McChrystal Out; COIN Stays

With Petraeus now running the Afghan "surge", we are back to square one: an impossible and contradictory war that requires permanent occupation to work and twelve months to succeed. Ambers, reporting the view from the White House, says it was a question of three strikes and he was out. It wasn't the insubordination; it was the indiscipline:

If there is any pattern here, it is not one of insubordination but of an acute deafness to institutional politics, a condition exacerbated by McChrystal's...