NATO soldier training Afghan in the proper use of a rocket propelled grenade launcher – something I would not have expected they would need. 

Yesterday – or maybe the day before yesterday – we – that being the coalition forces or ISAF – bombed and killed, by error, a group of Afghan civilians and General McCrystal apologized. Personally! On Afghan National TV. This is the general who is accused of stonewalling the friendly fire killing of Spc. Pat Tillman and of abusing detainees in Iraq!  

And he was put there after firing the last commander, General David McKiernan. Firing a commander is pretty unusual in the Army and this was even more unusual because McKiernan was a classic Army commander who came up through the ranks in Armor. For at least the last 60 years, Armor has been the preferred path to promotion in the Army. Sort of like being an aircraft carrier guy in the Navy.

Then the Armor guy is replaced by a Special Forces guy – or snake eater as they used to be called. And now the snake eater is apologizing for killing Afghans. The same day, the new Afghan governor – or mayor – moved into Marjah before the fighting even stopped. He came with a lot of money, is backed by the Marines, and supported by U.S. State Department personnel. 

This is an amazing change of attitude. A sea change in the culture of the U.S. Military and the Army in particular. This is a huge bureaucratic organization that is totally changing in the middle of the dance. It is like General Motors changing to manufacturing only compact cars in 1995. (BTW as an example of how hard that is – The General just hired – as a consultant – the CEO the Obama administration forced them to fire last year.)

The military has gone from measuring success by high body counts to courting the local loyal jurga. I am astounded! And delighted at how serious and sincere the Obama Administration and the United States military are – even though I am still not convinced we should be there.

No One Expects The Spanish Inquisition

To recap a bit of history, back in the early days of the Bush administration a man named Donald Rumsfeld—deemed one of the worst secretaries of defense in American history
by John McCain—was running the Pentagon. He had a guy working for him
named Marc Thiessen as a speechwriter. This was all when George W Bush
was president, one of the worst in history. In addition to Bush,
Rumsfeld, and Thiessen there were other dimwitted and immoral people in
charge of running the government. One thing that dimwitted and immoral
people do when under pressure is decide that lashing out with a kind of
dimwitted and immoral violence is going to help them. Consequently,
they got the dimwitted and immoral idea that they ought to torture people with techniques they got out of techniques the US government has developed to train soldiers in torture-resistanc

This was a bad idea, so they were warned that it was a bad idea.
Instructor Joseph Witsch told a Pentagon working group on
interrogations “The physical and psychological pressures we apply in
training violate national and international laws … I hope someone is
explaining this to all these folks asking for our techniques and
methodology!” They established a Behavioral Science Consultation Team
at Gitmo that was told “Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of
physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information
from a detainee is very low.”

But Marc Thiessen and his friends aren’t very smart and they are
very immoral. They love inflicting violence. So they went ahead and
tortured. One technique they used, waterboarding, bears a great deal of
similarity to the so-called “tormenta de toca” from the Spanish
Inquisition. Since the Spanish Inquisition is famous for its cruelty,
sometimes critics of the kind of dimwitted cruelty beloved by Marc
Thiessen and his pals point out the similarity. But Thiessen doesn’t like this comparison so earlier today he called me out for making it, observing:

Apparently, Yglesias has not bothered to read Courting Disaster.
If he had, he would know better than to make this ridiculous argument.
Even a basic review of the facts makes clear Yglesias is completely
uninformed.

Courting Disaster is Thiessen’s book, and if he wants me to
read it he’ll have to force water down my throat to induce the
sensation of drowning. But having summed that up, we come to Thiessen’s
big point. It turns out that during the Spanish inquisition, in addition to the basic “water cure” elements beloved by Thiessen they also
used “Sharp cords, called cordeles, which cut into the flesh, attached
the arms and legs to the side of the trestle and others, known as
garrotes, from sticks thrust in them and twisted around like a
tourniquet till the cords cut more or less deeply into the flesh, were
twined around the upper and lower arms, the thighs and the calves.” So
you see, it’s totally different—when Thiessen and friends were running the show, they did
tie people down to boards (like in the Spanish Inquisition!) and they
did pour water on them (like in the Spanish Inquisition!) but in the
Spanish version they used the cords to cause additional painful torture whereas in the more refined Bush/Rumsfeld/Thiessen era the water torture itself was deemed sufficient!

And that, my friends, is the advance of civilization over time.