"Why McChrystal Did It"
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, gave an
interview to Rolling Stone magazine in which he
and his staff insulted the civilian leaders of his country. He was
fired for insubordination by Pres. Obama. Even his defenders said
that McChrystal's remarks were impolitic and a mistake. Given the
fact that McChrystal is an exceptionally intelligent and very
ambitious person, why did he do it?
McChrystal gave the interview in order that he be fired. And why
did he want to be fired? He wanted to be fired because he knew that
the policies he was pursuing and championing in the war in
Afghanistan were not working, could not work. And he didn't want to
be the one tarnished with the public blame.
Consider the long history that led up to this interview. The
military strategy the United States forged in Afghanistan and Iraq
was originally that imposed by then U.S. Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld. The policy was one of unlimited machismo. Bomb the
enemy from way up high and don't worry about who gets killed. Use
torture on those you capture. Don't consult with anyone, even if
they are so-called allies. Occupy the country, indefinitely.
Stanley McChrystal was a one-star general at the beginning of these
wars, working in Washington as one of Rumsfeld's "golden boys." He
had a long history, since his West Point days, of being a daring
rebel who knew just when to stop - contemptuous of superiors he did
not respect but always seeking to advance himself. Rumsfeld placed
him in charge of the military's most secretive elite units, engaged
in "special operations" and known to be a "killing machine." He
performed brilliantly, as usual.
Then in 2006, if we still remember, the military, the politicians,
and the press all began to say that the United States was losing
the war in Iraq. Resistance seemed too strong, and the number of
U.S. lives lost was steadily going up month by month. The
Republicans did very badly in the elections of 2006. Something had
to be done.
Something was done. Rumsfeld was fired by President Bush.
Vice-President Cheney, Rumsfeld's strongest defender, lost
influence to Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld's
successor, Robert Gates, who championed more "moderate" views,
emphasizing diplomacy. A new military strategy suddenly gained
ground, counter-insurgency (referred to by an acronym COIN). It was
developed by a previously obscure military officer, David
Petraeus.
Petraeus is as ambitious and as driven as McChrystal but a quite
different personality. He is what might be called a military
intellectual. He won the award as the top graduate of the U.S. Army
Command and General Staff College in 1983. He got a Ph.D. in
international relations from Princeton in 1989. He taught
international relations at West Point. At the same time, he has a
long record as a seasoned combat officer. And he cultivated favor
with Washington politicians.
Since the 1980s, his published articles and reports advocated
counter-insurgency as a doctrine. He drew on the experiences of the
French using it in Algeria and the United States using it in
Vietnam. As Petraeus' right-wing critics note, these were not
notable successes. COIN emphasizes the need for "winning hearts and
minds," which means necessarily incorporating diplomatic and
political considerations into military tactics. The writer of
the Rolling Stone interview, Michael Hastings,
described COIN this way: "Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace
Corps."
Pres. Bush turned to Petraeus in 2006 and allowed him to implement
COIN in Iraq. This was the famous "surge" that involved increasing
the number of U.S. troops in Iraq and changing strategy. Basically,
Petraeus did two things that did indeed reduce the amount of
violence against U.S. troops. The first was to bribe Sunni tribal
elders in central and western Iraq to cease their tacit support of
non-Iraqi al-Qaeda units. Since the Sunni sheikhs had never liked
the al-Qaeda units, they were willing to forget their dislike of
the Americans - for a price.
The second thing that Petraeus did was to permit ethnic cleansing
in Baghdad, turning a multi-ethnic city into two segregated zones,
a larger Shi'a zone and a beleaguered smaller Sunni zone. This
reduced violence against the U.S. troops at the expense of
increased inter-Iraqi violence. It also served the political
interests of the most persistent and effective opponent of U.S.
interests in Iraq, Mokhtar al-Sadr, who is emerging as the key
broker in the newly-elected Iraqi parliament.
As Hastings said in an interview with the Huffington
Post about his article, "Petraeus is sort of a genius. He
managed to turn what could have been catastrophic defeat in Iraq
into a face-saving withdrawal." But of course, a face-saving
withdrawal is not a victory, even if Sen. John McCain insisted so
when running for president in 2008 - unsuccessfully.
When Barack Obama ran for office, he said quite clearly that he was
against the war in Iraq and for the war in Afghanistan. So
obviously he had to pursue it. He promoted Petraeus, adopted COIN,
and named McChrystal commander in Afghanistan. True to his "rebel"
style, McChrystal publicly demanded 40,000 more troops from Obama
who, after months of reflection, gave him 30,000 - plus a
withdrawal date.
At this point, however, McChrystal abandoned his previous machismo
style and became the enthusiastic, perhaps over-enthusiastic,
implementer of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. He issued
super-strict directives to avoid civilian casualties, a policy not
at all appreciated by U.S. infantry units. He developed warm
relations with Pres. Hamid Karzai, whom other U.S. leaders held at
a distance. He thought he could win a quick victory in Marja and
turn the area over to Afghan forces. Instead, it was a failure. And
he recently announced that the key operation in Kandahar province,
heartland of the Taliban forces, had to be postponed until
September.
Even McChrystal's Chief of Operations, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville,
says Afghanistan will be like Vietnam: "It's not going to look like
a win, smell like a win or taste like a win....This is going to end
in an argument." Hastings ends his article this way: "Winning, it
would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley
McChrystal in charge."
So, what would you do if you were McChrystal? You'd invite a
reporter for a rock-and-roll magazine, considered to be on the
left, to accompany you on airplanes and to drink fests, and sneer
at the government. This was guaranteed to get you fired. And it
meant that the future "argument" would not involve you.
What could Obama do? He had to fire McChrystal. Then, he tossed the
hot potato to Petraeus, who couldn't refuse it. The next year or
two are going to be a fast-moving game in which Obama and Petraeus
are going to try to shift the public's blame for the defeat on the
other.
The far right, the friends of Cheney and Rumsfeld, are not fooled.
Diana West, one of their pundits, says: "The COIN nightmare
continues." For her, COIN means ordering troops "to exercise
fantasies of cultural relativism that makes lefty sense in a PC
classroom, but are nothing short of appalling on the front line." A
slightly less acerbic view was that of retired Col. Douglas
Macgregor: "The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars
to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense."
Of course, Macgregor is right. What are the policy choices? The far
right wants perpetual war. The only alternative is early and
complete withdrawal. Obama doesn't want the first and is
politically afraid to embrace the second. So he sends CIA Director,
Leon Panetta, out to give ABC News an interview, saying that making
progress in Afghanistan is "harder" and going more slowly than
anticipated. Indeed, it is.
by Immanuel Wallerstein
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm
http://www.iwallerstein.com/