An American Lion

LTG David McKiernan, left, with General Tommy Franks, 2003

One thing I cannot abide is an ass kisser.

I have always encouraged my employees to tell me things that I did not want to hear. I have always encouraged them to insult me, if they could figure out a way to do it without being overt about it. And I have always encouraged out-of-the-box thinking, especially when it could be something that would make me some money.

We now learn that, months after it happened, General David McKiernan's career as an Army General was ended because he wasn't an ass kisser.

McKiernan is an understated and reticent man; his 37-year career involved more than two decades of overseas deployments but less than a year at the Pentagon. He did not fawn over visiting lawmakers like Petraeus did in Iraq. He also did not cultivate particularly strong relationships with Afghan leaders. His replacement, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, is regarded as a leader in the Petraeus mold: able to nimbly run the troops on the ground as well as the traps in Washington.

"Blame General Petraeus," a senior Defense Department official said. "He redefined during his tour in Iraq what it means to be a commanding general. He broke the mold. The traditional responsibilities were not enough anymore. You had to be adroit at international politics. You had to be a skilled diplomat. You had to be savvy with the press, and you had to be a really sophisticated leader of a large organization. When you judge McKiernan by Petraeus's standards, he looked old-school by comparison."

This change of command is a story of Washington's new approach to the war, one that involves not just more troops and reconstruction money but a new kind of military leader to carry out the mission. It is a story of a loyal general who, his superiors believed, was miscast for the role he had been assigned, and his intense replacements, who have been asked to win a losing war with many of the same impediments. It is also a story of the president's top military leaders, who are betting that this one personnel decision, above all others, will set in motion a process that reverses U.S. fortunes in Afghanistan.

That's a buried lede if there ever was one.

President Obama and his Secretary of Defense are fighting a war with ass kissing generals. Truth tellers and honest men need not apply. I thought the adults were going to take over and do this the right way? I thought we were going to make changes, or did I hear that wrong during the campaign?

Make no mistake about it--General McKiernan was fired because he recognized the relationship between the Taliban insurgency, the cultivation of poppies in Afghanistan to make heroin, and the brother of Hamid Karzai. Don't fret your little mind about any of the bullshit being spread to try and persuade you of anything else. Every time a smack freak in Baltimore runs over grandma on his way to the pawn shop to sell a wedding ring that is still wrapped around a severed finger, think of how the corruption in Afghanistan is creating a generation of drug addicts in this country, courtesy of the US government and its refusal to deal with the Karzai brothers. The only thing missing right now is a Temptations song about it.

When McKiernan arrived in Afghanistan, he told the truth and it didn't get him fired by George W. Bush:

"There was a saying when I got there: If you're in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it," McKiernan said in his first interview since being fired. "If you're in Afghanistan and you need it, you figure out how to do without it."

By late last summer, he decided to tell George W. Bush's White House what he knew it did not want to hear: He needed 30,000 more troops. He wanted to send some to the country's east to bolster other U.S. forces, and some to the south to assist overwhelmed British and Canadian units in Helmand and Kandahar provinces.

The Bush administration opted not to act on McKiernan's request and instead set out to persuade NATO allies to contribute more troops. With Washington then viewing NATO as the solution -- not the problem -- McKiernan seemed like the right general to help win over the allies. Before coming to Kabul, he had been the top Army commander in Europe, and he had been part of the NATO mission in the Balkans in the 1990s.

He deemed management of the alliance in Afghanistan one of his chief responsibilities. He met with an almost daily stream of visiting delegations from European capitals, and he sought to change some of the more Byzantine troop rules.

But back in Washington, McKiernan was increasingly seen as too deferential to NATO. By November, when it became clear that the Europeans would not be sending more troops, senior officials at the Pentagon wanted him to focus on making better use of the existing NATO forces -- getting them off bases and involved in counterinsurgency operations. Although McKiernan sought to do that, his superiors thought he was not working fast enough. Of particular concern was the division of the country into five regional commands, each afforded broad autonomy to fight as it pleased.

That's a trumped-up charge. Afghanistan is, essentially, a NATO mission. We could not survive or function in Afghanistan without our NATO allies. If your complaint is that McKiernan wasn't good at diplomacy or being an ass kisser, then why would you contradict yourself and state that he was being too deferential to NATO? It would seem to me that General McKiernan got that aspect of his job exactly right--to be deferential to NATO was to practice diplomacy in a way that would get them into the fight and help alleviate the stress on US troops. One would have to be deferential to NATO in order to compensate for the lack of US assets and US troops. The article goes on to say that General Petraeus wanted to bring in a 3-star general to take care of day-to-day operations so that McKiernan could focus on dealing with our allies--clearly contradicting thenotion that being deferential to our NATO allies was a bad thing. McKiernan resisted, trying to keep that extra layer of bureaucracy between him and his troops. No one disputesthat McKiernan was already successfully working with our NATO allies in the theater--something that should have gotten him praise, not scorn. Unless, of course, we're on our way back in time to the days of "old Europe" and jokes about the French military.

The idea that McKiernan didn't "get" counterinsurgency warfare is laughable. He was the lone voice of reason in 2003 who told his superiors that the Saddam Fedayeen, which morphed into the insurgency of Iraq, was a much greater threat than anyone realized. He, essentially, got Iraq from the moment he arrived in 2003, years before anyone really knew what was happening and well before General David Petraeus. General Franks, of course, blew him off and subsequently retired.

So much of this piece in the Washington Post amounts to a post-mortem hit job. McKiernan is well out of the job and the new team is off to a shaky start, what with such media-savvy pronouncements from his staff, such as "Helmand is a sideshow" and the like.

Here's what rubs me the wrong way about this piece:

The humiliating removal of a four-star general for being too conventional reveals the ferocious intensity [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates and [Admiral Mike] Mullen share over a growing war that will soon enter its ninth year. It also demonstrates their zeal to respond to President Obama's demand for rapid success in a place where foreign armies have failed for centuries.

"There are those who would have waited six more months" in order to have a less abrupt transition, Mullen said in an interview. "I couldn't. I'm losing kids and I couldn't sleep at night. I have an unbounded sense of urgency to get this right."

Thanks to your shakeup, Admiral Mullen, you're losing more kids than you were under McKiernan, and that's a fact.

Our military is now firmly in the hands of ass kissers. Playing to the egos of Gates and Obama is the only way to move up now. When the war starts to go south, look for a fresh crop of perfectly coiffed ass kissers to take over.

A little observation about the picture above--it's a picture of then-LTG McKiernan in 2003, and as many people know, he was the ground commander who led US forces into Iraq. Compare him in the photo to his boss, then-CENTCOM Commander General Tommy Franks. Franks is walking with his sleeves rolled up, expensive watch on his arm, looking freshly showered and comfortable in his pressed, rarely-worn BDUs, and this is during or just after the fight his troops have been in.

I'm guessing that the Marine behind them is Franks' aide, and he's hustling the General's bags of pogey bait around. LTG McKiernan has his head down, he hasn't had a chance to get a haircut, he's wearing his sleeves down (probably because his troops have to have theirs down, so he's joining them in their uniform appearance), his BDUs are sweat-stained, he has no rings on his fingers, and he has his standard-issue 9mm weapon in a standard-issue holster and lanyard, just like any of the officers in his command would have. He's carrying his own soft cap--no odious little toady aide for him to carry it. No pearl-handled revolver, no expensive Glock, just what the armorer issued him. A warrior. Not a perfumed prince, sir.