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Obama, Afghanistan and General McChrystal

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that the US war in Afghanistan is objectively unwinnable, and that the public clash between President Obama and General McChrystal is not merely a personality dispute but a symptom of deepening contradictions within the American ruling class over how to manage an imperialist venture that has reached a strategic dead end. The central thesis is that no military strategy—whether counterinsurgency (COIN) or brute force—can overcome the fundamental reality that the Afghan people do not want foreign occupation, and that every civilian killed by US forces creates ten new enemies. The war therefore serves only as a drain on the US economy and a source of political instability at home, with no conceivable victorious outcome.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is grounded in the classical Marxist theory of imperialism, particularly the understanding that capitalist states pursue wars not for abstract security or humanitarian goals but for the economic and strategic interests of their ruling classes. The article draws on Trotsky's prediction that US global dominance would contain "dynamite built into its foundations"—the contradiction between the immense military power of American imperialism and the political and social limits of its capacity to control foreign populations. The argument also reflects the Marxist critique of the military-industrial complex and the autonomy of the military bureaucracy within the capitalist state: the Pentagon is presented not as a neutral instrument but as a powerful faction within the ruling class, capable of blackmailing elected politicians and pursuing its own institutional agenda. The concept of "quagmire" is deployed not as a journalistic cliché but as a concrete description of a situation in which military escalation produces diminishing returns and rising costs—a practical illustration of the limits that imperialism encounters when it overreaches.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in June 2010, at a specific inflection point in the Afghan War. US troop deaths had just passed the 1,000 mark, and Afghanistan had overtaken Vietnam as the longest war in American history. Obama had been forced to drop his July 2011 deadline for withdrawal. The Rolling Stone article exposing McChrystal's contempt for civilian leaders had just broken, creating a political crisis in Washington. The article situates this within a broader context of imperial overstretch: the US was spending more in Afghanistan than in Iraq, the Dutch government had fallen over the war, Germany's president had been forced to resign, and Canada and the Netherlands had announced troop withdrawals. The economic crisis of 2008 was still fresh, and the article notes the contradiction between astronomical military spending—over $600 billion annually for the Pentagon—and the domestic pressures of recession. The Taliban, meanwhile, was collecting up to $400 million annually from the opium trade, giving it "almost unlimited reserves of money, arms and manpower from Pakistan."

Where the Argument Continues

This article is an early statement of a theme that runs consistently through the IDOM corpus: the terminal crisis of US imperialism and the unwinnable nature of its post-9/11 wars. Readers should consult Alan Woods' later analyses of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which revisit these same arguments with the benefit of hindsight. The broader theoretical framework—the limits of imperialist military power, the contradiction between the military and political wings of the ruling class, and the role of war in accelerating economic crisis—is developed in IDOM's series on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and its relationship to imperialist rivalry. The article also connects to the tradition of Marxist analysis of the Vietnam War, particularly the work of Trotskyists who argued from the outset that US intervention in Indochina was unwinnable for the same structural reasons.

Connections

  • Trotsky's writings on US imperialism, particularly his prediction that American global dominance would contain internal contradictions that would eventually tear it apart
  • IDOM's later coverage of the Afghan withdrawal (2021), which confirms the article's central thesis
  • The Marxist analysis of the military-industrial complex and the autonomy of military institutions within the capitalist state
  • The broader IDOM corpus on the crisis of US imperialism, including analyses of the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of great-power rivalry
  • Clausewitz, invoked in the article via the observation that diplomacy is "the continuation of warfare by other means"—a formulation that reverses Clausewitz's original dictum but captures the reality of counterinsurgency

Key Quotes

  1. "The war in Afghanistan cannot be won. In February of this year a major offensive was launched to retake the southern town of Marja. But despite all the terrifying firepower of the US army, the fighting continues to drag on. McChrystal himself has referred to it as a 'bleeding ulcer.'"

  2. "With the aid of the most modern and sophisticated technology, such as the unmanned drones that drop bombs, they have killed a lot of people. 'JSOC was a killing machine,' says Maj. Gen. Mayville, his chief of operations. Unfortunately, the 'killing machine' has killed a lot of Afghan civilians, and for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies."

  3. "The central difficulty is easily expressed: the Afghan people do not want the foreign forces in their country. The huge amounts of money aimed at bribing the population only serve to fuel corruption, aggravating the feelings of resentment and hostility among the people, who see little or nothing of the aid that flows directly into the bank accounts of Karzai and his family and stooges."

  4. "Before the outbreak of the Second World War, with astonishing prescience, Leon Trotsky predicted that the USA would emerge as the main victor in the coming conflict, and that it would dominate the entire world, but it would have dynamite built into its foundations. The 11th September, and the calamitous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown how right he was."

  5. "The strategy of counterinsurgency will succeed only in creating a situation of perpetual war. Obama never speaks of 'victory' in Afghanistan because no victory is possible, as the British learned over a hundred years ago."

  6. "It was understood long ago by Robespierre, who pointed out that people do not like missionaries armed with bayonets. And in no country in the world is this assertion truer than in Afghanistan, as every invader from Alexander the Great onwards has found out to their cost."