General Stanley McChrystal conferring with a colleague before stepping down for his critical comments against the White House and the war effort in Afghanistan.

By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor

"And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

Afghanistan is known as the graveyard of empires. Alexander the Great died shortly after conquering Afghanistan, and his empire crumbled with his death. Others have simply lost whole armies. The Soviet Union's loss in the 1980s is still remembered by some, but apparently not enough. One hundred forty years earlier marked the “bloody battle” that Melville referred to in Moby Dick. It came two years after the British marched in and deposed the old leader, Dost Mohammed, who had gotten too friendly with the Russians, and installed Shah Shuja, who'd been driven from power decades before. A bloody revolt began in December 1841, and on January 6, 1842, the British began their withdrawal from Kabulm with 4,500 troops and 12,000 civilians planning to march to Jalalabad, about 90 miles away.

In July, 1842, the Boston-based North American Review magazine published an extensive account On “The English in Afghanistan,” which recorded that " the 13th of January, just seven days after the retreat commenced, one man, bloody and torn, mounted on a miserable pony, and pursued by horsemen, was seen riding furiously across the plains to Jellalabad. That was Dr. Brydon, the sole person to tell the tale of the passage of Khourd Caboul.” It was believed he was spared just so he could tell the ghastly tale.

So there have been no shortage of regional experts who questioned President Obama's decision to double down in Afghanistan — home to at most 100 al Qaeda operatives — while winding down in Iraq. “I'm not against all wars,” he said as a candidate, “Just dumb ones.” Those familiar with Afghan history were not so sure.

But America's corporate media was dutifully on board —at least until June 22nd, when Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article, “The Runaway General” broke. While it drew most attention for reporting on General Stanley McChrystal's hostility and disrespect toward the White House, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow quickly cut to the chase. McChrystal's behavior “did not just show indiscipline or insubordination,” she said the next day. It “called into question the military doctrine that General McChrystal championed.” It was a doctrine--known as 'counterinsurgency' or COIN--“that requires unity of effort between the military and all of these non-military people who are needed to win a war like this,” Maddow explained, adding, “You can't both be that guy and be the guy who's talking smack about all of the non-military people who even you say are essential to your mission. You can't be the guy who says that's necessary and the guy who talks all that smack.”

It took several days after that, but eventually it seemed that Maddow's insight sunk in, and McChrystal was replaced by the purported chief architect of that strategy, General David Petraeus. But the contradiction Maddow cited was only the tip of the iceberg.

Unlike Petraeus, McChrystal had never been a counterinsurgency maven. He had no background in “winning hearts and minds.” Just the opposite: before taking over in Afghanistan, he'd spent five years running black ops — not the sort of thing to win a population over. So why did he get the assignment in the first place?

Michael T. Klare, defense correspondent for The Nation magazine explained the contradiction a couple of months before McChrystal's fall, delving into the underlying philosophy as expressed in the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which had been released on February 1.

As Klare explained, the QDR “announced a revolution in military strategy--a transformation in global outlook and combat tactics whose only true precedent is the equally momentous turnaround engineered by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Kennedy administration. Then, as now, an incoming administration inherited a strategy heavily weighted toward high-intensity warfare among well-equipped adversaries, mostly in Europe and Asia; now, as then, the response has been to redirect the Pentagon's attention toward low-intensity combat on the fringes of the developing world. The result back then was Vietnam; today it is Afghanistan and an unknown number of 'future Afghanistans.'”

Like Obama, Kennedy's rationale was counterinsurgency, but the civilian side failed repeatedly, while “special forces” mushroomed.

"Subversive insurgency is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origins--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins; war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration instead of aggression," Klare quotes Kennedy saying at West Point in 1962. "It requires in those situations where we must counter it...a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of training."

This was the dark, bloody reality of American counterinsurgency theory from the very beginning. “Winning hearts and minds” was a rhetorical afterthought — and it remains so to this day.

More broadly, author and war correspondent Ann Jones, explained that COIN "is really less of a strategy than a set of tactics in pursuit of a strategy.  Counterinsurgency doctrine, originally designed by empires intending to squat on their colonies forever, calls for elevating the principle of 'protecting the population' above pursuing the bad guys at all cost.  Implementing such a strategy quickly becomes a tricky, even schizophrenic, balancing act,' involving 'lethal' American soldiers matched with 'nonlethal' counterparts.”

“General McChrystal himself played both roles,” she explained. “As the U.S. commander, he was responsible for killing what he termed, at one point, 'an amazing number of people' who were not threats, but he also regularly showed up at Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s palace to say, 'Sorry.' Karzai praised him publicly for his frequent apologies (each, of course, reflecting an American act or acts that killed civilians), though angry Afghans were less impressed.”

Writ large, she explained, “The formula, which is basic COIN, goes something like this: kill some civilians in the hunt for the bad guys and you have to make up for it by building a road. This trade-off explains why, as you travel parts of the country, interminable (and often empty) strips of black asphalt now traverse Afghanistan’s vast expanses of sand and rock, but it doesn’t explain why Afghans, thus compensated, are angrier than ever."

Perhaps it's all very simple. They've lived without those roads to nowhere for thousands of years. And they could live very well without the constant civilian deaths. The similarities to Vietnam could not be clearer. And yet, Klare went on to explain, Obama's QDR brims over with talk of exporting the failing Afghanistan model across the globe.

"U.S. forces are working in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, Colombia, and elsewhere to provide training, equipment, and advice to their host-country counterparts on how to better seek out and dismantle terrorist and insurgent networks while providing security to populations that have been intimidated by violent elements in their midst," the QDR said. What's more "The need to assist fragile, post-conflict states, such as Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan, and failed states such as Somalia, and transnational problems, including extremism, piracy, illegal fishing, and narcotics trafficking, pose significant challenges."

In short, if we could just win in Afghanistan, we'd have all sorts of little Afghanistans all ready to go.

If.

Following the firing of McChrystal, Rachel Maddow went to Afghanistan, where, among other things, she interviewed the American general in charge of southern Afghanistan, Brigadier General Ben Hodges.

"I don‘t get a sense there‘s a plan B. Is there a plan B? Is plan B just more time?" Maddow asked. Hodges ducked the question—effectively admitting that there was no plan B. Instead, he replied, "There's no reason why this shouldn‘t be successful if the Afghans do their part."

If.

He might want to check with Dr. Brydon about that.