Afstan: More on American brass hats and frock coats, and the ANA

In recent posts (latest) I may have seemed to have been effectively cheerleading for General McChrystal versus President Obama. Not really my intent (though I think the general is probably right and hope the president is not going to make an essentially party political decision--our prime minister seems only about politics, see this post and end of this one) but I am afraid there may have been an element of that cheerleading nonetheless. Still, as I wrote at an earlier post:

...
So Gen. Petraeus and Adm. Mullen are on Gen. McChystal's side. Moving towards a real showdown between the brass hats and frock coats? Things might get pretty serious...

The senior American commander in Afghanistan on Wednesday rejected any suggestion that his grim assessment of the war had driven a wedge between the military and the Obama administration, but he warned against taking too long to settle on a final strategy [emphasis added...]

Note that "warning" and compare it with what the frocks are saying. Hmmm. Policy positioning like that by the senior Canadian military (even former CDS Gen. Hillier, and even the British, though they are being fairly vocal--see here, here and here) is simply inconceivable. And I'm a bit wary about the extent it is developing in the US. A real public showdown with serving officers can, it seems to me, only hurt the war effort overall.

Now BruceR addresses the issue at Flit:

...there is clearly an ongoing attempt by senior American military leaders abroad to influence the political debate back home. As Michael Cohen and Pat Lang have rightly observed, the standard is for military commanders to present their bosses with a choice of courses of action, even if some of them are "throwaway COAs", but on Afghanistan the Obama administration has, in public at least, been presented with only the one. In the United States there has been a quiet but clear attempt to circumscribe the national debate, to define only one acceptable outcome. (In Canada, by contrast, there has been a quiet but clear attempt, and not by the military, to avoid any debate whatsoever [Quite - MC].) There may still be quite a gap between Sir Rupert Smith's need to prosecute (and advocate) "war amongst the people," and Gen. Ripper's "war is too important to leave to the politicians," but the current American military leadership is not adhering to historical norms on the issue... unless MacArthur or McClellan are your norms, which I suppose in the American context they kind of are.

UPDATE: The big problem with the "ISAF troop freeze, more ANSF" line of attack on this is that we haven't up to this point really done much to create an Afghan army that could stand on its own. Instead, we've created an indigenous adjunct force organized to help out a large in-place western force, but without any real capability in their absence. Saying we now wanted to have a large, effective ANA and limit ourselves to enabler support, training and mentoring... well it's like the old guy offering directions to the lost honeymooners on the backcountry road, "first off, I wouldn't start from here."..