McLaren is not happy with the folks at the Daily Kos, in part because they have accused “progressive religious forces” for their stealthy support of the Stupak-Pitts amendment to health care reform. McLaren explicitly repudiates the charge:

That faulty diagnosis [that Evangelical progressives are a Fifth Column of sorts in the Democratic Party] seems to be shared in recent speculation that the Stupak amendment — which went beyond the abortion neutrality called for by all the Christian progressives I’m aware of — was added to the House health-care bill as part of a long-standing plan by progressive religious forces. Those speculations are undermined by the fact that the amendment was added to bring some hesitant conservative Democrats on board, but it took Christian progressives by surprise as much as anyone.

Stupak-Pitts took Christian progressives completely by surprise!

In any case, we now we know that McLaren’s “third way” between the religious right’s support of Stupak-Pitts and the secular left opposition is to side with the secular left. Don’t worry, McClaren is telling the Daily Kos folks, we also oppose Stupak-Pitts. Unless I’m missing something McLaren just threw pro-life Democrats under the bus. And he did it in Sojourners!

Now we need to hear explicitly from the likes of Jim Wallis and David Gushee and other “progressive evangelicals.” Is this their idea of a “third way,” too?

Friends and acquaintances who are more inclined to give Brother Jim and other “progressive evangelicals” the benefit of the doubt would like to know whether this would rate him at least one cheer. Short answer: No.

While I’d be delighted to offer up a cheer or two for Wallis and Sojourners, I’m afraid I just can’t do it. For one thing, I simply can’t find any unambiguous support for Stupak-Pitts over at Sojourners from Brother Jim or anyone else. Nothing! I know where they stand on Afghanistan (unilateral military withdrawal) but on health care and abortion ambiguity (at best) seems to be the watchword. Nothing “prophetic” being offered up on that front.

However, maybe Brother Jim has been stealthily lobbying for Stupak-Pitts behind the scenes. Maybe he is, as the pro-abortion left would have it, really a stalking horse for the Catholic Bishops and the religious right. Maybe he did it without the knowledge of anyone in either Representative Stupak’s or Representative Pitts’ office. Stupak and Pitts’ staff has assured me that they know nothing of such lobbying efforts or support for the Stupak-Pitts amendment. Wallis has simply not been in the picture.

Some might think it would be uncharitable not to give Wallis, Brian McLaren, David Gushee and the rest of the progressive evangelicals the benefit of the doubt. But we’re way past the point where Wallis can continue to play this game. But lest I be accused of being uncharitable, here’s a chance for Wallis and the rest of the Sojourners crowd to clear the air. Jim (and Brian and David) do you support Stupak-Pitts or don’t you? Will you insist that the senate bill includes Stupak-Pitts language or not? Will you support health care legislation if Stupak-Pitts language is dropped from the final bill?

Absent such clear and unambiguous statement on the issue a lot of pro-life Christians might think Wallis, Sojourners and other progressive evangelicals are speaking out of both sides of their mouths on the question of health care and abortion. Time to fish or cut bait!

I am a loyal supporter of your presidency. I worked hard in the campaign and have never been as proud of my country as I was when we elected you.

I’m writing to ask you to find another way ahead in Afghanistan. I wrote a similar letter to President Bush when he was preparing for war in Iraq.

I believe now, as you and I both did then, that war is not the answer. Violence breeds violence, and as Dr. King said, you can murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. As the apostle Paul said, evil must be overcome with good, which means that violence and hate must be overcome with justice and love, not more of the same.

Obviously, you know things the rest of us don’t know. And you have pressures and responsibilities the rest of us don’t have. But we have based our lives on the moral principles that guided leaders like Dr. King, Desmond Tutu, and Nelson Mandela. We share a profound faith in a loving, non-violent God. We share a commitment to live in the way of Jesus the peacemaker. That’s why escalation is not a change we can believe in.

Given McClaren’s commitment to nonviolent pacifism one would expect him not only to oppose escalation but to favor a unilateral military withdrawal as well. If “war is not the answer” then it is not the answer with or without the 40,000 additional troops requested by General McChrystal, General Petraeus, and the JCS. McLaren, in other words, is calling for unilateral military withdrawal from Afghanistan. In the current debate over troop strength in Afghanistan, McLaren’s proposed number is zero!

That’s just what you would expect from a pacifist, of course. But we should pause and take stock for a moment on McLaren’s comment: “I believe now, as you and I both did then, that war is not the answer.” How odd, since Obama repeatedly insisted during the campaign that Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” (and hence the good war) unlike Iraq, which was a “war of choice”, (which was Bush’s bad war). And back in March, Obama seemed to make good on his pledge to fight this “war of necessity” by substantially increasing the number of troops. In other words, throughout the campaign and early in his presidency, Obama gave every indication that he believed that war is the answer. The only debate was over the way in which the war would be waged—not whether it would be waged.

So how do we square Obama’s words and actions (“war is the answer”) with McLaren’s contrary assertion that for Obama “war is not the answer?”

It could be that despite his public stance, (1) Obama secretly believes that “war is not the answer” and privately relayed his true pacifist beliefs and commitment to unilateral military withdrawal from Afghanistan only to his “spiritual advisor,” Brian McLaren. In which case Obama was flat-out lying to the American people about Afghanistan being a war of necessity. Or, (2) Obama never really believed that “war is not the answer,” and the disconnect is because McLaren is (a) confused about Obama’s clearly stated position or (b) lying about it. Or, (3) McLaren is a half-baked moral and theological blowhard who gives lie to the common notion that the infamous “scandal of the evangelical mind” is the exclusive province of the religious right.

I’m leaning toward (3), but could be talked out of it if anyone has a better explanation for this nonsense.

But don’t worry, David A. Catalina, the chairman of the D.C. Council Committee on Health, is on the job working to improve education in the District. According to the Post article, “D.C. Students say School’s Sex Education is Antiquated,” Mr. Catalina held a hearing yesterday as part of the Youth Sexual Habit Project.

D.C. public high school students who participated in focus groups on sexual health said they were unimpressed with the District’s sex education curriculum, do not trust the school nurses who are charged with counseling them about disease prevention and disdain the brand of condoms distributed by schools.

The students, particularly girls, said they were too suspicious or embarrassed to talk to school nurses about sex or ask about condoms. “It’s like talking to your mom,” one student said.

Those were some of the findings of a survey conducted by the Youth Sexual Health Project, funded by the D.C. Council Committee on Health, whose chairman, council member David A. Catania (I-At Large), had a hearing on the issue Wednesday.

“This has never been done by a committee,” but “it’s been an elephant in the room, an unaddressed issue for years: What are we doing with respect to the sexual health of our children? No one wanted to tackle it,” Catania said.

The article proceeds to spell out the complaints in more detail:

Health officials said frank discussions about sexual relationships are the foundation of sex education. But students surveyed said the instruction they get doesn’t address the real-life situations they encounter, such as how to talk to a partner who constantly pushes for unprotected sex.

Girls said they were unlikely to carry condoms for fear of being labeled promiscuous.

Students had another reason for passing up the free condoms available at school. Durex condoms, the brand widely distributed by the Health Department under a contract, are considered lame and more likely to pop or break, students said. They said they prefer Trojan or Magnum.

Youths “have very strong opinions about particular brands of condoms,” the researchers wrote. “These opinions . . . factually correct or not, play an important role in a youth’s decision to use a product.”

Students in the survey also said that school nurses were “judgmental and untrustworthy,” making it unlikely that teens would seek their advice.

One suspects that he nurses were accused of being “judgmental” because they might have hinted at the truth: that teenaged girls who carry around condoms really are “promiscuous,” although one also suspects that the children in the D.C. public schools have more colorful vernacular to describe the phenomenon.

Which makes you think that Ms. Rhee knows what she is talking about. And, that, when it comes to their daughters, the Obama’s know what they are doing. It’s another matter altogether for those lacking wherewithal to escape this insanity.

Update: As a guy who regularly gets mail addressed to Keith Paulishek, or Pavlicheck, or Palishak, or Pavilschek, or Pavlicik and every other misspelling you might imagine (not to mention the frequent misspelling of Keith—”I before E except after C” and all that), I should probably be particularly careful when it comes to making sure I correctly spell the names of others.

It seems as though “sexile rights” has become a hot issues on college campuses since Tufts University has banned sexual activity in dorm rooms when a roommate is present.

Tufts officials said the change was prompted by persistent complaints from students, numbering perhaps a dozen over the past two to three years.

In response, administrators helpfully added a new item to a list of host responsibilities for students with overnight guests: “You may not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room.” Dorm sex should never “deprive your roommate(s) of privacy, study, or sleep time.”

Here’s how the Post summarizes Tufts’ policy: “Tufts might be the first college in the nation to make explicit what other schools have only hinted at: It is not cool to have sex in front of your roommate.”

Not cool! Well, that’s one way to put it, although one might think that in an era of “nonjudgmentalness” what counts as “cool” might be in the eye of the beholder. Subjecting your roommate to the Jonas Brother through your dorm room’s stereo speakers is not cool. For that matter, it is a brute fact woven into the fabric of the universe (and not mere opinion) that even having the Jonas Brothers on your iPod is not “cool.” But I doubt that Tufts or any other college or university is going to ban the Jonas Brothers. So, it is not entirely clear to me why lack of coolness should be banned in the case of one instance (sex in front of roommates) and not the other (listening to the Jonas Brothers).

Of course, the mere suggestion that colleges reconsider all this co-ed dorms stuff would meet with howls of protest. That would most definitely not be cool.

Speaking for myself, I’m opposed to co-ed dorms and in favor of strictly enforced visitation procedures, and for a strictly enforced ban on the Jonas Brothers. Which, I suppose, raises my coolness quotient in one instance but lowers it in the other. So it’s a wash.

Oh, in case you were wondering, “Among local colleges, Georgetown University has come closest to positing a bill of rights for sexiles. The school advises students that “cohabitation, which is defined as overnight visits with a sexual partner, is incompatible both with the Catholic character of the University and with the rights of the roommates.”

I told him I thought it was pretty clear from my article what it would take to earn greater applause. Here’s what I said:

Before we break out the Champaign, pop the corks, and celebrate the return of a prodigal to the pro-life fold someone needs to ask Wallis a follow-up question: What exactly is so morally objectionable about including abortion in health care reform? For example, Wallis has always claimed to be both pro-life and pro-women (whatever that means). Couldn’t his progressive friends argue that including abortion in health care reform is being pro-women? And if he opposed it, would that make him anti-women?

If Wallis’s opposition is truly principled (or “prophetic”) then we can expect Wallis and the Sojourners crowd to offer up a reasoned and articulate public argument for the moral wrongness of including this particular “health care procedure.” We would expect to hear from Wallis and the Sojourners crowd not merely the acknowledgment that other people have moral objections, but an explanation and articulation of Wallis own moral objections. We would expect an argument that informs his readers just exactly why his “progressive” friends are so wrong on this issue and the right wing “pro-life extremists” are right.

In addition, I told Wallis as bluntly as I could, that as far as I could tell his position and that of Sojourners was indistinguishable from the old Mario Cuomo position of being “personally opposed” to abortion while wanting to keep the procedure legal. I suggested that neither he nor Sojourners could honestly be labeled pro-life because, for that term to mean anything, it has to involve advocacy for the legal protection of the unborn. Wallis was equally frank in response. He simply rejected my suggestion that the “legal protection of the unborn” had anything to do with being pro-life. Both of us left that conversation with a clear understanding that Wallis was, quite simply, pro-choice on abortion.

I was a bit taken aback, then, to find that a fellow named Ryan Rodrick Beiler over at Sojourners thinks I have Jim Wallis all wrong. In “Critics on the Left Meet the Critics on the Right,” Beiler disapprovingly cites my “Back to Zero Cheers for Jim Wallis” as an example of how unfair I and other pro-lifers have been to Wallis. Here’s what I said in that post:

Last week almost seventy pro-life organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that abortion be clearly excluded from proposed health care bills. Signatories to the letter included Priests for Life President Fr. Frank Pavone, Fr. Benedict Groeschel, Democrats for Life of America head Kristen Day, CatholicVote.org President Brian Burch, Day Gardner of the National Black Pro-Life Union, and Marjorie Dannenfelser, President of the Susan B. Anthony List. John F. Brehany of the Catholic Medical Association and Christian Medical Association Senior Vice President Dr. Gene Rudd, M.D. also signed the letter.

Guess who is noticeably absent from the list of signatories? Wallis said that the abortion issue should not “doom the chances” of healthcare legislation. He characterized abortion in politics as a “contentious and ultimately unproductive debate” between “simplified and polarizing positions.”

Beiler is particularly unhappy with my preface to these comments. I said that my skepticism about Wallis was based on my observation that Wallis “has become little more than a flack for the Obama administration but also because Wallis has never really been serious on abortion.”

Now, you might think that Beiler would offer up an argument to refute all this. But he doesn’t. Instead, he resorts to a ploy that will be quite familiar to anyone remotely familiar Wallis and Sojourners. He digs up a pro-choice critic of Wallis and then declares that since Wallis has both pro-life and pro-choice critics, he is really a . . . a what? A “moderate?” A prophet who has attained a “higher plane,” or who has embraced a “third way,” between “polarized positions?”

Beiler calls our attention to a Mother Jones article, “White House Religion Adviser Trying to Hijack Health Care For Anti-Choice Cause” by Adele Stan. According to Stan:

The Rev. Jim Wallis is sitting pretty these days. He’s the evangelist the media love—so much so that Democrats kow-tow before him. He says he’s progressive, and has some credentials to back up the claim: anti-poverty work and opposition to the Vietnam War. But he’s opposed to legal abortion and same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, eager for an evangelical partner, President Obama named Wallis to the President’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, giving Wallis the ideal platform from which to try to subvert the debate over health-care reform for his anti-choice cause.

Let’s leave aside the disputable claim that Wallis is opposed to the legalization of same sex marriage. Why would Stan think that Wallis is “opposed to legal abortion”?

[T]he recent discovery and dissection of a 1996 pro-life statement, “The America We Seek: A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern,” by the journalist Frederick Clarkson, suggests otherwise.

Clarkson traces the connection between the statement, signed by Wallis, among others, aimed at making abortions more difficult to procure and current “common ground” strategies for “abortion reduction.” The statement, signed by major religious-right figures like James Dobson, was also signed by proponents of the Come Let Us Reason Together abortion-reduction strategy, including Wallis and Mercer University Christian ethics professor David Gushee.

Well, there you have it. Wallis tells me point-blank that he is opposed to the legal protection of the unborn. But, on the other hand, he signed a very pro-life letter back in 1996. Beiler concludes from all this that the confusion is entirely our fault. Stan is confused because he thinks Wallis is a stalking horse for James Dobson, the National Right to Life Committee and all the other pro-life signatories of “Come Let us Reason Together,” while I am confused because I have this crazy idea that Wallis, while “personally opposed” to abortion does not want to legally impose. It evidently has not occurred to Beiler that Wallis and Sojourners might be the cause of all the “confusion.” Maybe, just maybe, the confusion has something to do with Jim Wallis speaking out of both sides of his mouth.

But then, I may be entirely mistaken and overly harsh. Maybe I misunderstood Wallis, in which case I would be more than happy to apologize publicly for tarring him with the “pro-choice” label. In which case, Wallis could clarify matters easily enough. Here, I simply can’t improve on the remarks of one Sojourners reader commenting on Beiler’s article:

Prolifers criticize him on substance and prochoicers criticize him based on superficial rhetoric. Is this the ‘higher plane’ he has reached?

It would clear up a lot of this confusion and would make people like Adele Stan feel a lot better if Wallis was just more honest about his beliefs and repudiated the statement he signed years ago that he obviously no longer agrees with. Did he ever agree with it? Doubtful. . .

That’s something Stan and I could probably agree upon.

In the meantime, is it too much to ask Sojourners and Wallis to tell us whether or not they agree or disagree with the recently released letter to Congress authored by the three Catholic bishops leading the Church’s efforts on health care? They don’t seem to think that health care legislation is “abortion-neutral,” and have warned “we will have no choice but to oppose the bill” unless current bills are amended.” Can we expect Wallis and Sojourners to join the bishops in opposing the bill unless they are ammended? Or will they dodge the issue and proclaim they are on a “higher plane,” or embracing a “third way.”

Hold that thought.

Last month the New York Times reported “U.S. Kills Top Qaeda Leader in Southern Somalia.” The target was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was killed by American commandos in a daring daylight raid in southern Somalia. Here’s how the Times summarized the operation.

On Monday, around 1 p.m., villagers near the town of Baraawe said four military helicopters suddenly materialized over the horizon and shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert. . . .

The helicopters, with commandos firing .50-caliber machine guns and other automatic weapons, quickly disabled the trucks, according to villagers in the area, and several of the Shabab fighters tried to fire back. Shabab leaders said that six foreign fighters, including Mr. Nabhan, were quickly killed, along with three Somali Shabab. The helicopters landed, and the commandos inspected the wreckage and carried away the bodies of Mr. Nabhan and the other fighters for identification, a senior American military official said.

You won’t find it in the Times story, but Fox News made it a point to report that ten days prior to the raid President Obama signed the Execute Order that gave the go-ahead to assassinate Nabhan. President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a month later.

So, who says President Obama hasn’t done anything to earn the award?

“Peace through Targeted-Assassinations” anyone?

Gushee, for instance, recently took to the pages of USA Today complaining that even though he agrees that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided he has been “demonized,” for his attempt to find “common ground” on abortion:

The pattern remains most obvious whenever anything related to abortion is under consideration — as with health care reform, in which abortion has played a supporting role in the debate despite the efforts of most Democratic leaders to keep the legislation abortion-neutral. The entire health care reform effort has become an episode in demonization.

Well, perhaps we have been too hard on the Wallis-McLaren-Gushee crowd. Maybe we should not have been so hasty in suggesting they are simply carrying water for Obama and Congressional Democrats on the issue of abortion and health care. So let me suggest a little test. Let’s call it the “how-deep-are you-in-the-tank-for-Obama test.”

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops have just released a letter to Congress authored by the three Catholic bishops leading the Church’s efforts on health care. They don’t seem to think that health care legislation is “abortion-neutral,” and have warned “we will have no choice but to oppose the bill” unless current bills are amended. George Stephanopoulos summarizes the objection:

The bishops simply don’t buy the argument that House Democrats found a way to block public funding for abortions with the Capps amendment, and they insist that the Hyde amendment doesn’t apply to the bills because they are not appropriations measures. A sizable bloc of House Democrats, led by Bart Stupak of Michigan, agree and are pressuring for a clear prohibition on public funding.

It sure would be nice to know what Wallis, McClaren, and Gushee think of all this. Would it be too much to ask for them to step up to the plate and tell us whether they agree or disagree with the stance taken by the Bishops? To use rhetoric to which they might be more accustomed, will they “raise their voices in solidarity with the Catholic bishops” on the issue of health care and abortion. Or will they continue to carry water for the Obama administration? Are they now, at long last willing to surrender the notion that current health care legislation is still “abortion neutral?”

That should be sufficient for a “how-deep-are-you-in-the-tank-for-Obama test, at least for now.”

The article reports on the President’s decision in March, after a review by his national security team, “to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban.” This decision was then set forth in an administration white paper outlining what Obama called “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Preventing al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan, the document stated, would require “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy.”

So far so good. This is precisely the way it is supposed to work: civilian leadership sets forth the strategy and the military begins planning to determine what it will cost in terms of resources to execute that strategy. But evidently, for some senior administration officials, ”new” doesn’t mean new, “comprehensive” doesn’t mean comprehensive, and “strategy” doesn’t mean strategy:

To senior military commanders, the sentence was unambiguous: U.S. and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones.

And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground.

To some civilians who participated in the strategic review, that conclusion was much less clear. Some took it as inevitable that more troops would be needed, but others thought the thrust of the new approach was to send over scores more diplomats and reconstruction experts. They figured a counterinsurgency mission could be accomplished with the forces already in the country, plus the 17,000 new troops Obama had authorized in February.

The mind reels. Did someone pause for just a moment to ask themselves who is going to kill off the bad guys and secure an area to allow “diplomats and reconstruction experts” to do their work (“clear”) and subsequently protect them (“hold”) so that they can “build.” If there are indeed civilian members of President Obama’s national security team who either believed this nonsense, much less advised the President, or advised his advisors, they ought to be immediately fired for gross incompetence. These are people on his national security team, for goodness sake. Take this, for example:

“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.

Nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes! After eight years of war in Afghanistan, after a ubiquitous and profound debate on the decision, planning for, and execution of the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq in 2007, after years of intellectually profound debate and discussion on the doctrine and history of COIN, most of which can easily be found online or in easily accessible books on the subject, and we yet we get “senior administration officials” in charge of national security policy and the war in Afghanistan now confessing to having “sticker shock’ when it comes to the costs associated with the COIN strategy!

But as the article makes clear, it is not true that all senior administration officials have been so grossly negligent and incompetent:

At the same time that the counterinsurgency idea was taking hold among the review team’s members, [JSC Chairman Admiral] Mullen and [Secretary of Defense] Gates were starting to question whether [General] McKiernan was the right general to lead the effort in Afghanistan. If he was serious about counterinsurgency, some in the Pentagon wondered, how could he not want more forces?

To senior military planners, counterinsurgency had a clear meaning—and a defined prescription. The military’s counterinsurgency strategy, FM 3-24, promulgated by Petraeus in 2006, calls for securing the population from insurgents, and it suggests a troop density of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 residents in an area of operation. If that formula was applied to parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan where the Taliban is strongest, at least tens of thousands of additional foreign troops would be needed.

By mid-April, Mullen and Gates had decided to replace McKiernan with McChrystal. Although McChrystal has a Special Forces counterterrorism background, he impressed Mullen and Gates with his thinking about counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Before he left for Kabul, Gates asked him to assess the mission and report back within 60 days.

To McChrystal and his senior advisers, the white paper was the strategy, and his job was to figure out how to implement it.

This is elementary stuff. Gates got it right. Admiral Mullen got it right. And sure as shootin’ McChrystal got it right. Maybe that has something to do with the fact they actually read the counterinsurgency manual (also readily available online) and were able to do, as they say, a little elementary math. That would be, I suppose, just a tad too much to ask of other civilian “senior administration officials” who have been charged with winning the war in Afghanistan and who are putting Americans in harms way.

The article concludes like this:

To the military, however, the only way to do counterinsurgency is by protecting the population.

“We were operating under the assumption that when they said COIN, that’s what they meant,” said a senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan, “and they were serious about committing the necessary resources.”

You can bet they’re reading this article in the Pentagon this morning. And their eyebrows are raised and their eyes are rolling back in their heads. And they are not happy!

In a speech in London on Thursday, Gen. Stanley McChrystal publicly intervened in the debate over Afghanistan. Vice President Biden has suggested that we focus on fighting al-Qaeda and refrain from using our troops to prop up the government of President Hamid Karzai. But when this strategic option was raised at his presentation, McChrystal said it was a formula for “Chaos-istan.” When asked whether he would support it, he said, “The short answer is: No.”

Ackerman says, “As commanding general in Afghanistan, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements.”

Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, writing in today’s Post argues that although his public statements were perhaps “too blunt and impolitic” and that if he had a “do-over” he might have “made different, more nuanced statements”, McChrystal is nonetheless “A General Within Bounds.” O’Hanlon, I think, has it just about right. The key is in his opening sentence:

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has come under fire for making public comments about the war. While answering questions after an Oct. 1 speech — in which he avoided taking sides in the policy debate — McChrystal challenged a popular alternative to the approach that President Obama sent him to Afghanistan to pursue.

In criticizing the “counterterrorism strategy” being proposed by Vice President Biden, he was merely challenging a strategy that President Obama had already rejected last spring when he personally chose General McChrystal for the job. That’s why O’Hanlon is correct in calling the comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy the “Obama/McChystal plan”:

The Obama/McChrystal plan is classic counterinsurgency and focuses on protecting the Afghan population while strengthening Afghan security forces and government. McChrystal was asked about a “counterterrorism” strategy that would purportedly contain al-Qaeda with much lower numbers of American troops, casualties and other costs. McChrystal did not try to force the president’s hand on whether to increase the foreign troop presence in Afghanistan. The general critiqued an option that is at direct odds with Obama’s policy and conflicts with the experiences of the U.S. military this decade. That is not fundamentally out of line for a commander.

Indeed, as O’Hanlon says, in criticizing the counterterrorism option, McChrystal has actually “understated his case.” There is a near consensus among the uniformed military leadership that the counterterrorism option is a non-starter. By all accounts General McChystal’s view on this matter is shared by General Petraeus, the Commander of U.S. Central Command, and by Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not only that, but this particular view of a counterterrorism strategy runs deep and wide in the ranks.

Here, it is worth calling attention to a Thomas Ricks report on the comments of battle-tested commanders at a recent counterinsurgency conference sponsored by the Marine Corps:

No one quite spoke much directly to the issue, which would be “inappropriate” — Washington’s favorite word. But the debate of a COIN approach, with a sustained widespread presence vs. a counterterrorism approach (that is, in-and-out raiding) was constantly in the background. The third option, simply playing for time while building up Afghan security forces, didn’t seem to be treated as a starter.

“If you’re taking a raiding approach … you’re really vacating the battlefield,” said the ever-quotable Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster.

One of the most interesting panels was made up of three Marine colonels who commanded battalions in successful counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not surprisingly, they were the most vocal people all day in support of the McChrystal plan. What you need is a force that simultaneously goes after the enemy and protects the population, they all agreed. But, observed Col. J.D. Alford, “We’re a completely enemy-centric force” in Afghanistan. Alford, who commanded the 3rd Battalion of the 6th Marines in northwest Iraq in 2005, said we need to be much closer to the Afghan security forces, living and working alongside them.

On the McChrystal plan, Alford added, “We’ve got to do some real math and tell some real truth … if we are going to do population-centric COIN.”

When it all comes down to it, General McChrystal has simply done the math and told the unvarnished truth.

O’Hanlon notes that “Some might agree with all this yet say that McChrystal still had no business wading into policy waters at this moment. It is true that commanders, as a rule, should not do so.” But what happens when a truly bad idea gets floated to the public?

When . . . those [ideas] already tried and discredited are debated as serious proposals, they do not deserve intellectual sanctuary. McChrystal is personally responsible for the lives of 100,000 NATO troops who are suffering severe losses partially as a result of eight years of a failed counterterrorism strategy under a different name. He has a right to speak if a policy debate becomes too removed from reality. Put another way, we need to hear from him because he understands this reality far better than most in Washington.

But there is another reason to speak out on this. Call it, “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me”:

Many of those criticizing McChrystal wish, in retrospect, that our military command in 2002-03 had been more vocal in opposing Donald Rumsfeld’s planning for the Iraq invasion that assumed a minimal need for post-invasion stabilization forces. This was an unusually bad idea that military leadership went along with, at least publicly, partly out of a sense that they had no prerogative to intercede. The result was one of the most botched operations in U.S. military history until the 2007 surge partially salvaged things.

For the current military leadership, and for me personally, this is not history, it is memory. A bad memory! Many of us were simply confounded by the lack of planning for what the military called “Phase IV” (“post-invasion stabilization forces”) in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those who tried to raise the issue were told, in effect, to go back into their cubby holes, since “they”—someone “up there”—had it covered. They didn’t.

You can bet that McChrystal and Petraeus and Mullen and McMaster and Alford and countless numbers of now mid-level military officers and NCOs who had to pay the price have learned the lesson. O’Hanlon couldn’t have concluded his article any better: “But the counterterrorism option is not a viable way to help stabilize Afghanistan. Because Obama called Afghanistan “a necessary war” seven weeks ago, it would have verged on professional malpractice for McChrystal to pretend otherwise.”

Of course, strictly speaking it is still possible, albeit implausible, that those who are urging a “light footprint” counterterrorism strategy are right and the uniformed military leadership and the experienced warfighters are wrong. In which case, President Obama will have to find a few military flag officers to execute the “Biden Plan,” in good conscience. In which case we should all wish him good luck, because he’s going to need it.”