We all know about the war in Afghanistan - going from bad to worse as events even in the last 24 hours so clearly show - we know little about the people prosecuting it. In a piece on truthout something about General Patraeus is revealed. He was, it will be recalled, the General in charge of the war in Afghanistan and now heads the CIA. He now implements the Obama "regime" of drone war.
"A recent book about Gen. David Petraeus, the director of the CIA, called him "the most transformative American military leader since the days of Gen. George Marshall." (1)
With no hobbies, no fishing, no hunting, no golf, the five-foot-nine, 155-pound Petraeus, who wears his brown hair neatly parted, is known as a colossal worker. Since he assumed the central command of Centcom, he is known as a man who answers his emails at all hours of the day and night, a man whose days are full of secure computer screens, secure phones, with top-secret documents arranged around a compulsively immaculate desk. Once Petraeus was given command in Afghanistan, his star rose even more precipitously, and he became the director of the CIA and the czar of President Obama's drone warfare strategy in Afghanistan.
With no hobbies, no fishing, no hunting, no golf, the five-foot-nine, 155-pound Petraeus, who wears his brown hair neatly parted, is known as a colossal worker. Since he assumed the central command of Centcom, he is known as a man who answers his emails at all hours of the day and night, a man whose days are full of secure computer screens, secure phones, with top-secret documents arranged around a compulsively immaculate desk. Once Petraeus was given command in Afghanistan, his star rose even more precipitously, and he became the director of the CIA and the czar of President Obama's drone warfare strategy in Afghanistan.
However, the general's personal qualities and publicly touted accomplishments conceal as much as they reveal, and analysis of this key administration figure's actual achievements, and the present policies he has come to personify, suggests a less effective and prescient leader than the one generally portrayed."
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"Today, Petraeus heads a massive, "secret" policy under President Barack Obama that uses drones, cell phone monitoring and night assaults by US troops to eliminate high-value targets in the war on terror.
One of the results of this strategy was that the rate of drone strikes rose dramatically. In the fall of 2010, having now become the CIA director, Petraeus - following the lead of former CIA director Leon Panetta - was instructed to use the drone arm of the military as part of the new "National Strategy on Counterterrorism," that had been in operation but wasn't publicly disclosed (7) until June 29, 2011, in a document that commits the United States to "disrupt, dismantle, and eventually defeat Al-Qaeda affiliates and adherents" in South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, Europe, Iraq, the Magreb and Sahel regions, Southeast Asia and Central Africa. Thus, in places like Pakistan and Yemen, drone warfare has moved from being on the secret fringes to the very center of the White House's strategy. The secret drone war is not very secret anymore."
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