Why Obama should keep McChrystal on as Commander of the War In Afghanistan

Since the Rolling Stone article profiling General McChrystal came out, many Washington pundits have been calling for President Obama to fire him for insubordination. Throughout the profile, McChrystal's quotes have shown a man who expressed all too willingly that he felt he lacked support from top administration officials who disagreed with him about the Counter Insurgency strategy (also known as COIN) and the corresponding surge in Afghanistan. Now the ill-timed comments threaten to weaken his status as Commander-In-Chief, and more importantly, weaken the unified resolve to see the mission through.

McChrystal openly mocked officials such as Vice President "Bite Me" Biden and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke for advocating a purer counter-terrorism strategy with more drones and a lighter military footprint.

This is not good.  We have civilian leadership of the Armed Forces for a reason.  Sometimes in the midst of battle the good general thinks that the battle in front of him can always be won whereas the President must ask the question of whether the battle was worth fighting at all.

This flap is surely going to cause hurt feelings between the President and the General and many other Presidents such as President Truman could and did fire their generals for open disagreement.  I would not blame President Obama if he fired General McChrystal, but I think it is the wrong move.  After the lengthy review on Afghanistan's conflict, the President determined that it was a conflict worth fighting and that Counter Insurgency of "Clear, Build, and Hold" with extremely restrictive rules of engagement was the way forward.  General Stanley McChrystal literally wrote the manual.

Here's a chance for President Obama to illustrate that he's a different kind of President, that hurt feelings won't get in the way of seeing the strategy through.  The strategy might still fail, but at least we tried.  And in this era of foreign policy where the opaque goal is to not get 17 year old men with little to no employment prospects mad at you, unfortunately trying is all you can ask.

Why Obama's Afghanistan decision is the right call

Much like the Iraq surge the success of the continuation of our conflict in Afghanistan will not depend on how many troops we send to the region. What success does occur will happen largely as a result of the change of strategy.

Unlike some of my liberal colleagues, I supported the Iraq surge under President Bush, but I did so not because I believed that more troops would necessarily be the answer. My support was conditional upon a complete change of strategy. When Bush decided to make General David Petraeus, the man who helped develop counter insurgency strategy, the primary commander of the Iraq operation, I had the sense that a more sizable troop presence might help provide that security while providing our soldiers the added benefit of needed reinforcements.

The "surge" time line should be short and sweet. Personally, I only have the stomach to be militarily engaged there for 2-3 more years. I'm glad that President Obama did not adopt the McChrystal strategy wholesale as some of the area's extremely mountainous regions will never be able to be "held" by military forces. Afghanistan is the kind of terrain that is designed for extremely light special forces in the hills and a more traditional army presence in the major population centers. (Thank you Vice-President Biden for that policy movement)

We owe this to Afghanistan. We totally messed them up in the 80's when we used them to fight a proxy war with the Soviet Union, and our Central Intelligence Agency trained a promising young upstart in guerilla warfare named Osama bin Laden to do so. Anyone ever heard of him? I thought so. I would much rather have a communist Soviet Union than Islamic terrorism be the primary enemy of the United States, you can at least negotiate with a COUNTRY. However, I digress.

We again messed Afghanistan up in 2002-2005 when we actually did some good to start by ousting a terribly repressive regime. But then we sent a large majority of our forces there to fight a completely unnecessary war in Iraq. Now you can see why the war in Iraq was doubly stupid. Anyway, we are there now, and we owe the people of Afghanistan a good faith attempt at helping them create a civil society, one where women and girls go to school, one where literacy rates are higher, one where there's more subsistence farming and less poppy farming (perhaps more on that later), and where they have a government that can respond to their needs.

Again, I believe we owe them this shot at a workable stable country. They don't get a free police force for eternity as some would like. The Afghanistan Government gets 2-3 years to shape up, with substantial help. If they can't do that hopefully Afghans will remember the time that America tried to help rather than refer to the time "The Americans left again."

Let's hope.

Please look to my fellow blogger PaleThunder for an articulate argument of his concerns.

Put your money where your mouth is

Do you believe we should work to lower the deficit?
Do you support a troop surge in Afghanistan (estimated at $1M per solider / per year)? Great.

Now pay for it.

Dubbed the “Share the Sacrifice Act,” the six-page bill exempts anyone who has served in Iraq or Afghanistan since the 2001 terrorist attacks as well as families who have lost an immediate relative in the fighting. But middle-class households earning between $30,000 and $150,000 would be asked to pay 1% on top of their tax liability today — a more sweeping approach than many Democrats have been willing to embrace.

Hat tip to Matthew Yglesias at ThinkProgress. Read the full post here.

Why I support President Obama

Hillary Clinton, explaining the Afghanistan review process to Charlie Rose.



As I've said to friends before, it's not the what that President Obama does in office it's the how.

Would I like to see a healthcare bill with a reasonable public option pass (perhaps in states that only have one or two insurers)? Yes.
Would I like to see some sort of viable carbon tax bill pass? Yes.
Would I like to see the President move more forcefully on repealing the ban on gays in the military? Yes.

Even if he failed on all of these fronts (which there's a strong possibility he might) I would still support him. Why? That's sounds completely illogical.

Because I supported the President not for the decisions he makes but for how he goes about it. He's deliberate and incisive and seeks multiple opinions outside his own, just ask Republicans Olympia Snowe, Chuck Grassley and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

All I ask is that our President, regardless of party, thinks through every decision he or she makes with care and with all of the information and opinions available. There's so much pressure on Obama to make this decision and view it as some sort of insight into his strength or weakness as a leader.

Look guys, we all get it. Democrats are pussies who are afraid to fight wars (although you might want to refer to Presidents Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Kennedy/Johnson). Our soldiers don't deserve a leader who thinks he kicks ass just because he made a quick and final decision. They deserve a leader that puts their safety above his own ego.

It's time for Europe and NATO to step up

NATO and I agree with General McChrystal that perhaps the only winnable strategy in Afghanistan is one that involves a major counterinsurgency effort. I also agree that President Obama should approve General McChrystal's troop request of 40,000. However, I do NOT agree that all of those troops should be American.

NATO defense ministers comprising leaders from many of our allies have apparently voiced their support. Here's my message to them:

If you believe this mission is the right one and needs to be resourced more fully, then by all means send in the troops. But nicey nice Barack doesn't come for free. He comes at a price to you, to NATO, to Europe and the rest of the world. If you don't want the U.S. to be a bully single-handedly going around the world telling other countries what to do, then it's time to step up and become a part of the solution - and that includes military help.

The left in Europe agonized over the genocide in Darfur and Rwanda, yet most European countries wouldn't ante up the troops to stop the violence. The U.S. was just as bad on the genocide front but we made the right call in Bosnia and in Somalia (just because we had trouble in Somalia doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do).

In his address to Congress in November of 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said, "Let me tell you solemnly today: France will remain engaged in Afghanistan as long as it takes, because what's at stake in that country is the future of our values and that of the Atlantic Alliance. For me, failure is not an option. Terrorism will not win because democracies are not weak, because we are not afraid of this barbarism. America can count on France."

If the election of President Obama means the era of the unilateral superpower is over, then it's time for Europe to step up and embrace its new role and act on its words.