McChrystal’s Macchiavellan Plan
Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Politics, Porchy | Comments Off
- Image via Wikipedia
Just wanted to quickly add that, although, I’m a few days behind on this stuff, but the high mischief commented on here and on the follow through link was floated here as well. I mean right here, on Porch Dog:
…the interviews that made the story possible were done over months and it’s fairly clear that McChrystal was using Rolling Stone as a way of forcing this debate. There’s also the possibility that with a recent downturn in McChrystal’s success he’s anxious to have someone else be the general in charge if the whole thing falls apart.
Although, as usual Thomasky does it better as does the person he links too…and it was Thomasky original post on the topic that inspired the line of thinking above, so I’m surprised that he need to wait for Jim Sleeper to say it first.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think McChrystal being a registered Democrat is too compelling a reason to not try to jump ship and preserve his own legacy. Certainly he wants to appear in history books as neither failing nor accepting without a fight a failing strategy. But I think he also has a motivation to preserve his legacy within the Pentagon where a lot is riding on the COIN upstarts. If Afghanistan fails and McChrystal is blamed then all the COIN strategists will have to start all over. McChrystal’s departure makes it clear to anyone that the White House isn’t entirely behind COIN so whatever happens in Afghanistan cannot be blamed on the entire theoretical framework that McChrystal his command to start with.
Did McChrystal See the Rolling Stone Article Before it was Published?
Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Politics, Porchy | 3 Comments
Obama explains again the chain of command to one of his military inferiors.
Well, it appears the political story of the day is General McChrystal’s write up in Rolling Stone (due out Friday) which is apparently filled with unnamed sources citing a behind the scenes brouhaha over strategy and tactics and in which McChrsytal comes across as being…insubordinate to the commander in chief.
There’s already been talk of how Obama must fire McChrsysal at this point lest he encourages further insubordination.
(See here and here). At first I was thinking this might be an over-reaction given the recent state of Afghanistan along with the White House’s move out of Iraq and reprioritization the earlier conflict.
But if this (now retracted) piece by Taegan Goddard of CQ’s Political Wire (piece was titled “mcchrystal_saw_article_before_publication.html”) is a hint of a news story to come, I think I might have to side with those recommending removal of McChrystal from the position. It would be only a temporary blow to our efforts in Afghanistan that could be lessened by keeping McChrystal on as a consultant and coordinator answering to another general.
There’s a lot of talk of McChrystal’s genius which I think is probably overstatement. The Army is full of strategically adept commanders and if McChrystal is so damned smart how did he think this was going to play out for him anyway, especially if he saw the piece prior to publication? There’s strategy everywhere not just on the battlefield and a man as smart as McChrsytal knows you can’t go around bad mouthing your commander-in-chief.
And for what it’s worth, this isn’t McChrystal’s first act of out-of-turn public speaking.
UPDATE: Michael Tomasky’s take on this, as usual, is worth the reading.
It appears that earlier reports that McChrystal had seen the story were minor misstatements. But as Tomasky points out, the interviews that made the story possible were done over months and it’s fairly clear that McChrystal was using Rolling Stone as a way of forcing this debate. There’s also the possibility that with a recent downturn in McChrystal’s success he’s anxious to have someone else be the general in charge if the whole thing falls apart.
With that in mind, this is lose-lose for Obama. If he doesn’t fire McChrystal he risks looking weak and encouraging insubordination from future commanders. If he does fire McChrystal he opens himself up to charges of putting politics before military strategy. If he doesn’t fire McChrystal and Afghanistan fails pundits can blame a military without respect for its commander. If he does fire McChrystal and Afghanistan fails, pundits will blame the firing. Obama’s best choice, as I see it, is to remove McChrystal’s command but keep him in an active role on the project so that he remains somewhat culpable.
The Curious Case of Afghanistan’s Refound Mineral Motherlode
Filed Under Afghanistan, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Politics, Porchy | Comments Off
- Image via Wikipedia
I don’t know if there was a conspiracy on the part of the DoD to feed an A1 blockbuster story to the New York Times on the potential trillion dollars in valuable minerals below Afghanistan, but I’m glad Marc Ambinder brought it up.
I’m glad because when I saw the story this morning in my RSS reader I just skipped over it. I even think a yawn escaped my mouth while my eyes rolled. I may have even said “Old news” to no one in particular. So imagine my surprise when several other bloggers I read regularly were linking to the story as if it were new, exciting, important or all three.
I don’t mean to say that it isn’t important. But my very strong feeling was that I already knew that information. And as you can see from the several links that Ambinder provides, I did.
Specifically I think I read an AP rewrite of this McClatchy story that he links to [his link is messed up though, so use mine].
I don’t really have a lot to add to this story other than the obvious: Why are major newspapers so bad at providing the kind of context we need to understand what’s going on?
And that pic of the Pentagon? I put it there because of this Zemanta doodad that just showed up in by wordpress dashboard this morning. I have no idea what it does other than provide me almost relevant pictures and links like that one, sources them and puts them right in the post. Innovation!
Pogonophobia in Afghanistan
Filed Under Afghanistan, Foreign Affairs Desk, Porchy | Comments Off
Stop giving a beards a bad name, guys!
Actually I defer to the sensible words of the FP journos (Anthony Bubalo & Susanne Schmeidel): Not all well-behaved soldiers are also clean-shaven and not all bearded ones are bad guys. I’m actually sharing this one free of commentary because I think it’s interesting.
The Intelligence Situation in Afghanistan
Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Politics, Porchy, Terrorism | Comments Off
I’ve been meaning to blog about this since last week when it was still new, lucky for us (or not) things like having a pretty shitty intelligence operation in Afghanistan hasn’t fixed itself in the last seven days or so, so this is still a worthwhile bit of knowledge.
Starks’ piece in CQ (unfortunately, as always, subscription only) lays out the fundamentals of our intelligence problems there: the Afghan terrain, settlement patterns and history has been a problem historically for all invading armies; lack of cooperation between us and our allies has meant that those who would seek to mislead us or profit off us by selling and reselling (mis)information have had an easier time of it than they should have; we don’t speak the language(s); our relationship with Pakistan is mucking things up when Pakistan isn’t taking it upon themselves to muck it up directly.
Meanwhile, experts are worried that Obama hasn’t been able to quite recognize the uniqueness of the Afghanistan problem and might therefore be incapable of devising and implementing a plan to correct our course.
Of course, correcting the course is a requirement for victory there, and while an additional 21,000 troops might help our intelligence gathering effort, it’s also true that those 21,000 troops, if they are to be as effective as 21,000 troops should be, are going to be even more dependent on an intelligence apparatus that we don’t have.
This is a real problem and one that we’ve had seven years to address but, as we all know, Iraq sucked up a lot of valuable resources and arrested the progress of the Afghanistan situation while it was still in its early stages.
Some things before leaving you to read the article on your own (if you can). I’m not quite sure that the Afghanistan situation is so particular that we need to be spending a lot of time on acknowledging its differences. It seems to me that the complications in Afghanistan are really of a set of types that can gum up intelligence gathering in lots of different places. The rural nature of the settlements, for example, is a problem with similar solutions wherever and whenever we have run across rural settlements. Language barriers always present problems of information sharing and a whole linguistics field of study is at the disposal of anyone who would like to spend the time and energy going through the journals. All places have a unique history and, again, we have the intellectual apparatus in place to solve that puzzle. Borderlands far from established law enforcement mechanisms always create character-rich lawless regions. Lack of electronic, water, food, road, health, and communications infrastructures always create very similar problems wherever that absence is felt.
Yes, it is true that Afghanistan has a history particular to it. Yes, Afghanistan has a set of particular political relationships with its neighbors. Yes Afghanistan has its own mix of languages including non-verbal communication methods. But these things are largely learnable and, as I said, the kinds of problems that face us whenever we want to set up a intelligence gathering network.
Play to your strengths! The problem is not that we don’t know how to do this, it’s that we haven’t already and that’s got us playing catch up in a crucial stage–what should arguably be our home stretch by now.
Given the importance of Pakistan in regard to India going back to their independence from Britain, it’s kind of shocking to find out that we didn’t already have an established intelligence network in Afghanistan. Or later, once it was clear that the USSR was going to be going to war in Afghanistan it isn’t clear why we didn’t have a meaty covert ops network set up there or in the aforementioned Pakistani lalwess borderland. Not that I’m necessarily advocating for robust covert operations to help our enemy’s enemy fight our wars by proxy. It’s just sort of interesting, given Reagan’s known proclivity for such things, to find out that we didn’t have something in place.
keep looking »