The Pope Mouths Off
Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic blog
22 Jun 2010
The trouble with appointing Stanley McChrystal to run the Af-Pak war was always his temperament and his history. He is a driven man, strong-headed, amazingly disciplined, extremely able in a limited fashion - and clearly unused to compromise or getting along with people as powerful as he is. Diplomat he is not. As head of JSOC, moreover, he has always regarded himself as above political management, running a part of the military that seems at times to answer to no-one, and that, under Bush and Cheney was unleashed to do whatever it wanted, including, of course, brutal torture in the field, condoned from the very top.
These qualities might have seemed appealing at first for Afghanistan. Here you had a former torturer/badass who had learned by brutal experience that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be won that way. Converted to counter-insurgency as a philosophy, he was an apostate from the Bush-Cheney approach of "kill, bomb and torture until they embrace human rights" school.
Alas, you can't take an entire philosophy of warfare and reverse it easily, especially when your own men were among the most brutal and badass of the bunch. So you find comments like this from McChrystal's men:
The Atlantic blog
22 Jun 2010
The trouble with appointing Stanley McChrystal to run the Af-Pak war was always his temperament and his history. He is a driven man, strong-headed, amazingly disciplined, extremely able in a limited fashion - and clearly unused to compromise or getting along with people as powerful as he is. Diplomat he is not. As head of JSOC, moreover, he has always regarded himself as above political management, running a part of the military that seems at times to answer to no-one, and that, under Bush and Cheney was unleashed to do whatever it wanted, including, of course, brutal torture in the field, condoned from the very top.
These qualities might have seemed appealing at first for Afghanistan. Here you had a former torturer/badass who had learned by brutal experience that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be won that way. Converted to counter-insurgency as a philosophy, he was an apostate from the Bush-Cheney approach of "kill, bomb and torture until they embrace human rights" school.
Alas, you can't take an entire philosophy of warfare and reverse it easily, especially when your own men were among the most brutal and badass of the bunch. So you find comments like this from McChrystal's men:
"Bottom line?" says a former Special Forces operator who has spent years in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I would love to kick McChrystal in the nuts. His rules of engagement put soldiers' lives in even greater danger. Every real soldier will tell you the same thing."(More here.)
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