Jules Witcover

General Stanley McChrystal's reckless insubordination gave President Obama no choice but to dump him. In replacing him as the top commander in Afghanistan with General David Petraeus, the president has turned a huge embarrassment into a demonstration of political sagacity.

With one clever swoop, he has made the supposedly indispensable counterinsurgency genius dispensable, by bringing in the one military man with even greater reputation and expertise in that particular art. Petraeus, who wrote the manual on counterinsurgency, has been engaged in the Afghanistan strategy from the start.

The move gives credibility to the administration insistence that the policy Obama signed onto last fall remains on track at a critical time, when the push for which the 30,000-troop surge achieved by McChrystal was about to reach full strength against the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

In firing McChrystal, the president not only forcefully asserted civilian control of the military but also convincingly addressed the political imperative of demonstrating his own toughness, increasingly under fire in the Gulf oil spill crisis.

In carrying out the astute change of command, Obama insisted that it never was a question of any difference on Afghanistan policy. In his Rose Garden announcement, he explicitly noted that "General Petraeus fully participated in our review last fall, and he both supported and helped design the strategy that we have in place."

But there always was speculation whether McChrystal fully bought into the Obama refocus on al-Qaida as the prime target in Afghanistan as advocated by Vice President Joe Biden. In the Rolling Stone article that was McChyrstal's undoing, Biden was the subject of pointed mockery.

The president reiterated in the Rose Garden that along with the effort "to break Taliban's momentum" and "to build Afghan capacity" his goal was to "relentlessly apply pressure on al-Qaida and its leadership, strengthening the ability of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to do the same." Notably, he sidestepped the question of nation-building in Afghanistan, a much more ambitious and time-consuming enterprise.

Evidence that the president never committed himself to that grander objective is the condition he imposed last fall of a required review of progress at the end this year and a guaranteed start of U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by the end of July 2011. The military generally has never bought into timetables, and even Petraeus in his most recent congressional testimony reiterated that the pullout would be conditioned by events on the ground.

With the push against the Taliban in Kandahar already postponed by McChrystal for more time to deal with an insurgent challenge stronger than first anticipated, meeting that mid-201l deadline had seemed increasingly problematic, even before his firing.

If the primary goal in Afghanistan has returned to going after al-Qaida, the timetable would not seem unreasonable if you accept the administration contention that the organization behind 9/11 has been largely decimated, relocated into Pakistan and scattered into other Middle East enclaves.

Virtually unmentioned in the ouster of McChrystal was the basic debate within the administration last fall between McChrystal and White House strategists on what should be the prime target in Afghanistan.

Over the eight years of the Bush administration, the focus had been strongly on the insurgent Taliban. Ousted from power in the first days of the American retaliation to the terrorist attacks of 2001, it was resurgent during the U.S. diversion into Iraq in 2003.

Increasingly thereafter, the American-led military effort segued into nation-building in Afghanistan as in Iraq -- the establishment of a friendly and stable regime government -- from the original pursuit of the al-Qaida perpetrators of 9/11 harbored in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In last fall's long strategy review, McChrystal got most of the troops he sought in his Afghanistan surge. But at the strong urging of Vice President Biden, the Obama administration emphasized increased targeting of al-Qaida as the legitimate mission.

In any event, the appointment of Petraeus provides a relatively seamless transition of command, after an ugly incident that could have thrown the war effort into further turmoil and left the already beleaguered president looking hapless and diminished. Instead, Obama emerges a bit scuffed up but still standing.

 

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Obama's Afghanistan Switch