Two Questions

Stanley McChrystal, or someone speaking for him anyway, called Obama weak and the French gay. Also, the Vice-President was instructed to bite an aide. That is gist of the controversy stirred up by Rolling Stone's profile on the brilliant, balsy, nunchuck-wielding, man-child of a general.

But what the kerfuffle over the name calling has overshadowed within the piece, and what leads me, much more than the insubordinate bravado of a commander, to despair, are paragraphs like this one:

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

And this one:

In the first four months of this year, NATO forces killed some 90 civilians, up 76 percent from the same period in 2009 – a record that has created tremendous resentment among the very population that COIN theory is intent on winning over. In February, a Special Forces night raid ended in the deaths of two pregnant Afghan women and allegations of a cover-up, and in April, protests erupted in Kandahar after U.S. forces accidentally shot up a bus, killing five Afghans. "We've shot an amazing number of people," McChrystal recently conceded.

And this one:

This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal's counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we've backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. "He's been locked up in his palace the past year," laments one of the general's top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal's desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. "General," he called out to McChrystal, "I didn't even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!"

And then, from the reliably dour Juan Cole:

Obama needs to define an attainable goal in Afghanistan and then execute it swiftly. As it is, when he is pressed about what in the world we are doing there, he retreats into Bushisms: “So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That’s the goal that must be achieved.”

Well that isn’t a good enough reason to be in Afghanistan. There is no al-Qaeda to speak of in Afghanistan. And although insurgents and Taliban probably control about 20 percent of the country, they have not let al-Qaeda set up shop in their territory. If they don’t now, when they obviously need all the help they can get, why would they in the future? One major guerrilla leader, Gulbadin Hikmatyar, went from expressing willingness to fight under the banner of al-Qaeda to roundly condemning the radical Arab group for having gotten the Taliban overthrown.

As for Pakistan, the US presence in Afghanistan is not necessary to partnering with Islamabad in rooting out al-Qaeda Arabs in the Pashtun tribal belt.

In other speeches, Obama has spoken about “defeating” the Taliban. But the Taliban are by now a long-standing social formation among the Pashtun ethnic group, and are a little unlikely to be wiped out by mere military means, especially the means available to a foreign military.

A congressional investigation has even thrown up good evidence that the US itself is indirectly funding the Taliban, insofar as the USG is paying warlords to provide convoy security on roads and they are using the money to bribe Taliban not to attack on their watch.

In short, we have no idea why US troops are being sent to Afghanistan at such an accelerating rate. It isn’t to fight al-Qaeda. And if it is mainly a matter of fighting the Taliban, why should we do that? They are not going to go away, and their brand of Muslim fundamentalism is by now woven deeply into the fabric of rural Pashtun life, such that for foreign Christian troops to argue the Pashtuns out of it at the point of a gun is a fool’s errand.

Even Mr. Friedman Unit wrote this morning that he can see no logical end to this. There is, as far as I can tell, no good news to report from Afghanistan.

So I ask these two questions (not rhetorically and not with any intended snark, because I'll take hope where I can get it), but if you think we ought to stick it out in Afghanistan, or second-best, you understand and sympathize with that view:

(1) What does victory look like?

(2) How do we get there?

I have been trying to answer these questions myself for the past few years. I'm still coming up blank.

And, just for the sake of chiming in, I agree with Juan Cole on this final point:

Obama has largely misunderstood the historical moment in the US. He appears to have thought that we wanted a broker, someone who could get everyone together and pull off a compromise that led to a deal among the parties. We don’t want that. We want Harry Truman. We want someone who will give them hell. We don’t want him to say one day that Wall Street is making obscene profits when the rest of the country suffers, then the next day say that the brokers deserve their bonuses. We don’t want him to mollify Big Oil one day then bash it the next. More consistent giving of hell, please.

If Obama doesn’t fire McChrystal, he will never be respected by anybody in the chain of command that leads to his desk. Moreover, moving McChrystal out now would be a perfect opportunity to pull the plug on the impractical counter-insurgency campaign that the latter has been pursuing, which probably has only a 10% chance of success. (A RAND study found that where a government that claimed to be a democracy actually was not, and where it faced an insurgency, it prevailed only 10% of the time. Sounds like President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan to me.)