MAQzine

May 13, 2010 The Inevitable Collapse of McChrystal's Afghan War Plan By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY Nisos Kos , Greece I n the 11 May issue of   CounterPunch , apparently based on White House and Pentagon sources, Gareth Porter, one of the most able journalists covering the Afghan debacle, reported that General McChrystal’s war plan is in the early stages of unravelling. To appreciate why this was entirely predictable, consider please, the following: On January 2, during an interview with Drew Brown of Stars and Stripes, McChrystal described   his plan   to create an ‘arc of security’ in the most densely populated regions of Southern Afghanistan . The green shaded area in the following map of Afghanistan overlays McChystal’s arc on the distribution of population densities. I constructed it from the information contained in Brown’s interview. As you can see, McChrystal plan opens his biggest military campaign to date by invading a region that has seen many invasions and muc...