Tim Lynch responds to my post on the overuse of special operations and special forces. His post is entitled Special Forces are not the answer. Here’s a taste.
What you are looking at is an SF A team commander who is wearing his body armor over a cut off tee shit. He is going into a village he doesn’t know searching for an alleged high value target (HVT) who is known to these soldiers as ‘Red Beard’. He is operating in Khost province where every village elder dies his beard with henna; which is red….are you getting the picture?
The only way you could offend Afghans more than showing up bare chested and forcing your way into their compounds is to walk around naked. The level of cultural tone deafness on display (from an SF guy who is supposed to understand the culture) in the linked video is beyond my ability to explain. If I had showed up in any Afghan village (especially a remote mountain village) without wearing a long sleeved shirt and long trousers I would have never returned. Failure to respect the local culture is the first step in mission failure and SOF guys like this one have a 16 year (and counting) run of mission failure.
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Want to know something our ‘elite’ SF guys don’t seem to know? Afghans don’t cuss. To call an Afghan a motherfucker (a word used frequently in every conversation by the American military) is a grave insult that would, in the local context, need to be atoned by blood. I cannot stress this point enough and if, during my frequent forays into the tribal bad lands, I used that word even in jest I would have been killed long ago. One of the secrets that I and my fellow outside the wire expats use in the contested areas is respect for local culture coupled with big confident smiles; that’s why we are able to do what every USG expert contends cannot be done.
When I said these things it was just me saying these things. When Tim says these things it means that man who is the longest lasting English speaking man alive in Afghanistan (more than a decade) says these things. It means it comes with authority – authority I simply cannot give this subject.
After sending this link to a military reader who deployed in Afghanistan, he responded this way.
So imagine an unarmored SUV with a 40mm grenade launder mounted on Pedestal and the gunners chair was a red velvet arm chair, crewed by a bearded buffoon who looked like a bad extra from a Spaghetti western. Furthermore, their fearless leader refused to sync ECMs, so our more advanced systems would negate their “SOF” equipment, so no one had coverage.
After these many years, the U.S. still doesn’t have a clue how to wage small wars or counterinsurgency. Still. How sad. And after all of these years, SO and SF are still an entitled group who thinks that only they are capable of DA raids. So all of that bluster by gun controller Stanley McChrystal was just bull shit.
As for Tim, he has tried to raise the money to embed back in Afghanistan. He sent me a note and thought I didn’t know that, but I follow Tim religiously. I knew it but had not said anything because I don’t want him to go.
Considering his time in the Marine Corps along with his decade in Afghanistan, Tim knows enough to be a five star military reporter, security analyst or consultant to the military or security contractors (please don’t ever work for DynCorps, Tim) without ever going back to Afghanistan. I don’t want Tim to get killed because I care about him.
