The Allies of Humanity – Fifth briefing

“Threshold: A New Promise for Humanity”

In order to prepare for the alien presence that is in the world, it is necessary to learn more about life in the Greater Community, life that will envelope your world in the future, life that you will be a part of.

Humanity’s destiny was always to emerge into a Greater Community of intelligent life. This is inevitable and occurs in all worlds where intelligent life has been seeded and has developed. Eventually, you would have come to realize that you lived within a Greater Community. And, eventually, you would have found that you were not alone in your own world, that visitation was occurring and that you would have to learn to contend with divergent races, forces, beliefs and attitudes that are prevalent in the Greater Community in which you live.

Emerging into the Greater Community is your destiny. Your isolation is now over. Though your world has been visited many times in the past, your isolated state has come to an end. Now it is necessary for you to realize that you are no longer alone—in the universe or even within your own world. This understanding is presented more fully in the Teaching in Greater Community Spirituality that is being presented in the world today. Our role here is to describe life as it exists in the Greater Community so that you may have a deeper understanding of the greater panorama of life into which you are emerging. This is necessary in order for you to be able to approach this new reality with greater objectivity, understanding and wisdom. Humanity has lived in relative isolation for so long that it is natural for you to consider that the rest of the universe functions according to the ideas, principles and science that you hold sacred and upon which you base your activities and your perceptions of the world.

The Greater Community is vast. Its furthest reaches have never been explored. It is greater than any race can comprehend. Within this magnificent creation, intelligent life exists at all levels of evolution and in countless expressions. Your world exists in a part of the Greater Community that is fairly well inhabited. There are many areas of the Greater Community that have never been explored and other areas where races live in secret. Everything exists in the Greater Community in terms of the manifestations of life. And though life as we have been describing it seems difficult and challenging, the Creator works everywhere, reclaiming the separated through Knowledge.

In the Greater Community, there can be no one religion, one ideology or one form of government that can be adapted to all races and all peoples. Therefore, when we speak of religion, we speak of the spirituality of Knowledge, for this is the power and presence of Knowledge that dwells in all intelligent life—within you, within your visitors and within other races that you will encounter in the future.

Thus, universal spirituality becomes a great focal point. It brings together the divergent understandings and ideas that are prevalent in your world and gives your own spiritual reality a shared foundation. Yet the study of Knowledge is not only edifying, it is essential for survival and advancement in the Greater Community. For you to be able to establish and sustain your freedom and independence in the Greater Community, you must have this greater ability developed amongst enough people in your world. Knowledge is the only part of you that cannot be manipulated or influenced. It is the source of all wise understanding and action. It becomes a necessity within a Greater Community environment if freedom is valued and if you wish to establish your own destiny without being integrated into a collective or another society.

Therefore, while we present a grave situation in the world today, we also present a great gift and a great promise for humanity, for the Creator would not leave you unprepared for the Greater Community, which is the greatest of all thresholds that you as a race will face. We have been blessed with this gift as well. It has been in our possession for many of your centuries. We have had to learn it both out of choice and out of necessity.

Indeed, it is the presence and the power of Knowledge which enables us to speak as your Allies and to provide the information that we are giving in these discourses. Had we never found this great Revelation, we would be isolated in our own worlds, unable to comprehend the greater forces in the universe which would shape our future and our destiny. For the gift that is being given in your world today has been given to us and to many other races as well who showed promise. This gift is especially important for emerging races such as your own who hold such promise and yet are so vulnerable in the Greater Community.

Therefore, while there can be no one religion or ideology in the universe, there is a universal principle, understanding and spiritual reality that is available to all. So complete is it that it can speak to those who are vastly different from you. It speaks to the diversity of life in all of its manifestations. You, living within your world, now have the opportunity to learn of such a great reality, to experience its power and grace for yourselves. Indeed, ultimately this is the gift that we wish to reinforce, for this will preserve your freedom and your self-determination and will open the door to a greater promise in the universe.

However, you have adversity and a great challenge at the outset. This requires you to learn a deeper Knowledge and a greater awareness. Should you respond to this challenge, you become the beneficiary not only for yourself, but for your entire race.

The teaching in Greater Community Spirituality is being presented in the world today. It has never been presented here before. It is being given through one person, who serves as the intermediary and speaker for this Tradition. It is being sent into the world at this critical time when humanity must learn of its life in the Greater Community and of the greater forces that are shaping the world today. Only a teaching and understanding from beyond the world could give you this advantage and this preparation.

You are not alone in undertaking such a great task, for there are others in the universe undertaking this, even at your stage of development. You are but one of many races emerging into the Greater Community at this time. Each one holds promise and yet each is vulnerable to the difficulties, challenges and influences that exist in this greater environment. Indeed, many races have lost their freedom before it was ever attained only to become part of collectives or commercial guilds or client states to larger powers.

We do not wish to see this happen for humanity, for this would be a great loss. It is for this reason that we are here. It is for this reason that the Creator is active in the world today, bringing a new understanding to the human family. It is time for humanity to end its ceaseless conflicts with itself and to prepare for life in the Greater Community.

You live in an area that has a great deal of activity beyond the sphere of your tiny solar system. Within this area, trade is carried on along certain avenues. Worlds interact, compete and sometimes conflict with each other. Opportunities are being sought by all who have commercial interests. They seek not only resources but also allegiances from worlds such as your own. Some are part of larger collectives. Others maintain their own alliances on a much smaller scale. Worlds that are able to emerge into the Greater Community successfully have had to maintain their autonomy and self-sufficiency to a great degree. This frees them from exposure to other forces which would only serve to exploit and manipulate them.

It is indeed your self-sufficiency and the development of your understanding and unity that become most essential for your well-being in the future. And this future is not far off, for already the influence of the visitors is becoming greater in your world. Many individuals have acquiesced to them already and now serve as their emissaries and intermediaries. Many other individuals simply serve as resources for their genetic program. This has happened, as we have said, many times in many places. It is not a mystery to us though it must seem incomprehensible to you.

The Intervention is both a misfortune and a vital opportunity. If you are able to respond, if you are able to prepare, if you are able to learn Greater Community Knowledge and Wisdom, then you will be able to offset the forces that are interfering in your world and build the foundation for greater unity amongst your own peoples and tribes. We, of course, encourage this, for this strengthens the bond of Knowledge everywhere.

In the Greater Community, warfare on a large scale rarely occurs. There are constraining forces. For one thing, warfare disturbs commerce and resource development. As a result, large nations are not allowed to act recklessly, for it impedes or offsets the goals of other parties, other nations and other interests. Civil war occurs periodically in worlds, but large-scale warfare between societies and between worlds is rare indeed. It is partly for this reason that skill in the Mental Environment has been established, for nations do compete with each other and attempt to influence one another. Since no one wants to destroy resources and opportunities, these greater skills and capabilities are cultivated with varying degrees of success amongst many societies in the Greater Community. When these kinds of influences are present, the need for Knowledge is even greater.

Humanity is ill prepared for this. Yet because of your rich spiritual heritage and the degree to which personal freedom exists in your world today, there is promise that you may be able to advance in this greater understanding and thus secure your freedom and preserve it.

There are other constraints against warfare in the Greater Community. Most trading societies belong to large guilds that have established laws and codes of conduct for their members. These serve to constrain the activities of many who would seek to use force to gain access to other worlds and their proprietary resources. For warfare to break out on a large scale, many races would have to be involved, and this does not happen often. We understand that humanity is very warlike and conceives of conflict in the Greater Community in terms of warfare, but in reality you will find that this is not well tolerated and that other avenues of persuasion are employed in place of force.

Thus, your visitors come to your world not with great armaments. They do not come bringing large military forces, for they employ the skills that have served them in other ways—skills in manipulating the thoughts, the impulses and the feelings of those whom they encounter. Humanity is very vulnerable to such persuasions given the degree of superstition, conflict and mistrust that are prevalent in your world at this time.

Therefore, to understand your visitors and to understand others whom you will encounter in the future, you must establish a more mature approach to the use of power and influence. This is a vital part of your Greater Community education. Part of the preparation for this will be given in the Teaching in Greater Community Spirituality, but you must also learn through direct experience.

At present, we understand, there is a very fanciful view of the Greater Community amongst many people. It is believed that those who are technologically advanced are spiritually advanced as well, yet we can assure you that this is not the case. You yourselves, though more technologically advanced now than you were previously, have not spiritually advanced to a very great degree. You have more power, but with power comes the need for greater restraint.

There are those in the Greater Community who have far more power than you at a technological level and even at the level of thought. You will evolve to deal with them, but weaponry will not be your focus. For warfare on an interplanetary scale is so destructive that everyone loses. What are the spoils of such a conflict? What advantages does it secure? Indeed, when such conflict does exist, it happens in space itself and rarely in terrestrial environments. Rogue nations and those who are destructive and aggressive are quickly countered, particularly if they exist in well-populated areas where commerce is carried on.

Therefore, it is necessary for you to understand the nature of conflict in the universe because this will give you insight into the visitors and their needs—why they function the way they do, why individual freedom is unknown amongst them and why they rely upon their collectives. This gives them stability and power, but it also renders them vulnerable to those who are skilled with Knowledge.

Knowledge enables you to think in any number of ways, to act spontaneously, to perceive reality beyond the obvious and to experience the future and the past. Such abilities are beyond the reach of those who can only follow the regimens and the dictates of their cultures. You are far behind the visitors technologically, but you have the promise to develop skills in The Way of Knowledge, skills which you will need and must learn to rely upon increasingly.

We would not be the Allies of Humanity if we did not teach you about life in the Greater Community. We have seen much. We have encountered many different things. Our worlds were overcome and we had to regain our freedom. We know, from error and from experience, the nature of the conflict and the challenge that you face today. That is why we are well suited for this mission in our service to you. However, you will not meet us, and we will not come to meet the leaders of your nations. That is not our purpose.

Indeed, you need as little interference as possible, but you do need great assistance. There are new skills that you must develop and a new understanding that you must gain. Even a benevolent society, should they come to your world, would have such an influence and such an impact upon you that you would become dependent upon them and would not establish your own strength, your own power and your own self-sufficiency. You would be so reliant upon their technology and upon their understanding that they would not be able to leave you. And indeed, their arrival here would make you even more vulnerable to interference in the future. For you would desire their technology, and you would want to travel along the corridors of trade in the Greater Community. Yet you would not be prepared, and you would not be wise.

That is why your future friends are not here. That is why they are not coming to help you. For you would not become strong if they did. You would want to associate with them, you would want to have alliances with them, but you would be so weak that you could not protect yourselves. In essence, you would become part of their culture, which they do not will.

Perhaps many people will not be able to understand what we are saying here, but in time this will make perfect sense to you, and you will see its wisdom and its necessity. At this moment, you are far too frail, too distracted and too conflicted to form strong alliances, even with those who could be your future friends. Humanity cannot yet speak as one voice, and so you are prone to intervention and manipulation from beyond.

As the reality of the Greater Community becomes more well known within your world, and if our message can reach enough people, then there will be a growing consensus that there is a greater problem facing humanity. This could create a new basis for cooperation and consensus. For what possible advantage can one nation in your world have over another when the entire world is threatened by the Intervention? And who could seek to gain individual power in an environment where alien forces are intervening? If freedom is to be real in your world, it must be shared. It must be recognized and known. It cannot be the privilege of the few or there will be no real strength here.

We understand from the Unseen Ones that already there are people who seek world dominion because they believe they have the visitors’ blessings and support. They have the visitors’ assurance that they will be assisted in their quest for power. And yet, what are they giving away but the keys to their own freedom and the freedom of their world? They are unknowing and unwise. They cannot see their error.

We also understand that there are those who believe that the visitors are here to represent a spiritual renaissance and a new hope for humanity, but how can they know, they who know nothing of the Greater Community? It is their hope and their desire that this be the case, and such wishes are accommodated by the visitors, for very obvious reasons.

What we are saying here is there can be nothing short of real freedom in the world, real power and real unity. We make our message available to everyone, and we trust that our words can be received and considered seriously. Yet we have no control over your response. And the superstitions and the fears of the world may make our message beyond the reach for many. But the promise is still there. To give you more, we would have to take over your world, which we do not want to do. Therefore, we give all that we can give without interfering in your affairs. Yet there are many who want interference. They want to be rescued or saved by someone else. They do not trust the possibilities for humanity. They do not believe in humanity’s inherent strengths and capabilities. They will give over their freedom willingly. They will believe what they are told by the visitors. And they will serve their new masters, thinking that what they are being given is their own liberation.

Freedom is a precious thing in the Greater Community. Never forget this. Your freedom, our freedom. And what is freedom but the ability to follow Knowledge, the reality that the Creator has given you, and to express Knowledge and to contribute Knowledge in all of its manifestations?

Your visitors do not have this freedom. It is unknown to them. They look at the chaos of your world, and they believe that the order that they will impose here will be redeeming for you and will save you from your own self-destruction. This is all they can give, for this is all that they have. And they will use you, but they do not consider this inappropriate, for they themselves are being used and know of no alternative to this. Their programming, their conditioning, is so thorough that to reach them at the level of their deeper spirituality holds only remote possibilities. You do not have the strength to do this. You would have to be so much stronger than you are today to have a redeeming influence on your visitors. And yet, their conformity is not so unusual in the Greater Community. It is very common in large collectives, where uniformity and compliance are essential to efficient functioning, particularly over vast areas of space.

Therefore, do not look at the Greater Community with fear, but with objectivity. The conditions that we are describing already exist in your world. You can understand these things. Manipulation is known to you. Influence is known to you. You have just never encountered them on such a great scale, nor have you ever had to compete with other forms of intelligent life. As a result, you do not yet have the skills to do so.

We speak of Knowledge because it is your greatest ability. Regardless of what technology you can develop over time, Knowledge is your greatest promise. You are centuries behind the visitors in your technological development, so you must rely upon Knowledge. It is the greatest force in the universe, and your visitors do not use it. It is your only hope. That is why the Teaching in Greater Community Spirituality teaches The Way of Knowledge, provides the Steps to Knowledge and teaches Greater Community Wisdom and Insight. Without this preparation, you would not have the skill or the perspective to understand your dilemma or to respond to it effectively. It is too big. It is too new. And you are not adapted to these new circumstances.

The visitors’ influence is growing with each passing day. Every person who can hear this, feel this and know this must learn The Way of Knowledge, The Greater Community Way of Knowledge. This is a calling. It is a gift. It is a challenge.

Under more pleasant circumstances, well, the need may not seem as great. But the need is tremendous, for there is no security, there is no place to hide, there is no retreat in the world that is secure from the alien presence that is here. That is why there are only two choices: you can acquiesce or you can stand for your freedom.

This is the great decision placed before each person. This is the great turning point. You cannot be foolish in the Greater Community. It is too demanding an environment. It requires excellence, commitment. Your world is too valuable. The resources here are coveted by others. The strategic position of your world is held in high regard. Even if you were living in some remote world far from any trade route, far from all commercial engagements, eventually you would be discovered by someone. That eventuality has come for you now. And it is well underway.

Take heart, then. This is a time for courage, not for ambivalence. The gravity of the situation facing you only confirms the importance of your life and your response and the importance of the preparation that is being given in the world today. It is not only for your edification and advancement. It is for your protection and your survival as well.

©2010 Society for The Greater Community Way of Knowledge.
All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.alliesofhumanity.org/chapter5-allies-of-humanity.php

Connecting the dots of doom.

[vsw id=”gfBa0aIztvY” source=”youtube” width=”510″ height=”410″ autoplay=”no”]

This video was uploaded in june 2008. Watch for the end. Unbelievable!

The controllers are playing a wicked game with  nature, HUmanity, animal kingdom. This madness has to stop!

All major events in USA connected, with lines. Reveals pentagram of blood and coming disasters
Bombs. terrorists, Bush George W, Dick Cheney , Illuminati, UFO, ATF, FBI, CIA, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, war, flight 93, pyramid, eye, World trade center, towers

The Rolling Stone Story That Got McChrystal Fired

This article appears in RS 1108/1109 from July 8-22, 2010, on newsstands Friday, June 25.
‘How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It’s a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He’s in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany’s president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

“The dinner comes with the position, sir,” says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

McChrystal turns sharply in his chair.

“Hey, Charlie,” he asks, “does this come with the position?”

McChrystal gives him the middle finger.

The general stands and looks around the suite that his traveling staff of 10 has converted into a full-scale operations center. The tables are crowded with silver Panasonic Toughbooks, and blue cables crisscross the hotel’s thick carpet, hooked up to satellite dishes to provide encrypted phone and e-mail communications. Dressed in off-the-rack civilian casual – blue tie, button-down shirt, dress slacks – McChrystal is way out of his comfort zone. Paris, as one of his advisers says, is the “most anti-McChrystal city you can imagine.” The general hates fancy restaurants, rejecting any place with candles on the tables as too “Gucci.” He prefers Bud Light Lime (his favorite beer) to Bordeaux, Talladega Nights (his favorite movie) to Jean-Luc Godard. Besides, the public eye has never been a place where McChrystal felt comfortable: Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon’s most secretive black ops.

“What’s the update on the Kandahar bombing?” McChrystal asks Flynn. The city has been rocked by two massive car bombs in the past day alone, calling into question the general’s assurances that he can wrest it from the Taliban.

“We have two KIAs, but that hasn’t been confirmed,” Flynn says.

McChrystal takes a final look around the suite. At 55, he is gaunt and lean, not unlike an older version of Christian Bale in Rescue Dawn. His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve fucked up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.

“I’d rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner,” McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

“Unfortunately,” he adds, “no one in this room could do it.”

With that, he’s out the door.

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides.

“Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.”

The next morning, McChrystal and his team gather to prepare for a speech he is giving at the École Militaire, a French military academy. The general prides himself on being sharper and ballsier than anyone else, but his brashness comes with a price: Although McChrystal has been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he has managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead to a state of “Chaos-istan.” The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile

Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. “I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”

When Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, he immediately set out to deliver on his most important campaign promise on foreign policy: to refocus the war in Afghanistan on what led us to invade in the first place. “I want the American people to understand,” he announced in March 2009. “We have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” He ordered another 21,000 troops to Kabul, the largest increase since the war began in 2001. Taking the advice of both the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also fired Gen. David McKiernan – then the U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan – and replaced him with a man he didn’t know and had met only briefly: Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It was the first time a top general had been relieved from duty during wartime in more than 50 years, since Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War.

Even though he had voted for Obama, McChrystal and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect. The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

From the start, McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government – a process that even its staunchest advocates admit requires years, if not decades, to achieve. The theory essentially rebrands the military, expanding its authority (and its funding) to encompass the diplomatic and political sides of warfare: Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps. In 2006, after Gen. David Petraeus beta-tested the theory during his “surge” in Iraq, it quickly gained a hardcore following of think-tankers, journalists, military officers and civilian officials. Nicknamed “COINdinistas” for their cultish zeal, this influential cadre believed the doctrine would be the perfect solution for Afghanistan. All they needed was a general with enough charisma and political savvy to implement it.

As McChrystal leaned on Obama to ramp up the war, he did it with the same fearlessness he used to track down terrorists in Iraq: Figure out how your enemy operates, be faster and more ruthless than everybody else, then take the fuckers out. After arriving in Afghanistan last June, the general conducted his own policy review, ordered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The now-infamous report was leaked to the press, and its conclusion was dire: If we didn’t send another 40,000 troops – swelling the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan by nearly half – we were in danger of “mission failure.” The White House was furious. McChrystal, they felt, was trying to bully Obama, opening him up to charges of being weak on national security unless he did what the general wanted. It was Obama versus the Pentagon, and the Pentagon was determined to kick the president’s ass.

Official White House photo by Pete Souza

Last fall, with his top general calling for more troops, Obama launched a three-month review to re-evaluate the strategy in Afghanistan. “I found that time painful,” McChrystal tells me in one of several lengthy interviews. “I was selling an unsellable position.” For the general, it was a crash course in Beltway politics – a battle that pitted him against experienced Washington insiders like Vice President Biden, who argued that a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would plunge America into a military quagmire without weakening international terrorist networks. “The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people,” says Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel and leading critic of counterinsurgency who attended West Point with McChrystal. “The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.

In the end, however, McChrystal got almost exactly what he wanted. On December 1st, in a speech at West Point, the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It’s expensive; we’re in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then, without ever using the words “victory” or “win,” Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested. The president had thrown his weight, however hesitantly, behind the counterinsurgency crowd.

Today, as McChrystal gears up for an offensive in southern Afghanistan, the prospects for any kind of success look bleak. In June, the death toll for U.S. troops passed 1,000, and the number of IEDs has doubled. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the fifth-poorest country on earth has failed to win over the civilian population, whose attitude toward U.S. troops ranges from intensely wary to openly hostile. The biggest military operation of the year – a ferocious offensive that began in February to retake the southern town of Marja – continues to drag on, prompting McChrystal himself to refer to it as a “bleeding ulcer.” In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.

Even those who support McChrystal and his strategy of counterinsurgency know that whatever the general manages to accomplish in Afghanistan, it’s going to look more like Vietnam than Desert Storm. “It’s not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win,” says Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, who serves as chief of operations for McChrystal. “This is going to end in an argument.”

The night after his speech in Paris, McChrystal and his staff head to Kitty O’Shea’s, an Irish pub catering to tourists, around the corner from the hotel. His wife, Annie, has joined him for a rare visit: Since the Iraq War began in 2003, she has seen her husband less than 30 days a year. Though it is his and Annie’s 33rd wedding anniversary, McChrystal has invited his inner circle along for dinner and drinks at the “least Gucci” place his staff could find. His wife isn’t surprised. “He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formalwear,” she says with a laugh.

The general’s staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There’s a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. After arriving in Kabul last summer, Team America set about changing the culture of the International Security Assistance Force, as the NATO-led mission is known. (U.S. soldiers had taken to deriding ISAF as short for “I Suck at Fighting” or “In Sandals and Flip-Flops.”) McChrystal banned alcohol on base, kicked out Burger King and other symbols of American excess, expanded the morning briefing to include thousands of officers and refashioned the command center into a Situational Awareness Room, a free-flowing information hub modeled after Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s offices in New York. He also set a manic pace for his staff, becoming legendary for sleeping four hours a night, running seven miles each morning, and eating one meal a day. (In the month I spend around the general, I witness him eating only once.) It’s a kind of superhuman narrative that has built up around him, a staple in almost every media profile, as if the ability to go without sleep and food translates into the possibility of a man single-handedly winning the war.

By midnight at Kitty O’Shea’s, much of Team America is completely shitfaced. Two officers do an Irish jig mixed with steps from a traditional Afghan wedding dance, while McChrystal’s top advisers lock arms and sing a slurred song of their own invention. “Afghanistan!” they bellow. “Afghanistan!” They call it their Afghanistan song.

McChrystal steps away from the circle, observing his team. “All these men,” he tells me. “I’d die for them. And they’d die for me.”

The assembled men may look and sound like a bunch of combat veterans letting off steam, but in fact this tight-knit group represents the most powerful force shaping U.S. policy in Afghanistan. While McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war, there is no equivalent position on the diplomatic or political side. Instead, an assortment of administration players compete over the Afghan portfolio: U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, Special Representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke, National Security Advisor Jim Jones and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, not to mention 40 or so other coalition ambassadors and a host of talking heads who try to insert themselves into the mess, from John Kerry to John McCain. This diplomatic incoherence has effectively allowed McChrystal’s team to call the shots and hampered efforts to build a stable and credible government in Afghanistan. “It jeopardizes the mission,” says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who supports McChrystal. “The military cannot by itself create governance reform.”

Part of the problem is structural: The Defense Department budget exceeds $600 billion a year, while the State Department receives only $50 billion. But part of the problem is personal: In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side. One aide calls Jim Jones, a retired four-star general and veteran of the Cold War, a “clown” who remains “stuck in 1985.” Politicians like McCain and Kerry, says another aide, “turn up, have a meeting with Karzai, criticize him at the airport press conference, then get back for the Sunday talk shows. Frankly, it’s not very helpful.” Only Hillary Clinton receives good reviews from McChrystal’s inner circle. “Hillary had Stan’s back during the strategic review,” says an adviser. “She said, ‘If Stan wants it, give him what he needs.’ ”

McChrystal reserves special skepticism for Holbrooke, the official in charge of reintegrating the Taliban. “The Boss says he’s like a wounded animal,” says a member of the general’s team. “Holbrooke keeps hearing rumors that he’s going to get fired, so that makes him dangerous. He’s a brilliant guy, but he just comes in, pulls on a lever, whatever he can grasp onto. But this is COIN, and you can’t just have someone yanking on shit.”

At one point on his trip to Paris, McChrystal checks his BlackBerry. “Oh, not another e-mail from Holbrooke,” he groans. “I don’t even want to open it.” He clicks on the message and reads the salutation out loud, then stuffs the BlackBerry back in his pocket, not bothering to conceal his annoyance.

“Make sure you don’t get any of that on your leg,” an aide jokes, referring to the e-mail.

By far the most crucial – and strained – relationship is between McChrystal and Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador. According to those close to the two men, Eikenberry – a retired three-star general who served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2005 – can’t stand that his former subordinate is now calling the shots. He’s also furious that McChrystal, backed by NATO’s allies, refused to put Eikenberry in the pivotal role of viceroy in Afghanistan, which would have made him the diplomatic equivalent of the general. The job instead went to British Ambassador Mark Sedwill – a move that effectively increased McChrystal’s influence over diplomacy by shutting out a powerful rival. “In reality, that position needs to be filled by an American for it to have weight,” says a U.S. official familiar with the negotiations.

The relationship was further strained in January, when a classified cable that Eikenberry wrote was leaked to The New York Times. The cable was as scathing as it was prescient. The ambassador offered a brutal critique of McChrystal’s strategy, dismissed President Hamid Karzai as “not an adequate strategic partner,” and cast doubt on whether the counterinsurgency plan would be “sufficient” to deal with Al Qaeda. “We will become more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves,” Eikenberry warned, “short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.”

McChrystal and his team were blindsided by the cable. “I like Karl, I’ve known him for years, but they’d never said anything like that to us before,” says McChrystal, who adds that he felt “betrayed” by the leak. “Here’s one that covers his flank for the history books. Now if we fail, they can say, ‘I told you so.’ ”

The most striking example of McChrystal’s usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan. The doctrine of counterinsurgency requires a credible government, and since Karzai is not considered credible by his own people, McChrystal has worked hard to make him so. Over the past few months, he has accompanied the president on more than 10 trips around the country, standing beside him at political meetings, or shuras, in Kandahar. In February, the day before the doomed offensive in Marja, McChrystal even drove over to the president’s palace to get him to sign off on what would be the largest military operation of the year. Karzai’s staff, however, insisted that the president was sleeping off a cold and could not be disturbed. After several hours of haggling, McChrystal finally enlisted the aid of Afghanistan’s defense minister, who persuaded Karzai’s people to wake the president from his nap.

This is one of the central flaws with McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy: The need to build a credible government puts us at the mercy of whatever tin-pot leader we’ve backed – a danger that Eikenberry explicitly warned about in his cable. Even Team McChrystal privately acknowledges that Karzai is a less-than-ideal partner. “He’s been locked up in his palace the past year,” laments one of the general’s top advisers. At times, Karzai himself has actively undermined McChrystal’s desire to put him in charge. During a recent visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Karzai met three U.S. soldiers who had been wounded in Uruzgan province. “General,” he called out to McChrystal, “I didn’t even know we were fighting in Uruzgan!”

Growing up as a military brat, McChrystal exhibited the mixture of brilliance and cockiness that would follow him throughout his career. His father fought in Korea and Vietnam, retiring as a two-star general, and his four brothers all joined the armed services. Moving around to different bases, McChrystal took solace in baseball, a sport in which he made no pretense of hiding his superiority: In Little League, he would call out strikes to the crowd before whipping a fastball down the middle.

McChrystal entered West Point in 1972, when the U.S. military was close to its all-time low in popularity. His class was the last to graduate before the academy started to admit women. The “Prison on the Hudson,” as it was known then, was a potent mix of testosterone, hooliganism and reactionary patriotism. Cadets repeatedly trashed the mess hall in food fights, and birthdays were celebrated with a tradition called “rat fucking,” which often left the birthday boy outside in the snow or mud, covered in shaving cream. “It was pretty out of control,” says Lt. Gen. David Barno, a classmate who went on to serve as the top commander in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. The class, filled with what Barno calls “huge talent” and “wild-eyed teenagers with a strong sense of idealism,” also produced Gen. Ray Odierno, the current commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.

The son of a general, McChrystal was also a ringleader of the campus dissidents – a dual role that taught him how to thrive in a rigid, top-down environment while thumbing his nose at authority every chance he got. He accumulated more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination – a record that his classmates boasted made him a “century man.” One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out, and he spent hours subjected to forced marches in the Area, a paved courtyard where unruly cadets were disciplined. “I’d come visit, and I’d end up spending most of my time in the library, while Stan was in the Area,” recalls Annie, who began dating McChrystal in 1973.

McChrystal wound up ranking 298 out of a class of 855, a serious underachievement for a man widely regarded as brilliant. His most compelling work was extracurricular: As managing editor of The Pointer, the West Point literary magazine, McChrystal wrote seven short stories that eerily foreshadow many of the issues he would confront in his career. In one tale, a fictional officer complains about the difficulty of training foreign troops to fight; in another, a 19-year-old soldier kills a boy he mistakes for a terrorist. In “Brinkman’s Note,” a piece of suspense fiction, the unnamed narrator appears to be trying to stop a plot to assassinate the president. It turns out, however, that the narrator himself is the assassin, and he’s able to infiltrate the White House: “The President strode in smiling. From the right coat pocket of the raincoat I carried, I slowly drew forth my 32-caliber pistol. In Brinkman’s failure, I had succeeded.”

After graduation, 2nd Lt. Stanley McChrystal entered an Army that was all but broken in the wake of Vietnam. “We really felt we were a peacetime generation,” he recalls. “There was the Gulf War, but even that didn’t feel like that big of a deal.” So McChrystal spent his career where the action was: He enrolled in Special Forces school and became a regimental commander of the 3rd Ranger Battalion in 1986. It was a dangerous position, even in peacetime – nearly two dozen Rangers were killed in training accidents during the Eighties. It was also an unorthodox career path: Most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don’t go into the Rangers. Displaying a penchant for transforming systems he considers outdated, McChrystal set out to revolutionize the training regime for the Rangers. He introduced mixed martial arts, required every soldier to qualify with night-vision goggles on the rifle range and forced troops to build up their endurance with weekly marches involving heavy backpacks.

In the late 1990s, McChrystal shrewdly improved his inside game, spending a year at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and then at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he co-authored a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. But as he moved up through the ranks, McChrystal relied on the skills he had learned as a troublemaking kid at West Point: knowing precisely how far he could go in a rigid military hierarchy without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass, he discovered, could take you far – especially in the political chaos that followed September 11th. “He was very focused,” says Annie. “Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don’t think his personality has changed in all these years.”

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