{"id":3083,"date":"2010-06-24T05:48:39","date_gmt":"2010-06-24T10:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=3083"},"modified":"2010-06-24T05:48:39","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T10:48:39","slug":"insiders-view-of-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=3083","title":{"rendered":"Insiders view of Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Email received this morning from Afghanistan.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>McChrystal trusted his luck to a Rolling Stone reporter and his staff let their guard down over a number of weeks.<\/p>\n<p>I am surprised, though, that McC did not insist on resigning but rather allowed the WH to call the shots on his &#8220;dismissal.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>In the Rolling Stone article, McC. felt President Obama was &#8220;unengaged,&#8221; called Holbrooke a wounded animal fearing replacement, noted Eikenberry had &#8220;betrayed him,&#8221; said NSA Jim Jones should go, and described Marjah, his first campaign in the south, as a bleeding ulcer, according to his aides.<\/p>\n<p>The Rolling Stone article spotlights the lack of confidence among his own troops to prosecute his &#8220;show-restraint&#8221; strategy and his own difficulties in selling his strategy to them.  In other words, the article is damning.<\/p>\n<p>No one is indispensable.  Of course, Karzai called for McC&#8217;s retention because he was the only principal here who has been unfailingly polite and respectful to K&#8217;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&#8217;s declaration of a July 2011 deadline to begin a troop drawdown by suggesting McC&#8217;s team were instead gearing up to ask for still more troops in light of the slow progress against an entrenched insurgency.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s strategy of keeping our troop footprint smaller should again be given a serious look&#8230;but don&#8217;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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Email received this morning from Afghanistan. McChrystal trusted his luck to a Rolling Stone reporter and his staff let their guard down over a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}