by Liam Kloef

Created on: July 03, 2010

Gen. McChrystal should’ve been removed from his position and even forced to retire, but it is genuinely baffling to see why 1) he was in charge of ground forces in Afghanistan and 2) he’s telling the press what he could’ve have told the President. 

The war in Afghanistan was a disaster from Day 1: we were after Osama bin Laden, we were after al-Qaeda, we were (ostensibly, publicly) after the directors of the 9/11 attacks, and we do what?  Bomb Kabul.  No bin Laden, no al-Qaeda; just a blind lion at the Kabul zoo.  Well, you never know! 

Oh, sorry: when the President and minions said bin Laden, I didn’t know they meant the Taliban.  Well, you see, the Taliban harbors al-Qaeda.  I get it: the Afghans traditionally despise foreigners (ask Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and the Soviet Red Army), Taliban is Afghans, but for some reason they like al-Qaeda, yet another band of foreigners (Saudis, Syrians) inching into their land.  That’s a stretch, although we’d been funding the Taliban for five years in 2001, just happy somebody stopped that endless ethnic strife after the Soviets left. 

OK, enough already: pounding back the Taliban was a pleasant diversion from the real work, wasn’t it?  Then so was plunking old Karzai into the President’s chair.  Fine: Karzai’s the Afghan Chalabi: a guy accustomed to stroking the backsides of American influence peddlers for cash.  Of course, then we gotta fight all those ethnic warlords, the Northern Alliance, which always thought eradicating al-Qaeda (foreigners) was a far more worthy endeavor than beating back the Taliban.  A couple more diversions: we’ll get to what’s his name eventually.

 Now eight-plus years later, we’re still subsidizing this drug lord Karzai, and because he’s too whacked out to care, we need to take on all his enemies, foreign and domestic.  Suddenly, there’s special ops. stud McChrystal and his “clear, hold, build” strategy; the press just can’t enough of him; and, later, as we know, he can’t get enough of the press.

 Our guys clear the district of the enemy, hold them off, and build up our idea of the good life.  Of course, no one at home, no one in the press, and about two guys in the policy department realize that this sorta thing has not been and cannot be accomplished by an occupying Army.  There is

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