Shattered McCrystal: The paragraph quoting Rolling Stone Magazine's article "The Runaway General" (link below) sums up a great deal of Obama's Afghanistan strategy and even his presidency:

"Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a "bleeding ulcer." In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multi-generational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want."

The things the President says he does not want like meaningless inadequate off shore ecologically catastrophic oil drilling, an expanded Vietnamesque Middle East war and its consequential civilian collateral damage death he gives a thumbs up. The things he said he DOES want like a public option health care, civil libertarian priorities like habeus corpus, support for Main Street against Wall Street with wholly revamped regulatory economic policy he, so far, folds. Mr. Obama stirs the pot of a soup he made. Can YOU figure him out? I'm STUMPED!

As for McCrystal's motives for what he said and Obama's response to it, the president is damned if he fires him and damned if he doesn't. The psychological etiology of McCrystal's verbal fire only he knows. Was his goal to embarrass the administration, voice dismay for its war strategy thereby hurting the US war effort or to get himself off the hook for its failure? I need to crawl into McCrystal's brain to figure that one out. One thing is clear he succeeded in doing most all of those things and both his military career and Obama's policy(ies), so far, are shattered glass.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390