First let me thank Tom Riggins for his fine post. I too read the Rolling Stone article (which really wasn't adequately dealt with in the press and TV accounts) and what I read sounded, from both Stanley Mac's aides and himself like a group of cynical foul mouthed characters who reminded me of the Nixon White White House Watergate crowd as a group of people --except they, the military leaders, were the ones managing the corruption and the lies(unlike the Nixon White House inner circle) and talking about their civilians leaders the way Nixon and his aides talked about their political enemies.
Replacing McChrystal with Petraeus though is from what we know like replacing Harding with Coolidge or Boss Tweed with the Tammany Hall leaders who followed him for the next ninety years until Carmine De Sapio, the last old style Tammany leader, finally went to prison in the 1960s. Given what both are, it can't by itself change anything.
Both are Military Industrial Complex (MIC) interchangeable parts in a parasitic system which is a textbook example of Lenin's theory of imperialism--undermining earlier liberal democratic institutions and traditions (for which militarists whatever they say have, given the lucrative industry of which they are a part, as much contempt for as corporate leaders have for unions) and of course creating, extending and expanding wars that consolidate the power of monopoly capital, as it exports capital abroad.
The war in Afghanistan is a lose lose situation for the Obama administration. If Obama really were the Socialist (and particularly the Communist) of right wing fantasies, his administration might stand a chance to do something positive in Afghanistan by supporting a restoration of the policies that the Peoples Democratic Party (Communist Party) of Afghanistan fought for, far reaching land reform, the destruction of the feudal land lord warlord, Islamic clergy power structure which ruled over an impoverished unskilled illiterate people, and of course, general and especially female education. The U.S. given its resources might do a better job at that the the Soviet Union did, because it would not have Russia or any other power supporting the Taliban and the warlords to the tune of billions to arm and train tens of thousands to disrupt all of that.
Of course, I am saying this with my tongue pretty far in my cheek. What the Obama administration can do, though, given what it formally stands for and the hopes of its core constituents, is to carry forward a military withdrawal from Afghanistan, work with India, China, former Soviet Republics in the region and Russia, on some reconstruction and stabilization plan, with the United Nations providing through its various agencies oversight. The longer the administration continues the present course in Afghanistan, the more it divides its own supporters and helps the Reagan-Bush-"Tea Party" extreme right forces regain the initiative and improves their chances to restore their power. And the victory of those forces is a much greater danger to the economic and social security of the American people than anything that can happen in Afghanistan.
