Getting rid of McChrystal is a bit like removing Montgomery five days after D-Day because no one had yet achieved a breakout from the beachhead.”
That was the view of one former British special forces officer, who has known General Stanley McChrystal for five years. “It’s fundamentally the wrong thing to do.”
Not every British soldier will be as sorry to see the back of General McChrystal. Though those who knew him personally — men including senior British commanders and SAS officers who worked with him in Iraq — regarded him as something of a god in the pantheon of counter-insurgency leaders, lower ranks were more suspicious of his edicts.
“I don’t think his rules of engagement are right for summer and the fighting season,” a British platoon commander, who has since been decorated for his work in Sangin, told me there last year — voicing a sentiment that became common among troops on patrol.
“They are too restrictive. We’re losing too many people of our own as a result, without being able to hit back as hard as we would like.”
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Others had a different gripe with his austere approach to soldiers’ lifestyles. “F*** McChrystal!” read graffiti, presumably scrawled by a disgruntled Nato soldier, in a Kandahar airfield toilet near a chain of fast-food bars that General McChrystal had ordered closed. “Give me Burger King of Death!”
Yet there was no doubting the general’s devotion to the Afghan mission, nor the benefits of his command.
He succeeded in ending most of the divisive national caveats relating to the use of different Nato units in Afghanistan — rules by which some forces were used as cannon fodder, but others as little more than armoured taxi services.
Crucially, he elevated the lives of Afghan civilians to a strategic importance, reducing their deaths by 40 per cent during his command by imposing stringent rules of engagement — often detested by ground troops.
Up to a point, he was politically savvy — at least enough to earn the respect and trust of the President Karzai, whose catfights with the US State Department and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are legendary.
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These attributes will be shared, in the eyes of most British troops, with General McChrystal’s replacement, General David Petraeus, the “Jedi Knight” of America’s contemporary counter-insurgency warfare era.
Indeed, on a day-to-day basis, General McChrystal’s removal may have no impact on British operations in Helmand — though his resignation has caused Lieutenant-General Sir Nick Parker, the British deputy Nato commander in Afghanistan, to take on temporary overall command until General Petraeus arrives.
What General McChrystal’s departure signals, however, is a strategic shift in Mr Obama’s thinking on Afghanistan that will have deep implications for the future of military involvement there for every Nato member.
“I suspect that his removal is symptomatic of the deep divides between the military and the politicians,” said Adam Holloway, a Tory MP, former soldier and member of the Defence Select Committee with widespread experience of Afghanistan.
“The military have always told us that the answer lies at the end of the operational rainbow. But it doesn’t. Things have actually got worse there down that road. The answer instead lies with political solution and settlement.”
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Many soldiers agree. “McChrystal was a military champion,” said a former SAS officer. “But Obama sees the military’s effort as being beyond its culminating point.
“Marjah was the test for McChrystal’s surge. That was the moment Obama thought, ‘Stan, it’s not working. We’re not going to resource the effort you asked for any more. We’ll draw down’.
“But McChrystal wasn’t happy. The Rolling Stone interview was a public manifestation of his unhappiness. And it was the chance to have him removed. What we’ll discover now is that the military has had its day in Afghanistan. You’ve had your day boys — its time for the politicians.”