I know this is already a day old but I was writing an evaluation of the McChrystal report as part of my list of Obama scandals and I thought I would share it. I sought to summarize the points that I and others have made about it and our presence in Afghanistan.

On September 21, 2009, a copy of McChrystal’s report was leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post which the Post then released online. The report had been completed August 30, 2009 and had been the subject of debate and disagreement in the White House and Congress. Shortly before the leak, military officials had been expressing frustration at the delay in the report’s acceptance. The leak was likely meant to increase such pressure.

The report which stresses understanding Afghanistan in depth was put together over a month by a group of a dozen mostly defense hawks, including several neocons, without any Afghanistan expertise. It stated that the US policy goal was to keep Afghanistan from becoming again “a base for terrorism.” That is an incredibly vague policy and does not take into account how conditions have changed since the initial US invasion. al Qaeda has morphed over the last 8 years into a loosely affiliated terrorist network. Despite our efforts and those of Pakistan, al Qaeda has succeeded in maintaining headquarters for its senior officials across the border in Pakistan. At the same time, it is no longer tied down to any one country and has or can move bases to other countries like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Why we need a large, comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, as the report recommends, but not in these other countries goes unaddressed and unexplained.

McChrystal defines his strategy as a two pronged approach, first to protect the civilian population rather than “seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces” and second to “elevate the importance of governance.” These two ideas while sounding good illustrate the hopelessly contradictory nature of the report. In effect, McChrystal is saying that Afghanistan’s people need to be protected from both the Taliban (the insurgents) and the central government (the crooks and warlords), the same government McChrystal seeks to preserve.

While he says, “Resources will not win this war, but under-resourcing could lose it,” he wants an unspecified increase in the number of US troops and to increase the size of the Afghan army, on an accelerated basis, to 134,000 by October 2010 and to 240,000 thereafter. The police would be increased to 160,000 for a total national security force ultimately of 400,000. This is vastly in excess of Afghanistan’s own resources to support. The report never really comes to terms with the fact that these forces who are supposed to fight the Taliban (the first part of McChrystal’s plan) are the same ones involved in all the corruption and graft (which McChrystal wishes to fight in the second part). Even less touched on is the ethnic makeup of these forces. Northern forces in the Pushtun south would be seen as hostile, not protective, and vice versa. How such forces could be integrated isn’t discussed at all. Nor is their motivation, their quality, why a few thousand Taliban are such effective fighters and hundreds of thousands of government troops are not.

McChrystal says that a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign is not primarily military in nature, that we risk “strategic defeat by pursuing tactical wins that cause civilian casualties or unnecessary collateral damage,” but the first phase of his strategy is exactly that. He envisages an upsurge in military activities during the first 12 months of his plan to “reverse insurgent momentum.”

A poorly articulated policy, an incommensurate strategy, and a poorly thought through report riven with contradictions, what we have is a war that lost its justification years ago, and politicians and generals still searching for some new reason for it or to win it. One of the most noxious aspects of empire is how persistence in error is transformed into a false contest of wills. The real act of will would be to acknowledge that Afghanistan is not central to our interests and move on.