Afghanistan: The Rift Between Gen. McChrystal and the Obama White House

What do you get when a media is hungry for news and there isn’t any? What do you get when an opposition is looking for anything—anything at all—that they can whine and cry there way to a victory in the next election?

Well you get the types of talking heads and Reich-wing bloggery that looks a lot like what our own CitizensForHonestGovernment writes, and Neocons, that should be silent for the inept handling of both Iraq and Afghanistan wars, say.

The now famous “dithering” remark by former Vice President Dick “never go hunting with me” Cheney (who went looking for Bin Laden in the wells of Iraq) are being echoed from the likes of Bill “I’ve never been right on a single foreign policy issue ever” Kristol and other right-wing cattle.

Fox News “analysts”, “contributors” and news actors have all made such a phony spectacle of the pseudo-rift between what McChrystal asked for and what the White House is giving him, that it’s just preposterous.

And of course where the Fox leads the brainless hounds follow.

If you listen to the right, and (sadly) actually take them seriously, you’d think Obama is playing golf and wasting time instead of just giving the General what he wants.

You’d think that all McChrsytal wanted were more troops. And you’d blame Obama for taking too long to decide whether or not he will oblige the General’s request.

As always things are not as simple as the right wishes they were.

In the statement McChrystal made, he did ask for more troops, but he did also say something else. That “something else” gets lost in the simplification (or whine-ification) of the General’s request.

Here is the most important part of General McChrystal’s request:

[I]t must be made clear: new resources are not the crux. To succeed, ISAF [the NATO command in Afghanistan] requires a new approach -- with a significant magnitude of change -- in addition to a proper level of resourcing. ISAF must restore confidence in the near-term through renewed commitment, intellectual energy and visible progress.

What it is saying in the bold text are the important parts.

“New Resources are NOT the crux”. What that means is that troop levels aren’t the root of his request.

What is needed more importantly than the additional troops is “a new approach”, a “significant” “change” in strategy, plus the new troops.

He is saying we need a new plan and more troops.

Currently NATO plus U.S. troops out number Taliban troops 12:1 and we are still getting our butts handed to us. We just had the bloodiest month of the war since it first started in 2001.

Just additional troops is not sufficient in achieving the goals set in Afghanistan, we need a new plan as well.

So a plan is what the White House was been formulating.

The Reich-winggers prefer the way things were done under Bush. They want a surge of troops first and a strategy we can figure out later.

But fortunately for us the Obama Administration would actually like to end the war sometime during their term. This administration has no friends in Halliburton and actually cares for the troops enough to not send them in without a plan.

Does anyone remember what happened in Iraq after the mission was accomplished?

Let me tell you.

While Bush and Cheney were celebrating the “Shock and Awe”, the Iraqis fell into a civil war, because the only plan the Bush White House had was “Shock and Awe”, they didn’t bother going beyond that.

And when news organizations started being critical of the situation in Iraq, the Bush White House started attacking and threatening NBC and the New York Times, for reporting it (calling the reporting unpatriotic), instead of formulating a strategy. In hopes the troops on the ground would figure something out.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that economic policy wasn’t the only policy the Bush White House had a laissez faire attitude toward.

Obama has already sent in a surge of troops. The White House has already committed to fighting a war they have called a “war of necessity”. Now after the failure of the election in Afghanistan and the loss of control of most of the rural areas in Afghanistan, General McChrystal has recommended the White House to develop a new strategy.

And it looks like one has been formulated.

A couple of days ago the White House conducted war games to test out two plans. One plan with 44,000 troops and the other with considerably less troops, rumor has it the decision will be announced in the days following Afghanistan’s run-off election between Abdullah and Karzai.

Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton has also gone to Pakistan to discuss matters there.

Pakistan is going to play a major role with the plan to achieve victory in Afghanistan and to get Al Qaeda from within its own borders.

The rift between Gen. McChrystal and the White House has been imagined by the “so much time, so little to so” and the “we are the opposition” media.

Spencer Ackermann of The Washington Independent writes:

In a London address on Thursday, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, repeatedly defended President Obama's review of Afghan strategy; encouraged open debate on the controversial question of what to do about the bleak-looking war; recapitulated his argument that a counterinsurgency approach holds the best chance of success; and declined to answer any questions about increasing troop levels before Obama reaches a decision. Yet since then, McChrystal has been portrayed in the press as disloyal to Obama for saying anything at all, and all sides are trying to put an end to the controversy.

Now to be fair, many in the media have come out and said that Obama should take his time with the planning. In fact George WillGeorge Will, a conservative in favor of a more aerial war, has said a little bit of dithering could have helped the Bush White House.

But most on the right couldn’t care less.

Can you imagine how quiet things would be if the right actually paid attention to facts and reason instead of just whining constantly about imagined problems? I’d have nothing to write about.

And that is how I think the Fox-types think as well.

“Shoot, if we don’t make up things to be pist about we won’t have anything to report. We don’t actually want to say Obama is doing something correctly.”