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President Obama said Wednesday that he didn't fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal over policy disagreements. Too bad.

Almost every metric measuring military progress in Afghanistan has gone downhill since McChrystal took command a year ago, as an April Pentagon report detailed. More recently, a UN report revealed that incidents involving improvised-explosive devices -- the main killer of our troops -- rose 94 percent in the first four months of 2010 over a year earlier.

It's notable that one of the few strong statements of support for McChrystal came from Afghanistan's most notorious crime boss -- whom McChrystal had claimed as an indispensable US ally: Ahmed Wali Karzai. AWK, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, told The New York ...