Meet The New COIN Boss, Same As The Old COIN Boss

By Steve Hynd

Wow. News sources are reporting that President Obama has canned General Stanley McChrystal and designated General David Petraeus as his replacement, after a Rolling Stone article that quoted McChrystal and his staff making disparaging remarks about Obama and other senior officials. Presumably, Petraeus will now double-hat as CENTCOM/COMISAF.

According to some reports, McChrystal won't even return to Kabul, with his personal effects being flown to him in the U.S.

I honestly thought Obama wouldn't sack McChrystal, especially after the language used by Gibbs and Gates. I've rarely been happier to have read the tea-leaves wrong and have to think the surge of opinion among military types and pundits that McChrystal had to go influenced Obama's eventual decision.

The appointment of Petraeus obviously means the strategy will continue pretty much unchanged - Obama has just doubled down on the occupation of Afghanistan and on COIN as an operational gambit. But this leaves the teflon General sitting with his ass publicly on the line, pursuing his disciple's impossible dreams in Afghanistan. Bye-bye any chance of Petraeus 2012.

And just wait until Petareus starts up seriously on his campaign to ignore Obama's 2011 "beginning of a drawdown" date...

Update: CNN is apparently reporting that Petraeus won't remain as CENTCOM chief, so it's an effective demotion for him. No news yet on who might replace him there. And Bernard Finel gets it right: "We are continuing to over-emphasize personalities rather than strategy."

Update 2: as usual, Adam Serwer has an astute post that absolutely nails the dynamics at work here:

Liberals were hoping that McChrystal's departure would offer an opportunity for the administration to rethink a strategy which some suspect was adopted largely due to political pressure to continue the mission.They point to the recent difficulties in Marjah as evidence the strategy isn't working to dislodge or weaken the Taliban, and maintain that the structure and corruption of the Afghan government is an intractable problem. At the very least, they would have liked a serious reevaluation of the viability of the current counterinsurgency strategy.

The appointment of General Petraeus is likely to squelch any such discussion before it gets started. The near superhero status Petraeus enjoys isn't simply due to his intelligence or capability as a leader -- its also the result of media mythmaking about the Iraq War. Despite the ease with which the country has come to adopt the narrative that the 2007 troop escalation and the shift to a counterinsurgency strategy singlehandedly turned the Iraq War around, it remains untrue. As Michael Cohen helpfully continues to remind us, there were a number of factors involved, including ethnic cleansing in Baghdad, the Sunni tribes turning on al-Qaeda's affiliate in Iraq and the Sadr ceasefire.

These things are complicated though, and it's easier both for the press and for the general audience to shoehorn the complicated story of the turnaround in Iraq into a single epic narrative starring a indomitable warrior-hero, and the media won't be able to resist the temptation to call this a sequel. The problem with flattening these things into facile narratives is that it dissuades Americans from thinking critically about the implications -- both moral and practical -- of important policy decisions. Which--aside from his admirable record--is surely part of why Petraeus was chosen.

With Petraeus' appointment, Obama is hoping the "epic narrative" will replace a renewed public debate on the direction of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. At a time when every indicator there is a bad one, he didn't want that debate.