America's Top Commander Exposes Obama Administration Incompetence; Walks It Back

[Lemur]

My only argument is that I did, in fact, use the term correctly, despite your definition.

Yes, I invented that reading of "play the ball not the man," and I did it all on my own. My sole reason was to confound you. Curses! Foiled again! "Play the ball, not the man" has nothing to do with ad hominem attacks or the personalization of debate; it really means that you can never question another poster's sources. How did you find me out?

You seem to be under the impression that I posted the editorial as some sort of thesis on the subject, not because I thought it was an interesting opinion.

If the entire rambling essay is naught more than an "interesting opinion," why are you going on about it, then?

You took issue with Harnden’s assertion that losing McChrystal’s good relationship with Karzai is a bad thing. [...] Karzai is our partner in the region, whether we like it or not. Obama and team could have chosen to pursue their campaign to discredit him, but it was decided, surely out of necessity, that he had to be kept around.

At last! Something resembling substance! Wheeeeee!

First of all, please substantiate Obama's "campaign to discredit [Khazai]." By all accounts, President Khazai has been at turns ineffective, unpopular, corrupt and duplicitous. As I understand it, based on nothing more than reading, the civilian government in Afghanistan is the single biggest weakness in our COIN strategy. Correct me if you've heard differently.

Given this, how crucial is McChrystal's relationship with Karzai? What was he accomplishing with the President that another commander, with the initials D.P., cannot? Your essayist presents this relationship, and its end, as a completely understood disaster that we need not substantiate. I call male bovine fecal matter.

So, considering how important the local government is to COIN, I think it is certainly better to have a commander on the ground with a good working relationship with the local leadership than have one that will have to build such a relationship amid the most critical of stages of the conflict, or to not have a good relationship at all.

Again, every intelligent analyst I have read on the subject agrees that the civilian government is our #1 weakness in Afghanistan. Not the generals, not the money, not the diplomats, not Obama, not the previous administration, not troop morale, not the various strategies, and so on and so forth. The lack of a legitimate, effective civilian partner is the insoluble imponderable.

I'd like to see you address this, frankly, since most of the time your interest in Afghanistan appears to begin and end with how it serves as a talking point contra Obama.

Let's say P.J. is made President tomorrow. What do we do about our civilian partners in Afghanistan? And no, this is not a dodge or a changing of the subject, although you have dismissed every such thought exercise as such previously. It is not enough to robotically criticize every move our President makes; please demonstrate that you have given this some sort of thought beyond the partisan snipe line.

You seem to believe that there is some sort of clear path to victory. You demonstrate this belief by consistently claiming that President 44 is deviating from it. So it is not in any way out of order to ask, "Tell us, P.J., what is this path to victory, and what does your notion of victory look like?" Bonus points if you can construct your answer in terms that require less than five decades.