Obama Can't Fire McCrystal

Barack Obama’s problem with top Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal is one of his own making.

McCrystal and his staff – in a much-ballyhooed article in Rolling Stone set to be published on Friday – are reportedly disdainful and disrespectful to the White House, Afghanistan envoy retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry and Vice President Biden. That they were cannot be an accident. McCrystal (and his boss, Gen. David Petraeus) were uncharacteristically vocal in the months Obama pondered his Afghanistan strategy. They didn’t trust Obama then, and don’t now.

Obama chose McCrystal to command the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan (read “nation-building” for “counterinsurgency”). Both McCrystal and Petraeus (who helped draft the plan) agreed with President Obama’s July 2011 deadline for the campaign.

But it was – and is metaphysically impossible for the plan to work, as Petraeus and McCrystal both knew. A counterinsurgency can succeed, but only with an open-ended commitment to it, and a decisive action to end the involvement of out-of-country allies of the insurgents.

Simply put, basing a strategy on nation-building is the catastrophic mistake that George W. Bush made in Iraq that Obama is now compounding in Afghanistan.

First, you cannot defeat an insurgency without providing both long-term security and offering a form of government more attractive to the populace than the insurgent offers. Neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan is there such a form of government offered – far less credibly offered – to the population. And in neither place can we offer security for any length of time past the moment the last US trooper climbs into a truck to head to the airport for a flight home.

Second, neither Bush in Iraq or Afghanistan nor Obama in the latter has been willing to even admit that Iran and other nations’ intervention in support of the insurgents in both countries is the deciding factor in the insurgents’ campaigns. So long as the outside support pours in, the insurgents stay on the attack. And so they will in Afghanistan, long past the July 2011 deadline.

So as Stanley McCrystal comes back to Washington this week for a proper scolding by the president, what choice does Obama have?

He can’t fire McCrystal without giving McCrystal’s successor more time to accomplish the mission. If McCrystal is fired this week, how can anyone replace him and be expected to win in the next twelve months?

I predict McCrystal won’t be fired for that reason alone. It’s vastly more important to Obama to maintain the July 2011 withdrawal date than it is to succeed. McCrystal will be scolded, maybe even publicly, by Obama and sent back to do what the general and his military superiors must know is an impossible mission.