Author: Andrew Sullivan

Terelj, Mongolia, 3.25 pm

So we discover that Blackwater assumed the name of Eric Cartman and McChrystal's mofos call themselves "Team America." One does hope they understand that satire is operating here.

The one option president Obama never contemplated in reviewing the horrendous Af-Pak inheritance bequeathed by Bush and Cheney was ending the war. This was bizarre since his candidacy would never have occurred without the ill-judged, dreadfully managed and ultimately hopeless wars of occupation and attrition in Iraq and Afghanistan waged by his predecessors. And yet Obama, cautious as ever, ruled real withdrawal out from the get-go. Maybe the risk was too great of a terror attack at home being used by the neocons and the Dolchstoss camp. Maybe the risk of a terror attack, whatever the response of the neocons, was too high. But the next best option – Biden's proposal – was junked for more of the COIN same. Kevin Sullivan has a must-read this morning on this:

There are actually a multitude of options in Afghanistan, but none of them will ever appear viable so long as we cling to an amorphous definition of "victory" there. To my recollection, what the Bush administration did in Afghanistan was not at all "light footprint," but rather, under-resourced occupation. They wanted to keep troop casualties low, but they also wanted to pacify the country. They pushed for elections, but then provided no sustainable security arrangement to actually guarantee a democratic Kabul's legitimacy.

This policy – which even the Bush administration would later scrutinize – is not what Biden had proposed last fall. His suggestion was to contain Afghan radicalism, draw down forces and continue drone strikes on militant targets throughout the greater Af-Pak region. If you support such a strategy (as I do, albeit reluctantly), then you certainly aren't concerned about dressing Afghanistan up as a functional democracy, because it clearly isn't one.

But critics can't live in a counterfactual dream world where the White House actually engages the public in a serious debate over the War on Terror, because that moment has passed. While we all question the job security of one general, we should at least, in fairness, congratulate the COINdinistas for what appears to be a vise-like grip on U.S. foreign policy thinking.

Counter-insurgency in a country as vast and as remote as Afghanistan is in no way comparable to counter-insurgency in Sunni Arab regions of Iraq where al Qaeda had already over-stayed its welcome. The face-saving virtues of the surge in Iraq – and the illusion of political self-government there that isn't destined to devolve into either sectarian war or a Shiite strongman – do not exist in Afghanistan. There is even less of a credible government in that graveyard of empires than there is in Iraq; there is a stolen election and a corrupt leader. There is no way out in any foreseeable future that can be spun as some kind of success.

The question at hand is therefore whether we are prepared to stay there as long as the British in the nineteenth century and with the same result. Or whether we are prepared to live with the limits of American power. I always thought of Obama as a pragmatist. On this, he's as ideologically closed off as the Bushies.

England's ahead 1 – 0. Jonathan Liew, live-blogging:

Dear, oh dear. Rooney's limping. He pulled up a fraction after being called offside. He's trying to walk it off, just looks like a knock at the moment. That really would put a dead rat in our burger.

USA is seemingly unable to score and thereby headed home as of now.

The definitive photographic collection (but not if you've just eaten).

That's the length of the meeting between Obama and McChrystal. Doesn't sound like a reconciliation to me.

Michael Hastings explains:

Well, they were getting hammered.

One thing one presumes is an advantage for the MSM is the layer of editing before something gets published. Blogs, even some of the best ones, invariably have more typos, misspellings and occasional brain farts than copy that has passed before copy editors. And then you read the NYT op-ed page on dead tree and find that Abraham Lincoln made a decision in 1962 and see the word "principle" used as an adjective. Just sayin'.

Tapper reports that the general has conceded that he has "compromised the mission". That surely means he is out. When even Bill Kristol and Eliot Cohen have dropped him, it's curtains. Ambers, in his invaluable night-beat feature, writes this:

LOW BLOW: Avowed opponents of McChrystal are whispering about the DoD's inspector general's report on abuses at Camp Nama, which McChrystal oversaw as Commander in Chief of the Joint Special Operations Command. It hasn't been released.

Low blow? What we saw at Camp Nama was the same kind of towel-snapping, the rules-don't-apply-to-us arrogance among McChrystal's men that we see in the Rolling Stone fiasco. Except the result then was not political embarrassment but eager and unrestrained engagement in war crimes:

Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. 'Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?' And he said absolutely not. He had this directly from General McChrystal and the  Pentagon that there's no way that the Red Cross could get in: "they won't have access and they never will. This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even Army investigators." …

McChrystal was always a wild card. From his cover-up of the Tillman death to his toleration of brutal torture in Iraq, he was enabled and supported by all of official Washington. It is not a "low blow" to note the consistent thread here. And it is surely understandable that McChrystal's men – who had pioneered the Ralph Peters macho kill-and-torture-first policy – found counter-insurgency so, well, gay.