Original Story [7/24/2010]

Milwaukee talk-show host Mark Belling had an excellent monologue on the controversy over President Obama and his misbehaving General in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal (update: who has now been relieved of command). Here are some of the take-aways:

• Obama isn't committed to winning the war. He's only in it half-way. We should either withdraw entirely or increase our forces enough to destroy the Taliban.
  
  
• What a delicious irony: Obama is being forced to turn the reigns in Afghanistan over to a Bush General - David Patraeus.
  
  
• Lefties don't know how to react to this.
  
  
• The surge that Obama once said would not work was designed and led by Petraeus.
  
  
• As long as Obama is bringing Petraeus back to replace McChrystal, maybe he could bring Dick Cheney back to replace Joe Biden!
  
  
• The Left is mad at McChrystal because of the Rolling Stone article that showed how the General and his staff don't respect Obama and his administration ... but how does the Left feel now about McChrystal being replaced by Petraeus?
  
  
• After all, Petraeus is an evil Bush guy.
  
  
• Besides, what McChrystal said about Obama isn't that bad.
  
  
• Charges of insubordination are untrue. McChrystal wasn't insubordinate.
  
  
• McChrystal's big mistake? Giving a reporter for a hard-left magazine like Rolling Stone access to him at all. What was he thinking?
  
  
• On top of that is the fact that the war in Afghanistan isn't going well.
  
  
• If the problem and the threat to the United States is the Taliban, the goal should be to kill the Taliban.
  
  
• But that's not what our goal has been until now.
  
  
• We've been trying to prop up the Karzai government.
  
  
• We've been trying to protect the handful of Afghanistan cities that are strongholds from the Taliban.
  
  
• That's no way to fight a war.
  
  
• That would've been like trying to fight World War 2 without invading Europe.
  
  
• At some point you have to go on the attack.
  
  
• There's been a total disconnect on the part of the Obama administration over running this war.
  
  
• It looks like President Obama didn't pay any attention to Afghanistan until he heard that his general was making fun of him.
  
  
• Did the death of American soldiers get Obama's attention? No.
  
  
• Did the gains of the Taliban? No.
  
  
• What finally got Obama's attention? General McChrystal was in the pages of Rolling Stone making fun of Joe Biden.
  
  
• The whole operation's been in trouble ever since Obama became President.
  
  
• For this, General McChrystal, Secretary of Defense Gates, and President Obama all deserve a share of the blame.
  
  
• Hopefully with the arrival of General Petraeus, the Afghan mission will change focus from nation-building to killing the enemy.
  
  
• The American military can't endlessly prop up the Karzai government. It's never been the military's mission to run around in Jeeps in the countryside trying to protect a hapless country from itself.

Update [9/27/2010]

Since this story first appeared, Watergate reporter Bob Woodward has written a new book, Obama's Wars, which offers a much more detailed (and unsettling) look at the inner workings of White House politics concerning the war in Afghanistan. Among the excerpts:

• President Obama was intensely focused on finding a way out of the Afghan war last year.
• Obama was frustrated because none of the military options offered to him by his commanders involved reducing troop levels.
• Obama ended up designing his own strategy (involving 30,000 troops) with the goal of limiting U.S. involvement.
• Obama's plan takes the odd step of explicitly telling the military what it is not supposed to do.
• The president told General Petraeus and Defense Secretary Gates: "In 2010, we will not be having a conversation about how to do more. I will not want to hear, 'We're doing fine, Mr. President, but we'd be better if we just do more.' We're not going to be having a conversation about how to change [the mission] . . . unless we're talking about how to draw down faster than anticipated in 2011."
• Obama says he doesn't think about the Afghan war in "classic" terms of the U.S. winning or losing. "I think about it more in terms of: Do you successfully prosecute a strategy that results in the country being stronger rather than weaker at the end?"
• Relations between the White House and the Pentagon are tense. Woodward quotes one national security adviser as referring to Obama's political aides as "the water bugs," the "Politburo," the "Mafia," or the "campaign set."
• General Petraeus feels shut out by Obama. Petraeus told one aide that in his opinion Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod is "a complete spin doctor."
• Obama continues to keep in place 14 intelligence orders, or findings, issued by George W. Bush. They are the legal basis for the CIA's covert operations.
• U.S. intelligence reports say Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a manic depressive. According to U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, "He's on his meds, he's off his meds."