let the troops win what?

Ambassador Eikenberry's Cables on U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan

These uaddressed avariables include Pakistan sanctuaries, weak Afghan leadership and governance, NATO civil-military integration, and our national will to bear the human and fiscal costs over many years. The current military proposal preoperly sets aside each of these issues and many more because they are outside COMISAF's counterinsurgency mandate. Yet, in reality, each has the potential to block us from achieving our strategic goals, regardless of the number of additional troops we may send....

We have not yet conducted a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of all our strategic options. Nor have we brought all the real-world variables to bear in testing the poposed counterinsurgency plan. We agree than more trrops will yield more security wherever they deploy, for as long as they stay. But the last time we sent substantial additional forces instability in Afghanistan intensified. Also, neither ANSF nor the Afghan government has demonstrated the will or governance in any area cleared and held by NATO-ISAF. Experience with troop increases, therefore, offers scant reason to expect that further increases will permanently advance our strateic purposes; instead they will dig us in more deeply....

COMISAF has laid out the risk we face in not sending the full complement of additional troops right now. But there are competing risks, for example, that we will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves, short of allowing the country to descent again into lawlessness and chaos. Also, the demand for U.S. and allied civilian efforts in Afghanistan will only grow with the deployment of large numbers of additional troops.

To mitigate such countervailing risks, I believe there is no option but to widen the scope of our analysis to consider alternatives behond a strictly military counterinsurgency efffort within Afghanisfan.

Since the announcement Wednesday, the Stanley-out/David-in move has been hailed by Official Washington as a political master stroke, but not for the right reasons.

The conventional wisdom holds that Petraeus is the military genius who can still prevail in Afghanistan, but the real cleverness of the choice is that it dumps in Petraeus’s lap a mess that he also helped create, along with McChrystal and Obama (not to mention, Bush, Cheney, et al).

Petraeus gets a mission that virtually everyone but Sens. John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham realizes is an impossible assignment. It also gets Petraeus out of the country and, the Obama folks hope, out of contention for the 2012 Republican nomination.

Instead of possibly running against what a mess Obama has made of Afghanistan, Petraeus has been put in charge of the mess.

Despite McChrystal’s reputation as a ruthless practitioner of counterinsurgency warfare, responsible for the killing of thousands of Iraqis, the general has more recently been the target of growing criticism that the effectiveness of the operation in Afghanistan was being undermined by his excessive concern over civilian casualties.

That concern has nothing to do with humanitarian considerations. Rather, it is based on the cold calculation—the Rolling Stone article refers to McChrystal's "insurgent math"—that for every innocent person killed, ten new enemies are created.

The article, written by Michael Hastings, deals relatively briefly with the remarks of McChrystal and his aides about US civilian officials in Afghanistan. They are predictably crude, and could hardly have come as a surprise to Obama, let alone to the Pentagon. They are familiar with the fascistic and debased character of McChrystal’s entourage. Hastings concisely describes the general’s staff as “a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs.”