A few years ago I blogged about Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries based on a Rolling Stone reporters experience in Iraq while embedded with the marines. The article was The Killer Elite and spawned the book Generation Kill. The article was not good for the marines. On a personal level, I found the whole thing quite sad and it painted an unpleasant picture of the war and the future for that country. Not inspiring. For several of the marines in the book, it lead to grave consequences:

Sergeant Espera was forced to leave the battalion and SSgt. Eric Kocher was disciplined for his actions in retrieving a fellow Marine who was wounded after stepping on a landmine.^[2]

I am not sure how Rolling Stone does it, but their latest expose is even more damning. The article The Runaway General is a candid portrait of the situation in Afghanistan. Most people are ignoring the real issues in that country as the personal drama of whether or not President Obama will fire General Stanley McChrystal for his teams inappropriate comments in the article and open disdain for the White House.

Reading the article, I was left scratching my head. The strategy that the military is employing is a mix of military suppression, infrastructure rebuilding and active recruitment of a positive image within the Afghan community, called counterinsurgency:

From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his "surge" in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed "COINdinistas" for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

With billions of dollars being deployed and hundreds of thousands of troops, the future does not look so bright:

When it comes to Afghanistan, history is not on McChrystal’s side. The only foreign invader to have any success here was Genghis Khan – and he wasn’t hampered by things like human rights, economic development and press scrutiny. The COIN doctrine, bizarrely, draws inspiration from some of the biggest Western military embarrassments in recent memory: France’s nasty war in Algeria (lost in 1962) and the American misadventure in Vietnam (lost in 1975). McChrystal, like other advocates of COIN, readily acknowledges that counterinsurgency campaigns are inherently messy, expensive and easy to lose. "Even Afghans are confused by Afghanistan," he says. But even if he somehow manages to succeed, after years of bloody fighting with Afghan kids who pose no threat to the U.S. homeland, the war will do little to shut down Al Qaeda, which has shifted its operations to Pakistan. Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock. "It’s all very cynical, politically," says Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer who has extensive experience in the region. "Afghanistan is not in our vital interest – there’s nothing for us there."

Military men acting as enforcement, government and diplomat. A volatile mix and it would appear that the despair continues for that region with very little hope, a lot of wasted money and no end in sight.

What I don’t see is someone looking at the big, monster UN with a critical eye.