far they have come. Because I would contend they have come a long way.”
Journalists and troops living in Kabul during 2003 disputed McRaven’s characterization as an impassable battlefield. “I went out to dinner and drinks regularly. Bad traffic, tho,” tweeted one. “Very, very relaxed,” noted another. But it’s true that Kabul is a wealthier place with more business activity than it had a decade ago. (Although some believe that progress is based solely on an unsustainable flow of U.S. aid.) Civilian casualties are down a bit in Afghanistan. (2012′s death toll of 2,754 civilians was a drop from the previous year’s figure, but virtually unchanged from 2010′s.) While militant attacks remain more or less constant, the number of U.S. troops killed in action has dropped dramatically, as American forces leave the country and allow the Afghans to take the lead in the fight against the Taliban. There is evidence of forward progress in Afghanistan, if you look for it. On this day, the admiral was hunting.