McChrystal Strategy To Survive

Jun 23, 2010 Comments Off Erik Wong

Politico:

President Barack Obama may end up firing Gen. Stanley McChrystal — but he’s stuck with the strategy McChrystal helped put in place and is trying to execute.

The Afghan commander, who offered to resign Tuesday after his aides trashed, among others, the “wimps” in the White House, shaped what may end up being Obama’s most important foreign policy decision: McChrystal wrote a report, later leaked, requesting 40,000 new troops for Afghanistan, and the president largely followed his lead, escalating the war and tying his presidency to its success.

Obama now has the opportunity to both fire McChrystal and kill his strategy in its infancy. But unless he does a complete about-face, Obama will likely have to recommit to the mission — and that could be a strong argument for keeping the rebellious, if not insubordinate, general.

McChrystal and his tight inner circle of top officers – known around the Pentagon as “Team America” — are in the early stages of building up troops for a “surge” meant to reshape the long war and make space for peace and withdrawal. McChrystal, a special operations veteran intimately familiar with counterinsurgency tactics, is close to being indispensible in making this approach work, according to military officials. He’s also one of the few American officials on warm terms with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who did not seem to hesitate in offering McCrystal support Tuesday.

And this is a particularly hairy moment on the ground. A troop build-up has taken longer than expected, the Taliban has proved harder to clear, and the U.S. is gearing up for a politically and practically difficult offensive in Kandahar, where Karzai’s brother is a key player. A policy review – due in December – looms. Just half a year later, the White House has committed to beginning to draw down American troops from Afghanistan – a goal seen as increasingly distant.

The president may be forced to “act in the national interest, even if it embarrasses him,” said Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

If Obama does remove McChrystal, it would be hard not to also remove his brain trust, a possibility viewed in many military circles a large setback for the strategy just as the administration is trying to change the tone of the conversation about Afghanistan from pessimism to hope.

“If you could not keep the team intact, I think it would have a truly major impact,” Cordesman said.

In his only public remarks about McChrystal Tuesday, Obama tried to convey that his final decision on the general’s fate will not be based on anger, but on how it would affect the conduct of the war.

It will, he said, be “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 and that ultimately makes this country safe. I know [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates feels the exact same way.”

By keeping McChrystal, an ambivalent White House might be in a better position to argue against any further Pentagon requests for extending the surged troop presence in Afghanistan.

“Obama might want to reprimand [McChrystal] and then keep him,” one former Republican official told POLITICO. “[I] can’t imagine after this that McChrystal will be much of a force to contend with when the [Afghanistan strategy] review occurs.”

And while the Rolling Stone article – the “RS Article” as it was immediately known the in acronym-addicted Pentagon – reddened many face in the White House, it was empty of criticism of Obama’s actual policy. It was the journalistic equivalent of friendly fire: A brutal exchange among allies in a strategy that is barely popular enough to sustain.

“There’s not a strategic critique contained in the Rolling Stone piece,” said Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network.

So the president is now torn between a political and personal imperative – he doesn’t want to be seen as weak – and the practical necessities of what’s become America’s longest war.

“The president can’t get pushed around by his generals,” said Andrew Exum, a former Army officer, author and blogger and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington who once was an advisor to McChrystal. “Quite frankly, General McChrystal can’t say the types of things he said and get away with it.”

But Exum said Obama has to decide between the strategy and healthy civil-military relations and may decide that eliminating McChrystal will not serve his own strategy in Afghanistan well. The best course may be to demand McChrystal’s resignation and then refuse to accept it – a game, admittedly, but one that shows who is in charge.

“I think the president is well within his rights to fire General McChrystal, though I’m not sure that’s the best call,” Exum said.

Gates, who was instrumental in recommending McChrystal to the new president as a more innovative counterinsurgency commander for Afghanistan, is also known as a pragmatist – eliminating problems quickly and firing general officers and senior officials as needed.

“Gates has a tendency to fire people and this is a firing offense, I think, from Gates’ point of view,” said Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security who has interviewed McChrystal at length.

But mitigating that, Kaplan said, are other considerations: “Remember, it is in the middle of the summer, a time when there is usually heavy fighting in Afghanistan, on the eve of the Kandahar offensive, in the midst of a war with a fast timeline. It’s a very inconvenient time to fire the general and bring in someone new.”

And Obama has already fired one Afghan commander, McChrystal’s predecessor, General David McKiernan.

McChrystal, who comes from the secretive special operations community, is also not a natural with the media – this week’s flap a case in point. But his compelling story, that of a monkish warrior with an admirable personal discipline – eating one meal a day and sleeping four or five hours a night – has made him a media star. And that has given him a platform to tell the story of Afghanistan to a wary public – both at home and abroad. The Rolling Stone piece was an attempt by his press minders to reach out to an audience that is less likely to support the war.

Now, the article has produced a quick wave of unlikely alliances, as some of the war’s strongest supporters on the right call for firing McChrystal before his misstep bleeds into the larger war effort.

“Anyone who understands the challenges of supreme command, particularly in a war where the home front is as important as the battlefront, knows McChrystal has to go,” American Enterprise Institute military expert Tom Donnelly told POLITICO.

“McChrystal has to go. Period,” a former Bush-era NSC official said. “The situation is just like [former Centcom commander Adm.] William Fallon, but this is the second time,” he said, referring to the fact that McChrystal had been rebuked by the White House for giving a speech to a London think tank last fall during the administration Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review in which he said the U.S. would lose the war if he didn’t get the extra troops he was requesting.

By contrast, senior Democrats appeared inclined to throw McChrystal a life raft.

“Now is not the time for Washington to be sidetracked by chatter,” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Tuesday. “Everyone needs to take a deep breath and give the President and his national security team the space to decide what is in the best interest of our mission, and to have their face-to-face discussion tomorrow without a premature Washington feeding frenzy. I respect General McChrystal as a soldier and always have.”

But former military officials said that a fear of firing McChrystal, meanwhile, shouldn’t shape Obama’s decision.

“General Petraeus can deploy forward until a replacement is found,” said retired General Donald Kerrick, a former Clinton deputy national security adviser. “I don’t think the overriding concern should be that we can’t replace this guy.”

Still, he said, Obama is left without any particularly attractive options.

“McChrystal has put them all in such a box, and there’s no good way out,” he said.