Published on Saturday, June 26, 2010 by FlaglerLive.com
Firing McChrystal Isn’t Enough. Fire the War
by Pierre TristamGen. Stanley McChrystal should never have been the top commander in Afghanistan. He's a rogue and a bully, politically and militarily, and he's dishonest in the most dishonorable way: he signed off on the cover-up of the killing by his own troops of Pat Tillman, the NFL star who became an Army Ranger. McChrystal falsified the documents that lied to Tillman's family. "The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat's true action," Tillman's mother, Mary, wrote.
Tillman was one victim. But McChrystal has been falsifying the narrative in Afghanistan since becoming commander there, pretending and preaching, like Gen. William Westmoreland in Vietnam 40 years before him, that more troops and more resolve can win in Afghanistan as no foreign army has won there since Gengis Khan. More troops and more resolve have killed more troops and more civilians while sapping soldiers' faith: Some of McChrystal's biggest doubters are his own troops.
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Obama's foreign policy team is as fractured and arrogant as the French national soccer team. But the contempt isn't deserved from McChrystal, whose strategy in Afghanistan was itself predicated on the lie that there is something winnable there or something useful to win. Neither is the case.
Which is why his firing speaks more ill of Barack Obama than it does of McChrystal. Not because the firing was overdue, but because McChrystal should never have been hired, especially not in the hurried, uninformed way Obama hired him: on the advice of Pentagon brass, the last place a new president should have looked for advice on how to run Afghanistan after eight years of Pentagon failures there. Afghanistan required a more rational analysis of what's possible, exit strategies included, and who's best equipped to carry it through.
McChrystal, predisposed to worship the impossible as a reflection of his exceptionalism, was a man out of the Bush administration's playbook, not Obama's: McChrystal seconded Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when Rumsfeld foolishly described the falling apart of Iraq as "stuff happens," and he seconded Bush's own "Mission Accomplished" declaration that all major combat operations in Iraq were over by May 1, 2003, when they had barely begun. Obama picked him anyway, and wedded his Afghan fortune to McChrystal's idiotically acronymed "COIN" strategy-for "counterinsurgency." The strategy, a form of community policing with extra-lethal weapons and boots ready to kick down any door, was little more than the re-application of Iraq's pacification campaign to Afghanistan, as if the two countries were one and the same. They're as different as, say, New Jersey is from Nepal. But hey: they're both Muslim nations, they're both in the Greater Middle East, so how difficult could it be to fit them under the same Pentagon acronym?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/26
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