Michael Hastings on McChrystal And The Afghanistan Debacle

'I'll have that resignation on your desk right away, Mr. President.'

The Operators is an angry book. Part wartime memoir, part polemic, part score-settling with his critics, Hastings argues that the Afghanistan war is a debacle and that counterinsurgency is a liberal-sounding sham that conceals a bloodthirsty agenda. It’s the book’s big blind spot. If the problem is the Afghanistan war’s waste of human life, it’s odd to attack the general who restricted air strikes and ordered U.S. troops to drive friendly.
But The Operators is also a good, thorough and insightful book about the Afghanistan war. Which makes it rare: the few good ones either focus on the human dimensions of the war at the expense of its policy complexities (Sebastien Junger’s War) or vice versa (Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos). You might not agree with all of Hastings’ conclusions, but few other books are ambitious enough to survey the entire war and go down to the squad level. Full story here.