24 June 2010: The News International
By Mosharraf Zaidi
“Now you don’t talk so loud. Now you donít seem so proudÖHow does it feel?” Bob Dylan, 1965
In a terse address at the White House yesterday, US President Barack Obama announced the resignation of his Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The task of managing the US war in Afghanistan will now be given to US CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, McChrystal’s immediate boss, and the man widely credited with the success of the American surge in Iraq in 2007.
McChrystal’s resignation was prompted by a Rolling Stone magazine article titled “The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings. In it, Hastings describes a command culture around McChrystal that is virulently contemptuous of the American civilian leadership. The piece liberally quotes McChrystal staffers referring to senior Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden, derisively.
Many commentators and politicians in Washington DC had called for McChrystal’s sacking purely on professional grounds. Unlike in Pakistan, a healthy mutual respect between civil and military leaders in the United States is a core democratic value. Many have facetiously wondered if McChrystal had spent too many hours talking shop with his Pakistani counterparts, where the term “bloody civilian” is not unheard of.
Christine Fair, assistant professor at Georgetown University, security analyst and noted South Asia scholar however sees the Rolling Stone story as simply a reconfirmation of McChrystal’s contempt for civilian authority. Speaking to The News about McChrystal, she said, “This is not the first occasion. This is unacceptable. You cannot disagree with the White House publicly. You cannot do this in our system of government.”
Indeed, Fair is right. It is not the first occasion. At the International Institute for Strategic Studies in October last year, McChrystal delivered a controversial speech in which he openly campaigned for Obama to adopt his own prescriptions for the Afghan war. Moreover, he was critical of the counter-terrorism approach to the American campaign against al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and Fata favoured by Biden. At the time, many expected President Obama to come down hard on McChrystal. While the general was summoned to the president’s aircraft in Copenhagen (where Obama was pitching for Chicago as an Olympic host), he was not publicly rebuked. In fact, two months later, at his West Point Afghan strategy speech on December 1, Obama gave McChrystal almost everything he had asked for to pursue his version of an Afghan counterinsurgency strategy (COIN), including an extra 40,000 troops.
Obama’s returns on that investment have not been great. Not only has he had to deal with the disastrous fallout from the McChrystal expose in Rolling Stone. He has also had to deal with an increasingly belligerent partner in President Hamid Karzai, a resurgent Pakistani military, in which General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani openly headed the Pakistani contingent during the Pak-US strategic dialogue, and the embarrassing psy-ops extravaganza in Marjah that even some US officials now privately refer to as a fiasco. Ironically, McChrystal might not be the source of these problems, but in fact the only credible US actor that was making any headway in the region.
A former McChrystal adviser and New America Foundation Senior Fellow, Parag Khanna says that he did not want to see McChrystal lose his job. For Khanna, McChrystal represents much more than the average military general. “McChrystal is a management guru. He has flattened bureaucracy, transformed special operations, and mastered social network analysis and theory.” For strategists like Khanna, and other COINdinistas (many of whom openly speak of McChrystal with adoration), McChrystal gave the narrative of America’s Afghan quagmire a compelling, humane and winning edge.
His replacement is not someone unfamiliar with counterinsurgency. Gen. David Petraeus literally wrote the book on COIN, and is the man whose signature (along with Gen. James Amos) adorns FM 3-24: Counterinsurgency, which is the formal field manual for the US Army and US Marines conducting COIN ops. Unlike McChrystal, who enjoys his reputation as a soldier’s soldier, and has no tolerance for faux sophistication, Petraeus is a decidedly tame beast, with ambitions to follow up his stellar military career with a run for major political office in the US.
Noted Pakistani scholar, Dr. Hassan Abbas, currently professor at Columbia University, fears that this entire episode means that “America’s problems in Afghanistan have increased, and frankly that means that so have Pakistan’s. This of course doesn’t mean that the interests of these countries are aligned, it just means that it will be more difficult for everyone to manage and negotiate their interests. The silver lining for Pakistan is that McChrystal is being replaced by his boss, a man that is even more tuned into Pakistan than McChrystal was.”
For Pakistanis the entire McChrystal episode is a bittersweet mixture of intense familiarity and utter alienation. The sight of a military officer who openly challenges and disparages civilian government is of course a little too close to home. Conversely, Pakistanis can be forgiven for being flabbergasted at the notion that a senior soldier can be summoned half way around the world, at a days notice, and be given his marching orders by the elected leadership of a country.
To his credit, McChrystal tied the hands of trigger-happy American soldiers in Afghanistan with all kinds of conditions to help avoid civilian casualties. Those restrictions are unlikely to be lifted by Petraeus. Pakistanis could learn something from the Americans. The Pakistani military operations in the Fata region cause serious damage to civilian property, and allegedly also cause a significant numbers of civilian casualties.
Regardless of how angry Pakistanis might be at the hubris of America’s often unfettered exercise of power in this region, there is more than one important lesson here for Pakistan. A democracy has zero tolerance for insubordination to elected leaders. Among the many vast challenges this country faces, establishing an enduring and democratic balance between civil and military power may be the greatest. Instead of focusing on the next financial transaction with the US, Pakistan would do well to note how democratic orders operate.
