There is something surreal about the rise and fall of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, opines AIJAZ ZAKA SYED.
The dramatic departure of the US and NATO commander in Afghanistan has drawn inevitable parallels with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, arguably World War II’s most brilliant commander and America’s top commander in yet another forgotten war on a forgotten front.
Like Gen. MacArthur, who defied President Harry S. Truman to expand the Korean War into China bringing on his own fall, McChrystal has been brought down by his own hubris. He grew too big for his shoes taking the stories of his own brilliance as a commander and military strategist seriously.
If the success in the World War II and Korean War went to Gen. MacArthur’s head, the brutal “success” in Iraq and the subsequent lionisation in Afghanistan seem to have affected Gen. McChrystal excessively.
In a fleeting moment of weakness, the general lost sight of the fact that the real boss and commander in chief is the president. A costly mistake first made by the other Mac in the Korean War and paid for it dearly.
If Obama had chosen not to act, he would have been seen as a wimp, even a sissy by the gun-toting Americans who love their wars and take their commander in chief and his job to rule the world rather seriously.
Besides, those tearful tributes in Western media – and even in the Middle East – to Gen. McChrystal are exaggerated and far from justified.
Some Afghan and Pakistani officials have waxed eloquent about McChrystal’s “humanitarian concerns” recounting how the general helped bring down civilian casualties. They would do well to visit Kim Sengupta’s shocking revelations in the UK’s Independent daily this week detailing how the “hero” of Afghan war played a killer in Iraq.
For five years, the two-star general and his trigger-happy boys sat in a secret command centre and used the banks of television screens and controls to kill at will, blindly and remotely targeting densely populated civilian areas.
No wonder they called it the Death Star or Kill TV because you could “just reach out with a finger and eliminate” somebody. This is how the Special Forces eliminated tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and “usual suspects”. This is how the toll of civilian casualties crossed over a million in Iraq. And this is precisely why McChrystal was picked up by Gen. David Petraeus and his bosses in Washington for the top job in Afghanistan. So much for the general’s celebrated approach of “courageous restraint” and peacemaking in the badlands of Afghanistan!
If McChrystal had asked his boys to go easy, as some claim he did, in raining death on unsuspecting people on the ground, it beats me why innocents still continue to get killed in Afghanistan. Just Google and see how many civilians have paid with their lives in the West’s directionless, disastrous war.
Between 5,000 to 8,000 civilian deaths have taken place this year alone as a direct result of coalition strikes, as against 4,000 to 6,000 victims of insurgent attacks. This June has been equally disastrous and deadliest month for the coalition since the invasion.
So no matter who leads the Western coalition in Afghanistan, little is going to change on the ground. Let’s face it: This is a lost cause, if ever there was one. This war was lost even before it was launched. A mission impossible, if ever there was one. McChrystal knew this.
In fact, as Ray McGovern has argued in a scathing piece, McChrystal might actually have wanted to be fired – and rescued from the current March of Folly in Afghanistan, by shooting off his mouth about “the wimps in the White House.”
The sooner Obama confronts this reality, the better for him and for everyone concerned. Especially when this mess is not of his making. It beats me why someone who stuck out his neck to courageously oppose the attack on Iraq and even voted against it as a senator should stick to his guns on Afghanistan and is determined to fight a lost war.
In the face of unprecedented euphoria around the world over his historic election, the Nobel Peace laureate president has chosen to go along with the fiction that this is a “good war.” A war variously promoted as the war on terror to a mission to promote democracy and freedom, depending on who is spinning the Goebbelsian wheel.
However, nearly a decade on, the coalition is still fighting in the dark and is nowhere near victory or at least a face-saving mission-accomplished kind of withdrawal.
A new Newsweek opinion poll survey warns that Afghanistan is fast eating into Obama’s popularity ratings. A huge and disturbing majority – 53 per cent – now disapproves of the way Obama has handled almost every major challenge confronting his administration – a complete reversal from only four months ago.
More important, while a full 50 per cent of Americans approve of his handling of the McChrystal disaster, the controversy and the general’s views on Afghan mission have raised serious doubts about the war in American minds.
What was once a “good and right war” for much of the US establishment – as against the disaster of Iraq – is now being increasingly questioned at home and around the world.
Worse still, no one including the Americans seems to have a clue what this war is all about any more and what the goal posts are, if any, of the Western coalition.
As the Rolling Stone story has reminded the Americans, Afghanistan has now beaten Vietnam to become the longest running US war. Even after pouring trillions of dollars into this bottomless pit, victory eludes the mightiest army on the planet and its powerful allies.
And the longer US and other Western powers refuse to face this reality and the imminent outcome of this war, the greater the cost for both sides. If Obama doesn’t act now, Afghanistan is sure to end up as his Vietnam. Perhaps even worse. It’s nearly there already.
Why’s it so hard to see that Gen. David Petraeus cannot possibly succeed at something the much-decorated Gen. McChyrstal failed? Especially when McChrystal is preceded by a long line of failed foreign commanders. Not for nothing Afghanistan is called the Graveyard of Empires. Obama would do himself and America a great favour by getting the coalition out of Afghanistan sooner than later.
It may be a bitter pill to swallow but the West has no option but to reach out to Afghans and engage their real leaders if it wants to get out without egg on its face. Just a change of command is not going to end America’s woes in Afghanistan. It’s time to cut and run from Vietnamistan, Mr. President. Now!