McChrystal’s Last War

Many years ago I became friends with the mayor of a city whose population was about 200,000 – big enough to present the city’s leader with the gamut of civic challenges. At the time I was a professor in the college of business administration of a major university. It was my custom to invite guests from the “real world” beyond the cloister of academia, the world from which I came and to which I would return, to speak to my classes. So, when teaching a graduate class on policy formulation (how to decide how to decide) I invited my mayor friend, a very savvy guy.

In his presentation he excellently described a day in the life of a mid-sized city mayor – how he dealt with issues ranging from the mundane to the unexpected – and in the Q&A session that followed, a student asked, “When facing a difficult decision, how do you know what to do?” Without hesitation, Mr. Mayor said: “I find an expert in the matter who tells me the right thing to do. Then I decide the political thing to do.”

That answer stuck with me in the decades since. The right thing and the political thing are rarely the same thing.

And so it was this week when the military career of General Stanley McChrystal essentially came to an end. In an incredible act of stupidity this talented combat general had allowed himself and his staff to be followed around by a recorder-toting, anti-war reporter for a left-wing magazine gathering damning tidbits of insolence toward civilian authority. However well-deserved those remarks might have been, First Amendment free speech rights don’t apply to the military.

Reading the gotcha’ article that achieved a defeat by the press which the Taliban couldn’t achieve on the battlefield, I found what I would have expected to find among a group of breast-beating warriors full of bravado and guts – frat boy talk. After all, General McChrystal didn’t get to be a war commander by being a politician. He got it by achieving results. Before ascending to his present position, he commanded the secretive special ops “spook works” unit that, among other accomplishments, tracked down and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006, a truly bad guy.

McChrystal’s comments and even more those of his aides were impolitic but not insubordinate. Bush 43, Carter, and Truman had all fired commanders who challenged their policies, if not their authority. Lincoln, a longsuffering soul if there ever was one, fired the risk averse General McClellan, his senior commander, after “Little Mac” repeatedly failed to follow orders to get moving against General Lee in the early days of the Civil War. McChrystal supported the president's strategy and Obama acknowledged that this was so when he fired him.

McChrystal’s willingness to have insulting comments go on record showed tone deafness toward Obama’s prickly, thin-skinned nature. Unlike his alleged hero, Lincoln, who endured numerous overt insults from McClellan and still said that he would hold the reins of his general’s horse if he would only fight, Obama chose the political thing over the right thing. Changing generals in the middle of a war is risky. Changing generals in the middle of a surge campaign, the current operations in Marja and thereafter Kandahar, is even riskier.

While McChrystal had issued a press statement apologizing for the indiscretions reported in Rolling Stone, arguably the right thing to have done would have been for Obama to recognize that military sniping about civilian policy is commonplace in private conversations. Letting it become public was McChrystal’s sin, born out of political naiveté. If Obama had required McChrystal to stand by him and make a public apology, which Obama could then have graciously accepted while noting that he and his general had had “frank discussions,” faces could have been saved, and even more importantly, the only general who has been able to gain the confidence of enigmatic Hamid Karzai would have been saved.

Once again, however, Obama’s leadership inexperience and his inability to "suffer the slings and arrows” directed at him showed through. In his Rose Garden announcement this week that General Petraeus would replace McChrystal, Obama said, “I [do not] make this decision out of any sense of personal insult.” (Yeah, sure.) “Stan McChrystal has always shown great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully,” however, “the conduct represented in the recently published article … erodes the trust that's necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.”

Team? What team? A team implies a group of people who work together to achieve a purpose. Obama could not have assembled a more dysfunctional bunch than the ones surrounding him.

Obama selected Karl Eikenberry to be his Afghan ambassador and Richard Holbrooke to be his special policy envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of whom would serve along side of General McChrystal. Eikenberry is a retired Lt. General, junior to and less successful than McChrystal’s accomplishments in the field. Eikenberry dislikes and mistrusts Karzai. His second-guessing, cable leaking behavior bordered on petty jealousy. He opposed McChrystal’s counterinsurgency, the Afghan troop build-up, and the surge. Holbrooke has the personality of sandpaper, doesn’t get along well with the military or the State Department, and contradicted McChrystal to the point of causing Karzai to wonder who the heck is in charge here. Not only could these three not work together, they don’t like each other.

Combine these three with Joe Biden’s assertions that “You're going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ contradictions that any troop draw down was contingent on the conditions on the ground, Rahm Immanuel’s further contradiction that July 2011 was THE date for starting withdrawal, and the flap caused by National Security Advisor James Jones’ public criticism that Karzai wasn’t doing enough to rein in corruption and drug trafficking during the Afghan president’s recent visit to Washington.

Where’s the team?

On top of all of this, we have a president who agonized for three months before he would send the additional troops that McChrystal requested for the surge, and even then sent less than the requested number with an 18-month shelf life before they would be pulled out. Obama’s West Point speech announcing the troop increase did not use the words “win” or “victory” in its entirety and neither did his Rose Garden appointment of Petraeus to take over from McChrystal.

The war is being fought with such political correctness that there are lawyers on the ground in Afghanistan combat zone telling troops what they can do and not do. In one instance, troops pinned down by enemy fire asked for an artillery round on the point of fire and were refused because of potential collateral damage. In another instance, troops pinned down asked for a artillery smoke round so they could escape. Asked if there were any civilians nearby, which there were, the round was delivered a kilometer off target, even though it is incapable of damage or injury, forcing the troops to shoot their way out of harm’s way.

Surrounded by the likes of Holbrooke and Eikenberry, the dissonance among the White House league, and the Kafkaesque circumstances under which the Afghan war is being fought, can there be any wonder why McChrystal and his snake-eating young Turks became frustrated and disrespectful?

If McChrystal was to be fired, why wasn’t Eikenberry and Holbrooke also fired and Biden and Immanuel muzzled? Why didn’t Obama confirm that withdrawal was contingent on the conditions on the ground? Did the political thing once win over the right thing?

Into this maelstrom now steps General Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command, whose theater of operations includes the Middle East, Egypt, and central Asia. In effect he will assume the duties of his subordinate commander McChrystal. There isn’t time to get another commander up to speed. Whether Petraeus will (or is physically able) to retain his CentCom role is not yet known. If not, this will be a step down for him. But given McChrystal’s firing, it is Obama’s only option – another reason to have done the right thing rather than the political thing and sought some way for accommodation with McChrystal.

Petraeus won his spurs with his counterinsurgency surge in Iraq. But there he had the advantage of a generally well-educated populace capable of forming a government and the mule-headed persistence of George Bush, which eventually translated into an Iraqi willingness to cooperate with the allies and join us in the fight against the bad guys who were blowing up a sizable number of Iraqi citizens.

As the Russians learned in the 1980s, Afghanistan is another world, almost prehistoric, with an illiterate population, mountainous terrain, no infrastructure, and a citizenry that not infrequently cheers for the bad guys. It is more lethally Islamic than Iraq. When we have been able to get local cooperation, if our troops leave, the Taliban slips back in and kills the collaborators. The Afghan army lacks discipline and leadership, often goes AWOL, and returns from military leave stoned on opium and heroin. Officers steal the pay of their soldiers. Because of widespread illiteracy, the nascent army can’t read the training manuals to learn how to use weapons. The central government is almost a fiction. And unlike the Iraqis and Bush, the Afghans who could help us help them are uncertain of Obama’s commitment to stay until they can defend themselves against al-Qaeda and the Taliban – assuming they want to.

The Afghan war has already ended the careers of two general officers – McChrystal and his predecessor, David McKiernan. Let’s hope it doesn’t end Petraeus’ too.

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