General McChrystal used to love speaking to the press about how the war in Afghanistan was "a war of perceptions." It was counterinsurgency lite, a shorthand for the idea that the counterinsurgent has to change the views of the contested population in order to succeed in drying up the insurgency. This makes the general鈥檚 implosion-by-interview even more puzzling. Surely someone who understood the importance of perceptions would be extra careful around the press. Hell, you don鈥檛 have to be extra careful to avoid being portrayed the way McChrystal and his staff come across in the now-celebrated Michael Hastings profile. You just have to have a reasonable concern for your reputation.
What jumped out in the Rolling Stone article was just how blustery and needlessly aggro the McChrystal posse was. A general chooses his aides carefully, and these guys (I鈥檓 assuming they were all men) seem like the last people who should be involved in a politically difficult war. This portrait lends credence to my suspicions--edited out of every piece in which I mentioned the general--that McChrystal is indeed a Special Ops knuckledragger who talks COIN but doesn鈥檛 have a clue about anything but killing. I won鈥檛 even mention McChrystal鈥檚 insistence on acting like a country bumpkin in Paris (guess he鈥檚 talked his way out of that ambassadorship).
But then, if McChrystal had a clue about how media works, he wouldn鈥檛 have pulled a clumsy cover-up over the grim circumstances of NFL star Pat Tillman鈥檚 friendly-fire death. (There鈥檚 an in the Sports section of the Times about this.)
As with most cover-ups, the deceit made the whole episode infinitely more painful and shameful than dealing with the tragedy honestly.
One common thread here is hubris, the arrogance of a golden boy from a cloistered background--his father was a two-star general, he grew up on Army bases, then went to West Point--who thinks he can get away with anything. And another is the lack of a moral compass. This might have to do with McChrystal鈥檚 seeming enthusiasm for the ethically challenged Karzai brothers and the crowd around them, a group that is best described as evil henchmen.
Maybe McChrystal doesn鈥檛 think ethics matter; maybe they鈥檙e too "Gucci," to use his dismissive adjective for the unnecessary pleasures of fine dining. (A wise middle-aged friend has been agreeing with my doubts about McChrystal for months, not because he follows the Afghan news, but because he thinks there鈥檚 something seriously wrong with anyone who only eats one meal a day.)
On a recent West Point staff ride in Gettysburg, I was struck by an inscription that I hadn鈥檛 thought about in decades: "...with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right." It鈥檚 from Lincoln鈥檚 Second Inaugural Address, and it suggests a very Lincolnesque combination: humility before human frailty, joined with moral courage. They鈥檙e among the qualities that make leaders great. They鈥檙e very necessary in Afghanistan, where reality is almost infinitely granular, and where evil is never more than a stone鈥檚 throw away. I don鈥檛 have the sense that Stanley McChrystal gets those qualities. And I鈥檓 glad to see him gone.