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Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, is in hot water over criticism directed at the President and others in the administrations. Two takes…
This is an extraordinary man, with the perfect skill set necessary for the mission in Afghanistan: a thorough knowledge of counterinsurgency and deep experience in special operations. But there is another side to McChrystal: he is so focused on his real job that he hasn’t spent sufficient time learning how to play the public relations game. He speaks his mind; in private conversations, I’ve found, he is incapable of fudging the truth. This leads to a certain myopia, an innocence regarding the not-so-brave new world of the media. He spoke his mind during a question and answer session in London last autumn, expressing his skepticism about Vice President Biden’s preference for a smaller force in Afghanistan, with a heavy emphasis on special operations. And now he has been caught by a Rolling Stone reporter, speaking his mind on a number of subjects.
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I suppose he will have to be sacked now. He is not irreplaceable. [...] And it is a real tragedy, because Stanley McChrystal is precisely the sort of man who should be leading American troops in battle.
The trouble with appointing Stanley McChrystal to run the Af-Pak war was always his temperament and his history. He is a driven man, strong-headed, amazingly disciplined, extremely able in a limited fashion – and clearly unused to compromise or getting along with people as powerful as he is. Diplomat he is not. As head of JSOC, moreover, he has always regarded himself as above political management, running a part of the military that seems at times to answer to no-one, and that, under Bush and Cheney was unleashed to do whatever it wanted, including, of course, brutal torture in the field, condoned from the very top.
These qualities might have seemed appealing at first for Afghanistan. Here you had a former torturer/badass who had learned by brutal experience that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be won that way. Converted to counter-insurgency as a philosophy, he was an apostate from the Bush-Cheney approach of “kill, bomb and torture until they embrace human rights” school.[...]…the McChrystal strategy was a product of hope over experience, and that the arrogance that drove it was part of what had long been wrong with the conduct of both tragically flawed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I believe Sullivan is correct on the futility of this war.
We cannot win by 2011. And we will never win unless we devote far more resources and many more decades to neo-imperial control than America can afford and than the American and British publics will tolerate. Maybe deploying McChrystal to do his best – and still fail – will be the only way of proving this. Which is why this incident is actually, to my mind, a good thing.
It may help bring this madness to an earlier end.
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George Santayana said, “Those who don’t heed the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them” (not an exact quote but close enough). Our leaders should read history, specifically the fact that Alexander the Great, Tamerlane, Genghis Kahn, The British Empire at their height, and the mighty Soviet Union were unable to achieve that which we strive to achieve.
Afghanistan has always been ruled by warlords who will change sides in a heartbeat depending on who offers the best pay. I don’t think I am a pessimist but rather I am just being pragmatic when I suggest we leave that country and concentrate on our own problems.
If the response to terrorists in Afghanistan, immediately after 9/11, had been different and so much effort had not been diverted to Iraq to dispose of a tyrant we originally helped place in power, the outcome might be different.
The Pentagon described Afghanistan as the Saudi Arabia of lithium. Do you think that will be the lousy excuse for staying there instead of ending the war? Maybe I’m too cynical – or not cynical enough.
There is much wisdom to be found in cynicism.
“But there is another side to McChrystal: he is so focused on his real job that he hasn’t spent sufficient time learning how to play the public relations game. He speaks his mind; in private conversations, I’ve found, he is incapable of fudging the truth.”
Ummm. You want us to believe a man who achieved the rank of General in the US Army and got put in charge of the war in Afghanistan doesn’t know enough about politics and public relations not to diss the POTUS in public?
Fat effin’ chance, I say. There’s something else going on here.