Email received this morning from Afghanistan.
McChrystal trusted his luck to a Rolling Stone reporter and his staff let their guard down over a number of weeks.
I am surprised, though, that McC did not insist on resigning but rather allowed the WH to call the shots on his “dismissal.”
In the Rolling Stone article, McC. felt President Obama was “unengaged,” called Holbrooke a wounded animal fearing replacement, noted Eikenberry had “betrayed him,” said NSA Jim Jones should go, and described Marjah, his first campaign in the south, as a bleeding ulcer, according to his aides.
The Rolling Stone article spotlights the lack of confidence among his own troops to prosecute his “show-restraint” strategy and his own difficulties in selling his strategy to them. In other words, the article is damning.
No one is indispensable. Of course, Karzai called for McC’s retention because he was the only principal here who has been unfailingly polite and respectful to K’s face and, more importantly, behind his back. Sadly, Karzai is not a leader cut out of cloth that we recognize. He is a tribal leader that is positioning himself for our departure down the road. The Stone article did no favors for Pres O’s declaration of a July 2011 deadline to begin a troop drawdown by suggesting McC’s team were instead gearing up to ask for still more troops in light of the slow progress against an entrenched insurgency.
In short, this country is run by a complex, inter-locking group of criminal gangs, only some of which are insurgent and none able to take the field as a dominant, legitimate leadership group. In such circumstances, VP Biden’s strategy of keeping our troop footprint smaller should again be given a serious look…but don’t count on that to happen. Too much blood has been spilled to get us here and we will be damned to admit it was a mistake, in my opinion, as in the past.
