Image credit: U.S. Army
I missed this development Friday, and as James Ala notes, that is probably by design:
The military, even ours, is anything but a democratic institution. There are good reasons for that. As we learned in the McChrystal fiasco, any officer who publicly criticizes a policy he's in the act of implementing is likely to have his career come to a resounding halt. Major General Fuller must have known this when he said what he did to Politico.US removes Afghanistan commander Peter Fuller for criticising Karzai | World news | guardian.co.uk:Not only is Afghanistan the graveyard of Empires; it is fast becoming the graveyard of loose-lipped generals. First General McChrystal, now Major General Fuller have died from foot-in-mouth disease. There is something very wrong with this mission to make two flag officers go off the deep end.
Major General Peter Fuller, a top US commander in Afghanistan, has been relieved of his duties after criticising the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
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Sidebar: This was a very nasty dirty deed done dirt cheep; real graveyard stuff. It popped up on the google machine around 21:30 Pacific Daylight Time on a Friday[.]
US removes Afghanistan commander Peter Fuller for criticising Karzai | World news | guardian.co.uk
Our Afghanistan policy has been wrongheaded for a long time. It has only gotten worse since President Obama took over. There is no point in applying more force to the situation. The Afghan people are going to have to sort this out on their own. They probably never trusted us, and after ten years of bloodshed, they certainly don't now.
In the interest of not letting this one go quietly in the night, I pass it along...
Afterword: While I worked in the defense industry for a long time, I never worked with or for Program Executive Office (PEO) Soldier, MGEN Fuller's previous post, nor have I met him.
UPDATE: Corrected the link for James Ala's article. It had originally pointed to the Guardian article that James was quoting.
2 comments:
This is SUCH bullshit and I really thought Obama was above this kinda crap..removing generals that speak openly about the corrupt regime we are propping up there.
Wait...Obama and our forever wars..might as well be The Shrub, right, as Obama has killed more of our soldiers in Afghanistan than Bush43. I forgot about that for a minute.
I've never seen any reason to assume he was above it. While I agree with Fuller's take on things, his expressing his opinion where he did was bound to get him discharged. There's a very bright line that soldiers can't cross when it comes to expressing their opinions - they can't publicly criticize their chain of command. That's particularly true when it has to do with something they're working on.
My guess is that Fuller may be glad, in some ways, that he doesn't have to perform the Sisyphean task of trying to do whatever it is we're supposedly trying to do in Afghanistan.
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