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General Stanley McChrystal will go into the White House as possibly the most important soldier in the world.

It's not certain he will emerge with any job at all.

Summoned to Washington to attend the National Security Meeting on Afghanistan in person, it promises to be an uncomfortable experience even for such a hard nut.

After all, across the table, will be a president who disappoints him, a vice president he's dismissed with a "who's he?", special representative Richard Holbrooke whose e-mails he can't bear to read and the US ambassador to Afghanistan who he says "betrayed" him. Oh, and the national security advisor who an aide says is "a clown". 

All this rudeness is quoted and not denied in a . The is a brilliant piece of journalism, combining a world class scoop, a convincing and vivid profile of McChrystal and his inner circle with profound reflections on the strategy in Afghanistan. 

McChrystal's disappointment with the president was established at their first meeting. The general apparently felt Obama wasn't very interested.

He's indirectly quoted as saying the president seemed uncomfortable meeting the Pentagon's top brass. This I can well imagine.

While he's not the anti-military pacifist that propagandists love to portray, Obama sees the military as a tool to be used, and war as occasionally necessary rather than glorious.

He frequently pays tribute to men and women in uniform, but you can tell this is respect for duty and sacrifice rather than the veneration some Americans feel. He has none of the fascination for the tools of war - guns and hardware - that is common for so many men. It's a rather complex mixture.

McChrystal, as painted in the profile, is on the other hand straight out of Hollywood. Once a hard drinking rebel, who spent much of his time at military school on punishment duties, he became a charismatic, no-nonsense leader, without respect for authority or the rules - an ascetic hard man, whose top team is anarchic but fiercely loyal.

A lead from the front sort of guy who's as happy employing a techno geek with a nose ring, as a crew cut Marine, as long as more of the enemy die as a result. In America it is sometimes hard to work out if art mirrors life, or life imitates art. 

This is not the first time McChrystal has stepped out of line. He was seen as using a speech where he spoke of "chaosistan" to box the president in, and force him to send more troops to Afghanistan.

He was given a in Copenhagen.

According to Jonathan Alter's new book on Obama's first year - - the president concluded all generals wanted more troops and this one was a pawn being played by more political operators in the Pentagon. This time he may not be so forgiving.

Alter, who says Obama hates internal disputes becoming public above just about anything else, argues McChrystal and the Pentagon's behaviour triggered the "most direct assertion of presidential authority over the military" since .

So is this a MacArthur moment? Even if McChrystal walks, I don't think so. MacArthur was trying to expand the Korean War into China, deliberately defying the chosen policy of his commander in chief. 

McChrystal has been loose-tongued, ill-disciplined and recklessly rude to his colleague and civilian superiors. That is more than enough to cost someone their job. But he has not disobeyed orders, and is faithfully implementing the policy that the president has ordered.

But Afghanistan is back in the spotlight again. While oil has washed the conflict off the front pages (president's may be able to walk and chew gun at the same time, we journalists can't) it strikes me things haven't exactly been going to plan. 

At the time of the intense US deliberations over what to do in Afghanistan, it struck me as odd that just about all the think tankers and military intellectuals who abound in Washington were enthusiasts for a counter insurgency strategy (Coin) that had been so ignored in the past, particularly in Iraq. 

While it may be true that a full blooded desire to win hearts and minds, to build a civil society from a functioning democracy to good roads and drinkable water may be the only way to win such a war, it requires a degree of commitment to a new world order, neo-imperialism or what ever you want to call it which America may not have the stomach for.

When the headlines about McChrystal's fate fade, the most important part of the Rolling Stone article may be the last sentence. "Winning, it would seem, is not really possible. Not even with Stanley McChrystal in charge."

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