In Afghanistan, a Dismissal and Malaise

Barack Obama surely had good reasons for making such a heavy decision as the one he announced the evening of Wednesday June 23: dismissing the commander of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Mr. Obama found that the remarks made to the press by the general and his assembled team violated a fundamental constitutional principal: the preeminence of civil power over the military.

In an article published by the monthly magazine Rolling Stone, the general and his colleagues produce disparaging remarks about the American ambassador to Kabul, the State Department’s special correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the head of the White House’s National Security Council, among others. The tone of the group is one of an openly displayed disregard for the “civil echelon” in the chain of command.

But no matter what one thinks of the American president, that decision adds to the feeling of fiasco that is brought about, day by day, by that unending Afghanistan war — already eight and a half years of combat. With McChrystal, a key player departs. In the post for barely one year, he is the creator of the military doctrine being applied today in Afghanistan: bring out reinforcements (the “surge”) to hunt down the Islamic Taliban insurrection of the country’s South, then remain on the ground afterward to guarantee security and offer the outset of social and economic administration to the concerned populations.

This doctrine is unanimously supported by the United States’ allies in Afghanistan, long put off by the “total military” heavily applied by the American Army. It was also approved by the Afghan Chief of State, Hamid Karzai, a shifty man, with an erratic disposition and dubious relations, but with whom Gen. McChrystal was one of the few to entertain a relationship of relative confidence.

The moment when that resignation took place was not ideal either. While the McChrystal doctrine was tested in the Marjah region in the South, the month of June proved the most murderous for the 142,000 foreign soldiers deployed in Afghanistan: 79 deaths in three weeks. And this number comes to recall the immense difficulty and the little apparent success of NATO, since 2001, in that area of Central Asia where all previous foreign interventions have broken up.

Stanley McChrystal will be replaced by another American general, David Petraeus, commander of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The situation that he is going to find is not reassuring. The Taliban insurrection does not appear to be declining. The Marjah-Handahar operation, the war’s laboratory, does not seem conclusive. The strange Mr. Karzai is stalling in opening a political dialogue with the Taliban. In the U.S. and in Europe, governments and opinions are growing tired; they want an exit strategy and some signs of success. Their desires are not without merit.