Showdown at the White House

Summer certainly isn't President Obama's season. But let's give him props for the McChrystal episode. President Obama deftly handled the McChrystal flap and politically insulated himself from any (legitimate)criticism by choosing General Petraeus as the new Afghanistan war commander.

Politically, he choose the GOP's war hero, which should neutralize Republican congressional criticism. He also effectively eliminated another 2012 GOP candidate. He did this before with the appointment of Jon Huntsman, the governor of Utah, to the post of ambassador to China. If Petraeus succeeds, Obama gets the credit. If he doesn't, Petraeus doesn't acquire any political capital.

But the McChrystal situation harks back to the beginning of the administration when the Joint Chiefs of Staff tried to muscle Obama and he dressed them down, hoping this put the unrest in the military to bed. It didn't then and will not now. As today's Los Angeles Times article underlined, the America military has become politicized and at the military academies there is peer pressure to identify oneself as a Republican.

In the case of McChrystal, he had been a favorite of Dick Cheney and Sy Hersh makes the charge that McChrystal actually engaged in politically apoproved assassinations for the vice-president. Whether true or not, to have a military basically immune from congressional oversight and budget restraint encourages it to act independent of civilian control.

Recently, the military has been balking at Obama's timetable of drawing troops down by the summer of 2011. Unfortunately, this episode will raise this issue and not a debate over the whole Afghanistan adventure in general. There is something profoundly misguided with the current COIN strategy since it is based on the French experience in Algeria--which they lost--and our Vietnam experience--which we lost. When President Obama reviewed the Afghan policy , the Pentagon and McChrystal in particular advocated a $1 trillion program with an escalation of forces in the neighborhood of 100,000 plus and a lengthy commitment. While Obama righfully rejected this option, he never seemed to question the basic premises of the COIN doctrine in general. The Rolling Stone reporter who recorded McChrystal's comments said in an interview today that President Obama seemed not to truly understand what counter-insurgency meant to the military.

What has occured in Afghanistan is an amazing disproportionate allocation of resources. The military operation exceeds by many times the GDP of the entire country, while our USAID programs are miniscule to our military effort. This is symptomatic of our foreign policy in general, which has grown too top heavy with the military dimension and atrophied at the level of diplomacy and economic assistance. From an operational point of view, the military is the thousand pound gorilla in the room, pushing aside the other vital elements to policy. Just as an example, the PR effort of the military in Afghanistan totally eclipses our embassy efforts. So local political players know to play our military off our diplomats as witnessed by Karzai's embrace of General McChrystal. The net effect of this is to neutralize our other efforts to stabilize the political situation by other means.

The only positive thing appears to be President Obama's recalibration of what constitutes a satisfactory outcome in the country, which seems realistic and tangible. But this doesn't satisfy the military, who embrace words like "victory". I expect considerable tension on this issue for the next two years.

But for today, President Obama clearly showed he's the Commander-in-Chief, reinforcing civilian control over our miltary.