The Conversation About Afghanistan We Should Be Having

...is about strategy, not tactics.  Spencer Ackerman:

The issue with McChrystal, as Gibbs laid it out, is about fidelity to the strategy and the rest of the team implementing it. He’ll have an opportunity to make his case to President Obama tomorrow that he’s able to do that. But that exposes the biggest irony here. Gibbs said that the responsibility of team members is “not to relitigate” the policy debate of the fall. But notice: McChrystal never once relitigated it in the Rolling Stone profile. Why would he? After all, he got every significant thing he wanted from the fall strategy debate. You never see McChrystal complain about July 2011 or not being sufficiently resourced or the rest of the team’s commitment or blah blah blah. That would be relitigating the strategy.

Now, as I wrote earlier, at the heart of the strategy is a compromise for what happens after July 2011: less McChrystal and COIN (not none, but less); more Caldwell and training; and more Biden and counterterrorism-and-Pakistan focus. McChrystal signed onto that, even if the degrees to which each will balance each other and the pace at which they will de-emphasize the former and emphasize the latter have yet to be fully instantiated. Perhaps Gibbs was sending McChrystal a message that future relitigation, after 2011, won’t be tolerated — if McChrystal makes it as commander after tomorrow.

But nothing Gibbs said gave any indication that the strategy itself is about to be overhauled.

The problem in Afghanistan is not Stanley McChrystal.  The problem in Afghanistan is why nobody can explain why we're still there after eight and a half years.  We should be talking about bringing somebody in to replace McChrystal who understands that the job now is to leave.  Instead we're looking for another Stanley McChrystal.

That in and of itself tells you everything you need to know about our Afghan "strategy"...and that fact that nobody in Washington is even thinking to ask the question about why we persist in Afghanistan when our economy is falling apart.