Legal Commentary

McChyrstal: Afghanistan in "Post-Apocalyptic Nightmare"

By Jeralyn

Via Real Aspen, Gen. Stanley McChrystal was in Aspen this weekend, for a private Forstmann Little & Company conference. He was interviewed for over an hour by Charlie Rose.

The two were seated on a small stage in an open-air tent in front of a rich and powerful crowd that included Martha Stewart, Peter Ueberroth, Monica Seles, David Stern, Karl Rove, George Lucas, Daniel Snyder, Julian Robertson, Michael Ovitz, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Chris Mathews, Michael Eisner, Padma Lakshmi and Ted Forstmann, the Forstmann Little co-founder and IMG CEO who hosted the event.

Among his comments about Afghannistan:

“Right now, it doesn't exist,” said McChrystal, noting the perpetual state of civil war that has embroiled the country ever since the late 1970s. “Afghanistan is in some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare.”

[More...]

McChrystal even displayed a sense of humor:

One audience member at the Forstmann Little event stood up and asked McChrystal if he were Obama, given the totality of the circumstances and all that the general knows, would he have fired himself. There was a pregnant pause. Then the general cracked a wry smile and replied: “Several times.”

On finding Osama bin Laden:

“I don't know where he is,” the general said, joking that it took a long time to find Olympic Park Bomber Eric Rudolph and he was hiding in the woods of the United States, not the Afghan mountains.

What's the General up to now? Teaching a leadership course at Yale.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 27, 2010 (boomark / email).