McChrystal's Not The Real Problem

[spiritual_gunfighter]

Whatever else the storm over General Stanley McChrystal is about, it's not about a bunch of rude remarks from him and his staff in Rolling Stone. The world already knows that military types get drunk and sing stupid songs and make fun of their higher-ups. That's been the stuff of war -- fictional and real -- forever. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes this morning about the incredible rudeness President Lincoln tolerated -- for a while -- from Gen. McLellan during the Civil War.

The big difference, of course, was that President Lincoln was trying to win the Civil War, a just cause on which hinged the life of our nation. McChrystal is the face of Afghanistan, of American struggle and suffering in a war that we're not winning and may have no business fighting, in a place where almost no outside force has won, with a counterinsurgency strategy that has led to disaster for other nations that have tried it. Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings reveals McChrystal as a back-stabbing, trash-talking, politicking human being, and he makes you look at the facts of the war. McChrystal is not magic. He's a human being, and not a particularly pleasant representation of one. If you wanted to believe McChrystal could wave a wand over America's war in Afghanistan, Hastings forces you to see that your would-be magician is just another guy who doesn't want to read e-mail from a colleague he doesn't like.

Our problem is less McChrystal's behavior than the reality that we truly are still stuck in this war. It's this one paragraph from Hastings:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal's side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn't hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France's nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It's all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there's nothing for us there."

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/

[MichiganVote]

1. Our military is supremely sloppy. THAT is what this BS shows.

But of course Americans don't want a shot at the looking glass.

[BridgeTheGap]

2. Usually presented by the rw as "support our troops"... gross over-simplification to say the least!

The best support for our troops would be to get them the hell out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

[sinkingfeeling]

3. I think the entire article points out the hubris and contempt the Pentagon has for all of us. It's

out-of-control and doesn't want to listen to civilians nor the CIC.

[bemildred]

4. Nice piece.

General Stanley McChrystal certainly is "a problem", but he is indeed not "the problem". "The problem" goes much further back.