Setting aside your feelings about our Afghan policy, what do you think of Obama’s decision to cashier McChrystal and replace him with Petraeus? I mean, not only as a military matter, but a political one.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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He had to dump McChrystal if he ever wanted to shed the automatic assumption that Dems are weak.
His choice of Petraeus is the politically smart he tried during the health reform fight. It is political ju-jitsu. It failed then but worked here.
He has removed a “potential opponent” (I am not convinced Petreus was one).
He removed any possible attack from the right on weakening the “war effort” (I am not convinced there was one). Now criticism from the right will be seen as totally politically motivated (and maybe unpatriotic).
And he put the architect in charge of the construction project – an architect with serious project management experience.
So though completely unexpected, once announced to me it is obvious why Pertraeus.
What I find a more interesting question is why McChrystal decided to announce his retirement in Rolling Stone magazine.
brilliant. making lemonade from lemons. imo he could not not fire McChrystal and still have a chain of command. McChrystal was going to the media to undercut Obama’s authority. will this help ease out Karzai, or can Petraeus get Karzai under control? (one can hope)
I’ll second you, Errol, since my sensibilities seem to match up with yours pretty regularly. But the politics of anything connected to Af-Pak are so bewildering as to make one’s head spin.
Well Juan Cole also sees a problem with Obama defining goals there.
should never have been necessary. Obama knew he was untrustworthy (see Pat Tillman) and was foolish enough to trust him anyway.
McChrystal is a liar and a cretin but his assessment of Obama as weak and indecisive is spot-on. If the President had any backbone he’d pull the plug on the Afghan folly. Then he wouldn’t need Petraeus either.
President Obama did the right thing.
Civilian control of the military is a serious issue.
This is especially true when a policy has a deadline for US Military involvement like Afghanistan.
The hubris of some generals is breathtaking and this time, that hubris failed.
Bush strarted this, failed and just left heaps of awful problems for the country.
General Petraeus was an excellent choice. The genral knows the Afghanistan mission as it has been carried out and can go with any changes needed.
Read Seven Days in May.
It’s extreme, but it could happen.
Politically, the Republicans will have a problem if they start picking on Obama about this. They will have their tats in a wringer. They wanted war and now what?
This wasn’t about a popularity poll. It was about who is in control of the military.
We dodged a bad situation when President Obama accepted the resignation of General McChrystal.
I’m surprise Petreus took a demotion, but I suppose he sees a chance to be remembered as the “guy who saved Iraq AND Afghanistan for two presidents!”
Note: I’m just saying he wants to be remembered that way, not whether such a claim would be accurate.
Politically? Brilliant.
Militarily? I’m not so sure. I don’t think it bodes well for people who oppose the effort, but that’s not setting aside those feelings (I supported the war effort there and in my world I probably still would. In the real world, I would have used this moment to pivot and changed strategy to move towards winding down).
Patraeus has a good record, as you stated in your other post. What you didn’t state is that he will lie to the public about the state of the war, including writing Op-Eds in newspapers to reinforce that.
So I think it’s mixed. I’d have liked Gen. James Mattis to take over if anyone took over at all.
I expect that Repugs will attempt to link the failure in Afghanistan to McChrystal’s absence any moment now.
Why haven’t I read a single post anywhere raising the possibility that McChrystal did this intentionally for some reason? It’s strange, because he’s a very smart person. Everyone is scratching their heads as to why he agreed to say that crap on the record, and why his aides were permitted to say what they said on the record, but they don’t pursue this obvious line of inquiry (not that I’m aware, anyhow). Everyone seems to assume it was a blunder, but I’m not sure that’s the case.
The idea that McChrystal just stumbled into this situation is ludicrous; he knows damn well how key civ/dip efforts are to his COIN strategy. It begs the question: why go off reservation?
This is totally speculative, but to me it seems to fit the situation: perhaps McChrystal was disillusioned with the civilian/diplomatic actors in Afghanistan that he no longer felt he could accomplish his mission, and wanted to resign in a way that would call attention to that problem.
What do you all think of that? Alternate theories?
Yeah. No one gets stars without understanding the pol-mil hierarchy – not even MacArthur. McChrystal was doing something intentionally. The whole dynamic with Karzai on the one hand and Eikenberry on the other has been very interesting for a long time.
He just couldn’t pretend he and his staff were something other than what they are over a sustained period of time. Simple, really.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t find that brief dismissal very convincing.
You’re saying this was a lapse of restraint, a big slip. He just blew his top? A four star general? And authorized his staff to do the same?
I have to acknowledge the possibility that that’s the case, but I’m sorry, it seems very unlikely to me at this point. Hopefully we don’t have to wait for memoirs or Woodward on this one…
bologna, I agree—what McChrystal and his staff said in front of a (Rolling Stone!) reporter is so shocking that it seems entirely likely McChrystal was playing his own version of eleven-dimension chess (or something).
However, one of the things that made it a great article was not only the McChrystal & Co. quotes, but the biographical research the reporter did. In that context, McChrystal struck me as a more talented and under control version of John McCain—a military brat, bright, talented, with leadership skills, but also a goof-off (dare I say, maverick) who wants to do his own thing. The true story may be no more complicated than that.
If he wanted to end his career in disgrace then he did a good job. Otherwise, he did not intend for the article to ignore most of what he told the reporter and focus on how much he and his staff hate everyone but themselves.
I’m sympathetic to the view that he realized there was no way to win within the 2011 deadline and decided to decamp so that the blame would fall on someone else. There’s no other way he could do that without looking like he was doing that unless something like this happened.
aren’t they about to release a video of Afghans being slaughtered by soldiers under McChrystal’s command? Maybe getting out now “helps” the President later, near future, when this huge shit hits the public-audience fan.
Easy. McChrystal has political ambitions., as a Republican, of course. So he takes a shot at the “wimp”, Obama obligingly wimps out even as he is firing him and McChrystal escapes the blame for the debacle that is sure to come. Now he can run (Senate?) on a “who lost Afghanistan?” plank.
I nearly puked as I listened to Obama praising this snake.
Eisenhower became president. MacArthur didn’t.
link
Aha! So he is probably one of the 23% of Dems who are disapproving of Obama.
It was the only move available – insubordination equals walking papers every time.
The politics are wonderful. Naming Petraeus deflected a lot of criticism.
Practically, well, Petraeus is pretty busy already.
.
McChrystal’s former colleagues are, if anything, even more pissed off than the general’s current coterie. “I never thought I would say this,” one field-grade special forces officer tells Sean Naylor. “Until this article I was a huge McChrystal fan. I was just floored at how immature he came across.”
“Every son of a b— near McChrystal should be fired as well,” the field grade SF officer said. “Every one of those guys.”
Already in Afghanistan, there’s a deep divide between the special forces and the regular troops. To oversimplify, the SF guys think they’re carrying most of the load. The standard-issue troops view the SF crowd as a bunch of cowboys who overcomplicate the mission by using force recklessly. Lines like this one from the Rolling Stone piece aren’t going to help bridge that gap:
“You better be out there hitting four or five targets tonight,” McChrystal will tell a Navy Seal he sees in the hallway at headquarters. Then he’ll add, “I’m going to have to scold you in the morning for it, though.”
McChrystal comments shock spec ops officers
Indeed, it was the comments attributed to members of McChrystal’s staff that made the biggest impact on the special ops officers. “McChrystal has surrounded himself with a bunch of clowns … who don’t have really a … clue of what their role is and what they’re doing,” said a Special Forces officer with extensive experience in Afghanistan.
“I was really kind of stunned at the aloofness that the article portrayed,” said the field-grade SF officer, who worked under McChrystal when the latter headed Joint Special Operations Command. “I saw him up close and personal at JSOC and I never got that impression … I never got anything other than this guy is serious and this guy is professional and straight-arrow.”
(The Atlantic) – Eikenberry‘s beef with McChrystal goes back to the time when McChrystal was the Pope. The Pope is the head of the Joint Special Operations Command. The nickname goes back to an off-hand remark that Janet Reno made after failing to obtain information from JSOC after the raid at Waco. (JSOC operators were on the ground but did not assist in the raid itself.) She called JSOC the Vatican. And the head of the Vatican is … the Pope.
At some point, I think in 2005, one of McChrystal’s task-forces-that-didn’t-really-exist did something in Afghanistan that angered Eikenberriy, who was in command of the region at the time. The two men exchanged words and built mutual mistrust. They have not worked well together ever since.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s inaction against the network of Jalaluddin and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the most effective of Afghan Taliban groups and which operates out of Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area, is a constant irritation in relations between Washington and Islamabad.
The US is desperate that militant bases in North Waziristan be destroyed as these feed directly into the ever-growing insurgency across the border in Afghanistan.
PRICE TAG
Pakistani ambassador in Washington Husain Haqqani said the equipment was needed to take the war against al-Qaeda into the mountains bordering Afghanistan. He said Pakistan required new helicopter gunships, including the Apache-64-D, AH-1W, AH-6 and MD-530 Little Bird.
Haqqani said utility and cargo helicopters such as the UH-60 Black Hawk, the CH-47 D Chinook and the UH-1Y Huey would also be required.
McChrystal’s legacy: High-value detainees interrogated in The Black Room
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."McChrystal and replace him with Petraeus? I mean, not only as a military matter, but a political one.
as a military matter, McChrystal had to go. period. getting Petraeus is wicked chess on the President’s part. And, since the GOP’S lips have been stuck to Petraeus’ ass for quite awhile, it will be interesting to see them dance around this, all the while trying to criticize the President.
but, my feelings about Afghanistan have not changed. we needed to be out of there 7 years ago
both decisions were really his only choice. Afghanistan is going so badly that he couldn’t put a no name in charge. Only Petraus will get the stink off it enough, politically and militarily, to actually get us out.