Newsweek: Replacing McChrystal Doesn’t Change Anything (..."something like Vietnam...")

[Bluebear]

By replacing a general who was universally criticized with a general who almost can’t be criticized, President Obama pulled a political masterstroke on Wednesday. But the abrupt dismissal of Gen. Stanley McChrystal for making inappropriate remarks and the simultaneous announcement that he would be succeeded by his superior, CentCom Commander David Petraeus, papered over Obama’s real problem: the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that McChrystal championed and Petraeus virtually invented may be fatally flawed, at least as it’s practiced in Afghanistan.

Obama’s bigger problem right now is a rising tide of doubt, not only within McChrystal’s obviously stressed-out team but throughout the military and national-security apparatus, that there is any real momentum or that the policy in Afghanistan is working. COIN is based on the idea of winning hearts and minds in the local population and getting their help in rooting out the guerrillas or terrorists (in this case, the Taliban). But a number of well-informed critics say that in Afghanistan, several prerequisites for success are missing—in particular a central government with credibility, a large-enough force for the size of the country, and a local force (the Afghan Army and police) to hand things off to. “This briefs well in D.C. but you can’t operationalize it in Afghanistan,” says one critic of COIN, a military scholar who is engaged in the debate inside the Pentagon but would talk about it only on condition of anonymity so as to avoid the fate of McChrystal.

The outcome, these critics say, could be the worst of all possible worlds: no prospect of “winning” at all in an endlessly prolonged and bloody conflict in which we deceive ourselves for years that we are winning. Something like Vietnam, in other words.


http://www.newsweek.com/2010/06/24/replacing-mcchrystal-doesn-t-change-anything.html

[mix]

1. Something like Afghanistan, they surely mean.

[polichick]

2. There is no "winning" here - just endless war and endless streams of cash...

...from taxpayers to the mic. It's time for Americans to stop pretending it's anything else.

[gratuitous]

3. Newsweek is suddenly concerned with substance over style?

There wasn't much evidence of that for about, oh, eight years or so. White they call it a "political masterstroke," they now notice that there isn't much prospect for "winning" or even what "winning" might be. I wonder what's changed in the last 16 months or so that Newsweek now considers "real problems" and what looks to them like "papering" them over?

[KurtNYC]

4. if it doesn't change anything then magazines like Rolling Stone and Newsweek

are still irrelevant. Wanna know what headlines were on the internet 6 days ago? Buy Newsweek.

Then editor of Newsweek, in 2006 Joe Klein was asked point blank if he wrote "Primary Colors" and he said "no." In fact he condemned those who said he did write it including the literary professor of Vassar. Klein was pressed again and said he would stake his career on his denial of authorship of Primary Colors. Then on July 17 2006 he admitted to writing it. (Klein was a contributing editor at Rolling Stone btw). My point is MS print media is late and lacks credibility.

The fact that print media is being used in this McChrystal thing is, to me, a sign that the old guard, those within the military and US government who still think every war should be like WWII, is at work here.

They couldn't very well just hang a big sign on Afghanistan that says "War Under New Management" but that is the message.