An inconvenient truth

What he did was not just an error of judgment. It bust all the military and official rules in the book. He and his aides revealed the dissent within the American side while a terrible war is still under way.

But what he and his aides said was as revealing as it was alarming; the incompetence and worse of the political and defence leaders with whom he is having to deal in DC, the fight that was (is?) going on between Biden and Clinton over strategy. The frustration which appears to have caused him to boil over is eminently understandable. But even if one might share some or all of his concerns, should he be fired?

After all, you could say that McChrystal is now mortally wounded and has undermined his own side — a general who revealed his own judgment to be monumentally poor, a general who is at war with members of his own administration, a general who didn’t even have the professional self-discipline to keep his own mouth shut and whose underlings feel able to mouth off with impunity. If this war is to be won, America has to show it is united in its resolve, with a President seen as in full command of his own united and disciplined team.

But just to say that is to reveal the problem. Because the enemy already knows that the Americans are falling apart and that the administration is in disarray over its strategy. Obama has already run up the white flag by stupidly saying the US would start pulling out next year, regardless of whether or not the Afghans were able to hold off the Taleban by themselves (although in the past few days Defence Secretary Gates has been making more bullish noises about staying the course, because as could have been predicted there is no way the Afghans will be ready to do this by next year).

For my money, the most alarming thing about the Rolling Stone piece is the perception of the troops on the ground that they are being forced to hold back in order ‘not to upset Afghan civilians’ – and as a result are losing not just their comrades but the war itself:

Almost all of the soldiers here have been on repeated combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and have seen some of the worst fighting of both wars. But they are especially angered by Ingram’s death. His commanders had repeatedly requested permission to tear down the house where Ingram was killed, noting that it was often used as a combat position by the Taliban. But due to McChrystal’s new restrictions to avoid upsetting civilians, the request had been denied. “These were abandoned houses,” fumes Staff Sgt. Kenneth Hicks. “Nobody was coming back to live in them.”

One soldier shows me the list of new regulations the platoon was given. “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force,” the laminated card reads. For a soldier who has traveled halfway around the world to fight, that’s like telling a cop he should only patrol in areas where he knows he won’t have to make arrests. “Does that make any fucking sense?” asks Pfc. Jared Putsch. “We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place. You sit and ask yourself: What are we doing here?”

The rules handed out here are not what McChrystal intended – they’ve been distorted as they passed through the chain of command – but knowing that does nothing to lessen the anger of troops on the ground. “Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we would get our fucking gun on,” says Hicks, who has served three tours of combat. “I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fucked up – either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand it themselves. But we’re fucking losing this thing.”

McChrystal shouldn’t have given that interview. But whether or not he is sacked will make little difference to the real issue here. For what the article has confirmed is that the American prosecution of the Afghanistan war is flawed, chaotic, and incompetent and will hit the buffers unless someone gets a grip. And that means fighting this war as if it really is a war and not a ‘nation-building’ exercise; and saying unequivocally that America is there for as long as it takes because, however awful and bloody this conflict is, the alternative – a jihadi-boosting defeat for the west and the Talebanisation of Pakistan – is infinitely worse.