Leadership: The summoning of the president's hand-picked Afghan commander to the White House to explain a critical magazine profile does not bode well. Are we looking for scapegoats or victory?

To some, it evokes President Truman's meeting with Gen. Douglas MacArthur on Wake Island during the Korean War, shortly before Truman sacked the general who believed that in war there's no substitute for victory, a word that doesn't appear on administration teleprompters these days.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has been summoned to the White House to explain a profile to be published in Rolling Stone on Friday. The piece contains unflattering criticism of administration officials and policy in a war that candidate Obama said had to be won in a place we should be fighting.

We've become accustomed to rhetorical flourishes by the president that end up meaning not much. That apparently was one of them, along with the part about McChrystal being hand-picked.

In the piece, their first meeting was described as more of a blind date than a strategy talk between commander in chief and commander in the field. It quotes an adviser to McChrystal dismissing the early meeting with Obama as a "10-minute photo op."

"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. The boss was pretty disappointed," the adviser told the magazine. This blind date appears to be ending badly.

McChrystal clearly still smarts over Obama's Hamlet-like hand-wringing over the general's request for more troops, particularly when Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops. "I found that time painful," McChrystal said in the article.

The commitment for fewer troops than McChrystal asked for came with a large string attached. The White House's troop commitment was coupled with a pledge to start bringing them home in July 2011. McChrystal would be forced to play "beat the clock" while the Taliban pressed the snooze alarm.

McChrystal said he felt betrayed and blindsided by his diplomatic partner, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry. If Eikenberry had any doubts about the troop buildup, McChrystal said he never expressed them until a leaked internal document threw a wild card into the debate over whether to add more troops last November.

In the document, Eikenberry said Afghan President Hamid Karzai was not a reliable partner for the counterinsurgency strategy McChrystal was hired to execute. McChrystal also felt he was being set up. "Here's one that covers his flank for the history books," McChrystal told the magazine. "Now, if we fail, they can say 'I told you so.' "

Our Afghan policy is clearly in chaos, and the only thing the administration appears committed to is heading for the exits with a good cover story. Despite reassurances to Congress by Gen. David Petraeus, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday: "The July (2011) date, as stated by the president, that's not moving, that's not changing. Everybody agreed on that date." Well, maybe not everybody.

We have our own issues with McChrystal's politically correct rules of engagement that have led to higher-than-necessary casualties. What's clearly needed is a president and a general who are both fully committed to unconditional victory with no arbitrary troop levels or timetables.

Otherwise, all we may need to do is wait for the helicopters on the roof of our embassy in Kabul. President Obama would be in his rights to fire McChrystal for insubordination. Unfortunately, we're stuck with our commander in chief until long after the Afghan war may be lost.