Obama has replaced General McChrystal as the commander in Afghanistan. Our first reaction when this story first broke was that Rolling Stone magazine, a liberal humanist bullhorn had set McChrystal up and was trying to do its bit to undermine the US war effort.
Michael Hastings, the writer of the damaging piece, has gone on the record explaining some of the background and context. The reality appears more complex than our first impression. Watch the video interview below. Hastings appears quite knowledgeable and sensitive to the military. But what is most damning is his allegation that Obama has never got his head around the counterinsurgency strategy.
In fact, the strategy, as we have consistently argued in this blog, is doomed to fail in Afghanistan. For one thing, it does not have a credible stable local government with which to work. Secondly, Hastings argues that it has never been properly resourced. Thirdly, the time frame allowed for it to work by Obama is ridiculously short.
Probably the Rolling Stone slant would be that counterinsurgency is an OK strategy, but the effort and costs and timeframe required for it to be successful at it in Afghanistan make is politically and economically unrealistic--and therefore it is naive from the start. It should never have been a goer. But Obama got sucked in because he did not understand it. (Probably it involved questions that were higher than his pay grade.) Then, worse, he set it up to fail because he did not resource it properly (too politically costly) and limited the time commitment (again, to keep his political base in line.)
One puzzling this in this whole affair has been the alleged "immaturity" of McChrystal--why would he have exposed himself this way? Obama has slammed it as a serious lapse of judgment. He has publicly implied it reflected on McChrystal's part a poor understanding of the doctrine of civilian control of the military. What Hastings implies is that this whole thing was a carefully calculated move on the part of McChrystal to put more pressure on Obama to back and resource far more rigorously and comprehensively the counterinsurgency strategy--and if not, McChrystal probably calculated it would be better to be out of it.
Watch the vid. It is revealing. The clanger comes at the end.
Further, along these lines, Robert Grenier in Al Jazeera has a different take. He argues that Obama knew from the beginning that the strategy would fail (which suggests that he understood it sufficiently) but implies that he always and ever making a token gesture, to allow a speedy withdrawal commencing next year, with a filigree of honour intact.
If so, this would make Obama nefarious beyond belief: on this account he would be cynically using the military for his own short term political ends--treating them as little more than cannon fodder--yet all the while insisting publicly that he was taking his time making a decision in order to get the strategy right.
Ironically, just as the scandal was beginning to brew and before either of us knew anything about it, a former colleague and I were bemoaning the state of affairs in Afghanistan.
"Do you suppose there's anyone in command at this point," he said, "who doesn't know this strategy can't work?"
With a moment's thought, I replied that my guess - and it was only that - was that the civilian leadership in Washington has known, or at least strongly suspected, that its strategy was unworkable from the time the new policy was announced by the president on December 1, 2009.
Why else would they put it on an impossibly short timeline, and announce a date for its essential abandonment 18 months in advance?
The fault of General McChrystal and the military leadership in Afghanistan, on the other hand, is that they honestly believe they can succeed, and are thinking - and acting - accordingly.
One is put in mind of the press accounts of the first briefing provided by General McChrystal at the start of the latest Afghan policy review. When on the first presentation slide McChrystal indicated that his objective was to "defeat the Taliban," the statement was greeted with shocked silence by the civilians viewing it at the Washington end.
It apparently had not occurred to them that the general, at that late date, might still be pursuing the objective given to him by his president not six months before.
The fact that he might still believe now in what he is doing, and might be a little resentful of those who fail to back the stated policy of their own administration, ought not to come as a great surprise to those who lack McChrystal's forthrightness.
Make no mistake: I believe that the strategy championed by General McChrystal is deeply, indeed fatally, flawed.
Despite my profound personal respect for him, I view his confidence that he can successfully conduct an effective counterinsurgency campaign, on a massive scale, acting as a proxy for a hopelessly compromised and inept government, and do so with conventional military forces ill-suited to the task, as disastrously misplaced.
McChrystal's strategy, however, has been formally accepted by the administration - at least nominally - even if they refuse to grant him the time clearly required to carry it out on its own terms.
If the president and those around him do not have faith in the efficacy of current policy, as they manifestly do not, they should at least have the grace to say so, given the lives, resources, and prestige at stake, and move to an alternative course.
If they do not have a fall-back plan, as it appears they do not, they should develop it.
I have expressed my own views as to what that fall-back plan should look like, and surely will again. But as the administration considers where to go from here, it ought to steal a page from the man whose perhaps naïve candor is about to be punished, and try a little simple honesty.
Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. He was also the director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre.
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