McChrystal’s Fate as Commander Awaits Obama Decision (Update2)
By Tony Capaccio and Viola Gienger
June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Army General Stanley McChrystal, whose criticism of the civilian leadership of the war he is directing in Afghanistan drew condemnation from President Barack Obama, left the White House without public comment after a half-hour meeting with the president.
McChrystal had offered to resign after criticism over comments he and unnamed aides made in a magazine article that disparaged administration officials over their handling of the war in Afghanistan, according to a government official.
Obama and McChrystal had their face-to-face talk in the Oval Office earlier today before Obama’s national security team began meeting shortly before noon on Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Situation Room, according to the White House. Obama said yesterday that while McChrystal and his staff “showed poor judgment,” he wanted to speak to the general directly before deciding his fate.
“Whatever decision that I make with respect to General McChrystal, or any other aspect of Afghan policy, is determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there,” Obama said after a Cabinet meeting yesterday.
Afghan Fears
Afghan President Hamid Karzai pressed Obama in a video conference call last night to keep McChrystal, Karzai’s spokesman told reporters in Kabul. “The president believes that we are in a very sensitive juncture in the partnership, in the war on terror and in the process of bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan, and any gap in this process will not be helpful,” Waheed Omar said, according to Associated Press.
“We hope there is not a change of leadership of the international forces here in Afghanistan and that we continue to partner with General McChrystal,” he said.
The controversy over quotes from McChrystal and the unnamed aides reported in Rolling Stone magazine threatens to fracture a unified front that Obama has sought to build for the war and the international coalition doing the fighting.
The president reacted with anger upon reading the article, his spokesman said, and officials from the White House to the Pentagon to Congress called McChrystal’s remarks a serious lapse in judgment. Asked if McChrystal will be relieved as commander in Afghanistan, spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “All options are on the table.”
Stake in Outcome
Obama has staked a major piece of his foreign policy on the outcome in Afghanistan. He re-confirmed his commitment to the war in December, when he authorized the deployment of 30,000 additional troops, even as support from the public and other nations flagged.
McChrystal, 55, commands 142,000 troops from the U.S. and 45 allied nations and is in the midst of leading the biggest, and possibly most decisive, military offensive of the war in Kandahar Province, the Taliban’s heartland. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told a Senate panel last week, “As goes Kandahar, so goes Afghanistan.”
The increased tempo of fighting has pushed the number of U.S. personnel who have died in Afghanistan to 1,114, more than 450 of those since the start of 2009, Pentagon figures show.
‘Runaway General’
The profile in Rolling Stone’s latest edition, titled “The Runaway General,” quotes McChrystal and aides who were unidentified by the magazine as mocking Vice President Joseph Biden and criticizing special envoy for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry, with whom McChrystal is supposed to carry out U.S. policy. Most of the critical comments were attributed to the aides.
Lawmakers including Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, and Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, criticized the remarks. McChrystal issued an apology yesterday.
“I extend my sincerest apology,” he said in a statement e-mailed from his command office in Afghanistan. “It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.”
He made the offer to step down in a conversation with Defense Secretary Robert Gates before leaving for Washington, said the government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Gates and McChrystal met at the Pentagon before going to the White House.
Echoes of Fallon
Duncan Boothby, a civilian adviser to McChrystal who was responsible for arranging the Rolling Stone interview, submitted his resignation yesterday.
The controversy echoes an incident in early 2008, when Gates accepted the resignation of the then head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, after an article in Esquire magazine depicted the admiral as at odds with President George W. Bush over Iranian policy.
Retired U.S. Army four-star General Barry McCaffrey said McChrystal has to resign because he has irreparably harmed his relations with other government officials.
“There’s no question he’s fatally impaired his effectiveness as combatant commander to deal with the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan as well as the White House,” McCaffrey said. “He’s gotta go.”
‘Too Many Shots’
While McChrystal has been an effective commander, the remarks create a breach in the tradition of civilian control over the military, said Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who has written extensively about the U.S. civilian-military relationship.
“There are just too many shots at the vice president, at the president’s special representative -- no matter what you think of him -- at the ambassador,” said Cohen, who called McChrystal an effective commander. “It’s just not acceptable to leave him there as damaged goods.”
Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon, who knows McChrystal and Eikenberry, said the views reflected in the article are “highly uncharacteristic” of the general and that his performance in the field outweighs the incident.
“It would be a huge shame at this crucial moment to lose him,” said O’Hanlon, who specializes in foreign and defense policy at the Washington-based policy research center.
Potential Successors
For Afghan officials and analysts, the prospect of a command change raises fears of a possibly critical delay in consolidating a U.S. military surge that has stumbled with the indecisive result of its four-month-old offensive at Marjah, in southern Afghanistan -- and that now has only a year to run before the Obama administration has vowed to begin removing troops, said Haroun Mir, a political researcher at the Kabul- based Afghanistan Center for Research and Policy Studies.
“For any new commander to build his own relationship with other NATO countries and with the Afghan government will take a couple of months,” Mir said. “The Taliban are returning to Marjah, the Americans have been unable to launch the offensive they announced at Kandahar,” Afghanistan’s largest southern city, “and it is critical for the U.S. to persuade Afghans quickly that it can win,” Mir said in a telephone interview.
Obama wouldn’t have a hard time replacing McChrystal because nine years of war have honed a long list of experienced, effective military leaders, said McCaffrey, who received three Purple Heart medals in four combat tours and later served as the nation’s drug czar.
Two potential successors are Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, who runs day-to-day military operations, and Lieutenant General William Caldwell, commander of the NATO-led mission to train the Afghan army and police, McCaffrey said.
With all the friction surrounding McChrystal, that isn’t Obama’s biggest problem, McCaffrey said. A Washington Post/ABC news poll taken June 3-6 found that 53 percent of Americans say the war hasn’t been worth fighting, the highest recorded in that survey.
“The American people have essentially walked away from supporting the war, and they won’t come back,” McCaffrey said. “The question is what do you do about Afghanistan.”
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