And the McChrystal Ball Says . . .

Oh, Stanley, you have got to be one of the dumbest brilliant people I have ever heard of . . .

Just in case anyone out there has retreated under their personal rock again and somehow missed it, President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan today. Yeah, sure, offically the General "resigned," but let's face it, he was fired. Only when someone reaches that level of Government service and screws up, they're not publicly fired, they're resigned. Everybody involved gets to save a little bit of face that way, and at least some pretense can be made that the dirty laundry isn't being aired in public.

Now, let's also be clear on this from the outset: the President had no choice but to fire General McChrystal. What the man did ranks right up there with what MacArthur did that forced Truman to "resign" him. And what did McChrystal do? He shot his mouth off, and allowed his staff to shoot their mouths off, in front of a Rolling Stone reporter.

Nor should anyone make a mistake about this: the article in Rolling Stone that caused the President to fire General McChrystal was an out-and-out hatchet job from beginning to end. If you haven't read it, you really should; it is a classic example of an ill-informed reporter with an ideological agenda. To say that the author has an unflattering opinion of not only McChrystal and his staff, but of the military in general, would be an understatement. The article in question is, in tone, denigrating of the General, the people, and the institution.

On the flip side, the mind boggles not so much at the fact that McChrystal would allow a reporter, any reporter, that kind of access, but that he would, frankly, be dumb enough to allow his staff to speak that way in front of a reporter, whether or not they believed those conversations to be on the record or not. Look, it is an article of faith in the military that it is every soldier's God-given right to bitch about anything and everything, and if we were going to be completely honest, there probably wasn't anything quoted in that article that isn't being said by the troops out on the sharp end of the stick. But those are the bits of dirty laundry that you just don't air out in public.

Everyone has an opinion, but when an opinion becomes corrosive to the chain-of-command, they need to not be aired. There was nothing in that article, aside from a single snarky comment about the Vice President, that was directly attributed to General McChrystal. The problem was, however, that McChrystal allowed his staff to make those corrosive comments and, just like a politician's staff, a General's staff speaks ex cathedra for their commander. If McChrystal's staff felt comfortable enough to make the comments quoted in the article, then it is an almost sure bet that he shared those opinions.

So, the President made the only choice he could have, both to preserve the idea of good order and discipline within the military, and to once again reaffirm the notion of civilian control over the military. The President also made a good choice in dual-hatting General Petraeus as both CentCom commander and commander of our forces in Afghanistan. And the net effect of all of this?

We're still going to lose the war in Afghanistan.

The President has stated it on multiple occasions in the past, and he stated it again today when he announced McChrystal's resignation: the war in Afghanistan is vital to our national security. But he has also stated on multiple occasions in the past, and again today, that he will withdraw our troops from that country next summer. And that is why we are going to lose the war.

Does anyone else see the contradiction inherent in those two statements? If winning the war and stabilizing Afghanistan is vital to our national security, how can you then possibly say that you are going to withdraw the troops in less than a year? That would be like announcing on June 6, 1944, "Well, if we're not done by December 6, 1944, we're packing up and going home." It just doesn't make sense to say, on the one hand, that we're going to "relentlessy pursue the Taliban" and "strengthen Afghan capabilities" and then set an arbitrary end date, regardless of conditions on the ground.

The President has, in fact, told the enemy that if they only hang on until the summer of 2011, they've won. That one, single act of setting the withdrawal date renders any other initiative the President tries to institute in that Theatre moot. You can not apply diplomatic pressure on th enemy because, again, you've already told them that all they have to do is hang on until your withdrawal date. And any military pressure you try to apply is, in the end, just a waste of your soldiers' lives. Is it any wonder, then, that the soldiers might have a diminished opinion about their political masters?

Afghanistan itself is a classic example of what the military lovingly refers to as "mission creep." Our involvement there has expanded, almost inevitably, well beyond just toppling the Taliban to the State Department's favourite activity, "nation building." The problem there is that Afghanistan is never going to be a Western-style, liberal parliamentary democracy, which is what the State Department and liberals like the President want. No matter what we do - or don't do, for that matter - Afghanistan, in the end, is going to be what it has always been: a collection of provinces ruled by local strongmen who pay nominal alleigance to a weak central government that, in effect, bribes them to play along.

That is a hard thing for people whose political theories have been shaped by events that reach back through the Ages of Reason and the Enlightenment to roots that spring from Magna Carta to accept. Then again, those vast areas of the globe that don't trace their origins back to Western Europe have never played by those rules to begin with, which is also a difficult idea for people raised in our liberal society to accept. That is, nonetheless, the reality of the world we live in.

Any "solution" that we come up with to the "problem" of Afghanistan has to take that reality into account, or it is stillborn and doomed to failure before it even starts. Which is, again, why we are going to fail in Afghanistan, regardless of what General McChrystal did or did not say in front of an ideologue reporter from Rolling Stone, or what ideologues on either the Right or Left choose to beat their chests over as a result of that article.

There are those among us, who seem to get their History from the likes of CNN or MSNBC, who say that it is impossible to win a war in Afghanistan - indeed, that was a not-so-subtle subtext to the article in question - and smugly point out that no one has ever won a war in that sad, little country. But that isn't quite true. Yes, neither the Soviets nor the British at the height of their empire won in Afghanistan, but on the other hand, the Mongols and Alexander the Great did. What the latter had that the former did, and we do not, have was both the will and the understanding of the country to win. Nor did they set an arbitrary deadline on winning.

But, really, Stanley . . . you should have kept your mouth shut and reined your staff in.