I mentioned recently William S. Lind's
argument that Gen. Stanley McChrystal has, intentionally or not, done the Obama Administration a favor with the bleakness of his report on the prospects in Afghanistan. In response to the
recent Australian analysis of the McChrystal report, cited
here, a reader writes with a view complementary to Lind's:
"I suspect that the news media and blogosphere has overplayed the
tension between McChrystal and the Obama administration. As your
recent post on the Afghan Rorschach test suggests, McChrystal has given
an unvarnished assessment of the state of play, and a fairly
unvarnished assessment -- or at least a shockingly high assessment --
of the numbers of troops he needed to 'turn the conflict around.'
"In short, he made his troop request high enough to be
fairly easy to reject, and his report pessimistic enough to rule out an
Obamaesque middle course He can't be expected to craft a report that
would make withdrawal seem easy, but it is to his credit that he
(unlike Westmoreland) has made a good faith effort to make increased
commitment seem hard.
"One of the problems with civilian commentary on
Afghanistan is that civilians have been much slower than the military
to learn the lessons of Vietnam."
