The Rest Of The Story

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Now we're off to bombing these people. We're over that hurdle. I don't think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don't see anyway of winning.

~LBJ to Robert McNamara, February 26, 1965

Reaching For Glory by Michael Beschloss

McChrystal is out and Petraeus is in but is that only part of the story?  Tom Andrews says yes:

Michael Hastings' piece is about more than an adolescent general and
his buddies' school-yard shenanigans in Kabul and Paris. It was about
a failing strategy in Afghanistan and the disconnect between how the
administration portrays the war in public and the reality of how the
war is actually being waged.

Here are three points in the Rolling Stone article that contradict
what the White House has presented to Congress and the American people
about the war in Afghanistan:

"Instead of beginning to withdraw troops next year, as Obama promised,
the military hopes to ramp up its counterinsurgency campaign even
further." A senior military official stationed in Afghanistan told
Hastings: "There's a possibility we could ask for another surge of US
forces next summer if we see success here."

General McChrystal's Chief of Operations Major General Bill Mayville,
described the war in Afghanistan as unwinnable: "It's not going to
look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win. This is going
to end in an argument."

"If Americans pulled back and started paying attention to this war, it
would become even less popular." This was how a Senior Advisor to
General Stanley McChrystal characterizes the war in Afghanistan.

While President Obama has been assuring Congress and the American
public that US troops will begin leaving Afghanistan next July, his
senior military leaders believe that if they are successful, next
summer could see a surge of troops, not a withdrawal. And the military
should be careful not to reveal what is really going on in Afghanistan
because the more Americans know about the war, the more they will be
against it.

But as Norman Solomon says When the wheels are coming off, it doesn't do much good to change the driver.

Between the lines, some news accounts are implying as much. Hours
before Gen. Stanley McChrystal's meeting with President Obama on
Wednesday, the New York Times reported that "the firestorm was fueled by
increasing doubts -- even in the military -- that Afghanistan can be
won and by crumbling public support for the nine-year war as American
casualties rise."

.......

For months, the McChrystal star had been slipping. A few days
before the Rolling Stone piece caused a sudden plunge from war-making
grace, Time Magazine's conventional-wisdom weathervane Joe Klein was
notably down on McChrystal's results: "Six months after Barack Obama
announced his new Afghan strategy in a speech at West Point, the policy
seems stymied."

Now, words like "stymied" and "stalemate" are
often applied to the
Afghanistan war. But that hardly means the U.S. military is anywhere
near withdrawal.

Walter Cronkite used the word "stalemate" in his
famous February
1968 declaration to CBS viewers that the Vietnam War couldn't be won.
"We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American
leaders both in Vietnam and Washington to have faith any longer in the
silver linings they find in the darkest clouds," he said. And: "It seems
now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to
end in a stalemate."

Yet the U.S. war on Vietnam continued for
another five years,
inflicting more unspeakable horrors on a vast scale.

I'm going to be a bit more positive than Solomon or my partner Steve.  McCrystal's problem was the fact that his plan wasn't working as much as his lose tongue. Petraeus is a smart man and he knows it's not working.  Petraeus is also an ambitious man and doesn't want to be associated with a losing effort.  Obama may have said that McChrystal's departure did not mean a change in policy - don't believe it.  There won't be any dramatic moves in public but out of the public eye there will subtle moves to find an exit - find a way to redefine victory so it won't be so painful.  McChrystal's groupies may have been talking about an additional surge in the summer of 2011 but Petraeus knows that public opinion will be overwhelming against the war by then and congress will bow to the pressure of that public opinion.  I find the fact that Petraeus accepted this assignment to be a good thing.  He will be looking for an exit from a war he knows can't be won.