WaPo Wants To Fire Eikenberry To Save McChrystal

By Steve Hynd

Deputy editor Jackson Deihl takes to the WaPo today to tell us something obvious and suggest a radical solution. He writes:

The countless red carpets rolled out for Hamid Karzai in Washington this week could not disguise an ugly emerging reality: So far, Barack Obama's surge in Afghanistan isn't working.

He then glosses over the many reasons for this, pinning all the blame on Afghan corruption as if civilian deaths, McChrystal's unwarranted over-optimism about "government in a box" and the very nature of a military occupation didn't count. (Really, relabelling an offensive as a "process" when soldiers with guns are running everywhere killing people isn't going to fool anyone into thinking its a "kinder, gentler war".)

Deihl also makes the standard error of imagining that military battles won in Iraq meant that the surge there worked - even as violence there is growing fast amid political factionalism that was only ever papered for a little while.

However, having pinned all the blame on the leaders that the US parachuted in to run Afghanistan - "The problem starts with Karzai" my ass - Deihl decides to shoot the messenger.

What's harder to understand is Obama's failure to fix the dysfunctionality on the American side. A pivotal player here is Karl Eikenberry, the retired general Obama appointed as ambassador. Eikenberry's relations with Karzai are bad; his relations with McChrystal may be even worse. Since January a steady stream of stories has documented their clashes over tactics, including Eikenberry's opposition to the formation of local militias and quick development projects in Kandahar. Now they are at odds over how to respond to an Afghan request for an upgraded strategic partnership, including a U.S. security guarantee. Here's another contrast with Iraq: There was no daylight between military commander David Petraeus and then-ambassador Ryan Crocker.

At a White House press briefing Monday, Eikenberry was put on the spot by a reporter who asked if he now believed that "President Karzai is an adequate strategic partner." Incredibly, the ambassador refused to offer his personal endorsement to the man he is supposed to be working with. "President Obama has expressed his confidence in President Karzai and our work together," he answered.

"Hamid Karzai is, for better or worse, the United States' man in Kabul. He can be forgiven, though, for not knowing who his man is in the United States," analyst Andrew Exum of the centrist Center for a New American Security wrote in a searing new critique of the administration's civilian strategy. Exum, who sensibly proposed that Obama "settle upon one point person for dealing with the Afghan president," asked: "Is either the ambassador in Kabul or the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan an effective interlocutor with Afghan policymakers? Is the U.S. Embassy in Kabul fully supporting the counterinsurgency campaign?"

The obvious answer to these questions -- no -- points to the first fix Obama must make if he is to save his surge.

I've already compared Exum's "searing new critique" to calling for bolting the barn doors after the horses have fled in that it begs the question of why the COINdinista gurus didn't do something about it before they started the shootin'-an'-bombin' part of the surge. But the very mention of Exum and the CNAS COINdinista mothership is significant. The COIN crowd have their knives out for Eikenberry, apparently because when the surge fails he'll be able to say 'I told you so."

Mr. Eikenberry, a retired Army lieutenant general who once was the top American commander in Afghanistan, repeatedly cautioned that deploying sizable American reinforcements would result in �astronomical costs� � tens of billions of dollars � and would only deepen the dependence of the Afghan government on the United States.

�Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable,� he wrote Nov. 6. �An increased U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan dependence, at least in the short-term.�

But, as the COINdinistas increasingly take on the tone of an ideological movement with totalitarian inclinations, the question of whether someone is "fully supporting the counterinsurgency campaign" has become the new "with us or against us". That Eikenberry played Cassandra to McChrystal's careerist hustling makes him a marked man and Jackson Deihl is happy to help plant the blades in his back.

For the rest of us, we'd do better asking which one should be fired - the hustler or the guy who expressed concerns that were subsequently validated.