Un-uniformed insurgents who know the terrain like the back of their hands, who can withdraw to safe havens, who have intelligence networks at the village level and who face an enemy far from home, stretched thin by economic and impatient political reality, have a massive advantage, especially as time passes, year by year. Add a nation that has never really functioned at a national level, is defined by tribalism, and where those in power immediately and completely soak their corrupt hands into public coffers and give themselves the juiciest plums of economic development. Spin plays a factor too: when the big bully uses technology with a killing radius that always inflicts civilian collateral damage, make sure the people – hell, the world – knows about it. And without that technology, the badly outnumbered foreigners don’t stand a chance of prevailing. But shame them into curtailing using the only tools they have… let them cut off technology under the guise of “winning the hearts and minds” of the locals, and sit back and wait. This land is yours.
Generals hate announcing time lines for withdrawal for obvious strategic reasons, but that was official Obama policy. General Stanley McChrystal was dumb enough to criticize the civilian leadership openly, most recently in a June 25th Rolling Stone article, where McChystal’s past statements were followed up by words which his Commander-in-Chief found to be insubordinate. Bye-bye General McC – relieved of command. Try these excerpts on for size:
Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of "Chaos-istan."…
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. "I never know what's going to pop out until I'm up there, that's the problem," he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
"Are you asking about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal says with a laugh. "Who's that?"
"Biden?" suggests a top adviser. "Did you say: Bite Me?"…
Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better.
The rules of engagement promulgated by McChrystal in the year he has led the Afghan campaign – an effort to stem the bad publicity that negated the U.S. efforts in that theater of war by curtailing civilian casualties – have also come back to undermine his leadership. The June 22nd New York Times illustrates: “Riding shotgun in an armored vehicle as it passed through the heat and confusion of southern Afghanistan this month, an Army sergeant spoke into his headset, summarizing a sentiment often heard in the field this year… ‘I wish we had generals who remembered what it was like when they were down in a platoon,’ he said to a reporter in the back. ‘Either they never have been in real fighting, or they forgot what it’s like.’ … The sergeant was speaking of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and the circle of counterinsurgents who since last year have been running the Afghan war, and who have, as a matter of both policy and practice, made it much more difficult for troops to use airstrikes and artillery in the fight against the Taliban.”
The fact remains that absent an American willingness to commit to decades of a vastly larger military presence in Afghanistan – while attempting to create a new economy built on the region’s vast mineral resources at the expense of opium farms – the military effort in Afghanistan is doomed to failure, as it has been since the first day President Obama took office and inherited this debacle. The Taliban harbored our enemies, the al Qaeda operatives who took down the Twin Towers and almost destroyed our Pentagon. They ruled in Afghanistan, and our attacks crippled their government and toppled them from office. We could have stayed to clean up the mess and withdrawn, but instead we withdrew most of our troops and sent them to fight the false war in Iraq long before the clean-up was completed. And this gave the Taliban and other insurgents the time they needed to replant the insurgency that we cannot topple with any form of military activity that the American people will tolerate. We blew it, plain and simple.
It’s not about McChrystal – a general who seemed to lack the good judgment not to criticize his bosses in public – it’s about a war that we simply cannot afford to win, that is draining our coffers to the delight of our enemies at a time when that money is desperately needed for domestic issues. Americans have a bad habit in believing in miracles, that people who have behaved in a particular way for centuries will suddenly change and do what we think is best for them. When that doesn’t happen, and when there is truly no hope that our efforts will succeed along the lines we hoped for, Americans just don’t know how to stop and withdraw. The Afghan theater cannot be stabilized along the lines that two administrations have attempted to implement. And since the patience of decades of additional troop deployment is politically unsustainable, Mr. Obama, it’s truly time to leave Afghanistan. If the Taliban mount another offensive against our cities and towns, you will know what to do… and it isn’t occupying a land recent history has shown cannot be subdued by outsiders with short-term goals.
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