Patraeus replaces McChrystal; strategy in Afghanistan stays
The image of Gen. Stanley Mc- Chrystal surrounded by a motley crew of soldiers, former soldiers and spies as his closest advisers — men for whom, he tells Rolling Stone, he would die and vice versa — says something about the general and a lot about how waging foreign wars have changed.
Trying to wrest Afghanistan from the Taliban, defeat al-Qaida, and maybe kill Osama bin Laden in the bargain, makes for a different kind of war, just as the two World Wars were different from each other, Korea was different from Vietnam, and the shock-and-awe strategy that was supposed to assure quick victory in Iraq in 2003 is different from counterinsurgency tactics being pursued in Afghanistan now.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the absence of latitude given a GI to publicly challenge an officer or a general to challenge the chain of command.
Anyone who read the Rolling Stone article that turned out to be McChrystal’s undoing could see that on some level McChrystal’s subordinates understood that. While they were individually and collectively willing to skewer President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Adviser Jim Jones and a host of others, not one was recorded saying an ill word about McChrystal. Him, they referred to most often simply as “the boss.”
There’s a peculiar myopia at work in that: The boss is off limits, everyone else is fair game.
And it caught up with them once “The Runaway General” appeared in print.
McChrystal has been removed from command in Afghanistan and will be replaced by another four-star general, David Petraeus, who wrote the book on counterinsurgency. Patraeus oversaw the troop surge and counterinsurgency in Iraq before McChrystal was put in command in Afghanistan.
The fallout
McChrystal’s military career, which swung from fearless and brilliant to reckless and dangerous along its course, is effectively over. His aides, official and unofficial, can expect to find other things to do inside and outside the U.S. armed services. The fallout from getting caught up in an interview in Rolling Stone (the story did not even get the cover of Rolling Stone) will affect individual lives and entire families and will cost the nation, literally, millions of dollars.
In persuading Petraeus to return to the war zone as McChrystal’s replacement, what President Obama seems to be saying is that he does not intend for this distraction to cause a break in the continuity of the counterinsurgency strategy that McChrystal advocated and Obama adopted last year.
But what has been lost from the public discussion of the Rolling Stone article has been the story’s conclusion, which expresses serious doubt about the prospects for anything resembling “success” in Afghanistan.
This is now the longest war in U.S. history. The death toll for American troops now exceeds 1,000. The drain on the treasury will be in the trillions of dollars, and the Taliban remains firmly entrenched in much of the country.
Petraeus is popular on Capitol Hill and his confirmation is as sure a thing as anyone can find in Washington today. But the confirmation hearing will give Congress an opportunity to re-examine our goals and our prospects in Afghanistan.