Tory Maguire, Afghanistan, and make sure you know you'll win before you do anything ...

(Above: how to win a war. Go showbiz, and make sure you're on the same page as Gaga as she shows how to handle weaponry).

Speaking of people rushing late to the scene of an accident and wondering what it's all about, look no further than Tory Maguire and her column Is the Afghan war in the hands of cowboys?

As she meanders down to the end of the piece, Maguire lands on this penetrating thought:

What would be excellent would be if we got to hear McCrystal’s assessment of the mission. Not in a coded jibe at his boss in Rolling Stone, but in a clear and concise manner.

Not much point in that, since the rooster McCrystal is now a feather duster, of use only in dusting off his chair for General David Petraeus. (Generals Change But Strategy Doesn't In Afghanistan).

Not that the plaintive Maguire couldn't have found out plenty about McCrystal's thinking if she'd simply bothered to consult the full to overflowing intertubes.

But then the level of fatuity in Maguire's piece might have dropped. Here she is opening up her observations:

Much is being read into a couple of lines in the feature piece, in which McChrystal and his staff made some seemingly benign but inappropriate comments about the President and his Vice President Joe Biden.

Seemingly benign? In the sense of a kind and gentle disposition? Or in the way of showing gentleness and mildness? Or perhaps in the meaning tending to exert a beneficial, or even a favourable influence? Or perhaps in the way of having little or no detrimental effect, harmless?

Well bite me on the bum, or should that be get bitten Tory. It seems you're unprepared, and quite frankly we're disappointed in you. Reading you - well that time is painful, as it seems we're selling an unsellable position. We like to think of you as a wounded animal, at least when we're not feeling betrayed. There's no doubt about it, you're as silly as those wimps in the White House.

And so on and so on. And sure a lot of the quotes are from unnamed advisors around McChrystal, and only a few are directly from McChrystal, but when you get too close to the media sun, expect the wax on the wings to melt a little.

When Harry S. Truman clipped the wings of General Douglas MacArthur and ordered him back home, it caused him a lot of flack and produced the usual calls for impeachment, but thank the lord MacArthur never had a chance to bring on a third world war and sort out the Communists there and then.

Meanwhile, Maguire gets herself caught in a logic trap:

The author of the piece, Michael Hastings, says McChrystal and his team were sending a message to Obama that “there are serious sceptics [about the war] in the highest levels of his staff”.

If that’s true, we deserve to know what has prompted that scepticism.

Um, so the President wants a serious sceptic to run his war in Afghanistan? Well that'd be a first.

And why might some of the people on McChrystal's staff be sceptical?

Lordy who could work that one out. It's really tough. Perhaps it's because the war's gone so swimmingly well these past nine years? As it did for the Russians before the Americans? And for the British before the Russians?

Roll me downhill and beat me with a feather, we must be in company with one of the pundits from The Punch, Australia's most retrograde conversation.

Maguire ends her plaintive whine with this plaintive plea:

The Australian Diggers already there, and the ones that may end up joining them, deserve to know they’re not fighting a losing battle.

Roll that one around in your head for awhile. The diggers, it seems, stout hearted and all, should only head off to war if they know they're not fighting in a losing battle.

Damn, if only we knew we were going to lose in Vietnam, we wouldn't have bothered going. As for the Korean war ... still not settled ... should we have shown up for a stalemate? Is a draw in chess just as bad as fighting a losing battle?

The not so hidden element in all this is of course the Australia-United States alliance. So long as the USA retains an interest in the balancing act between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, and keeps its army on the ground in country, Australia will tag along, never mind the potential futility of the exercise.

The Labor party could no more tarnish the alliance than Tony Abbott, and if either faltered, then the other side would seize on it, and run the betrayal to ground like a fox given a touch up by a pack of scent hounds. It was part of John Howard's cunning to do a tour of Iraq with minimal casualties, and now with a few Australian deaths in Afghanistan, the punditocracy are just starting to wake up to the news that there's a real war happening, and people are killed, and now it's not just people at wedding parties and funerals being taken out by Predators ...

So what on earth are we to make of this insight, as reported in the Herald's piece on Hastings?

Mr Obama named General McChrystal as commander in May 2009 to bring a fresh approach to the struggling Afghan campaign, but Hastings said the relationship "has been strained from the beginning".

"I think the frustration is that the President really believes in the mission in Afghanistan. That, I think, is at the root of the problem," he told NBC.

The root of the problem is that Obama believes in the mission in Afghanistan? And accordingly sacks a general who doesn't?

Pass me the kool aid, I need a deep hearty swig.

You see, in the old days, if the military had expressed this kind of white feather shirking attitude, the Republicans would have flailed them alive. But now Obama's a problem because he's drunk the George Bush kool aid and believes that there's a job to be done in Afghanistan?

Well, here at the pond we understand the importance of the mission.

The supply lines for the opium and heroin trade have to be kept open, and corrupt warlords supported, chief amongst them Karzai, while all the time blathering about democracy, as if democracy was remotely the name of the game, and if that's not important enough, the recently re-floated, if aged news that Afghanistan has mineral wealth will have to do as an explanation of why the course must be stayed ...

Meanwhile, General McChyrstal will long be remembered for his epic war with PowerPoint ... (We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint).

Now there's the way to win a war ...