General Stanley McChrystal: Off the Reservation

Jules Witcover

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, who sold President Obama on the 30,000 troop surge there last fall, is on the President Obama's carpet for his loose tongue about perceived critics in the White House.

The president is said to be hot under the collar over McChrystal's slaps at him and his national-security team in an article in Rolling Stone magazine. Obama summoned the general to Washington Wednesday to discuss Afghanistan policy, a meeting that earlier was scheduled to happen via videoconference.

The general is represented through an aide's observations as mocking Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Adviser James Jones, special adviser for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, all of whom have been at odds with McChrystal over policy in the past.

The most politically damaging part of the article, seized upon by the news-media echo chamber, is an introductory editorial comment by the magazine saying the general "has seized control of the war by never taking his eye off the real enemy -- the wimps in the White House."

McChrystal is never quoted directly as saying these words. But in a grossly irresponsible lapse of journalism, many sites on the Internet picked up the "wimps" comment using quotation marks, leaving the impression he did say them. The general quickly apologized for the story, but without disavowing the magazine's editorial characterization or repudiating it.

The incident has spotlighted again the debate last fall when McChrystal first called for the surge. Biden worked on the inside to assure that any further troop buildup would focus on rooting out al-Qaida, with the 9/11 attacks as the original justification for the American intervention in Afghanistan.

McChrystal earlier was said to have wanted a larger troop surge for his counterinsurgency strategy, and the difficulty the military effort has encountered on the ground in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar has raised new skepticism about its achievement.

In the most recent congressional testimony by McChrystal's military boss, Gen. David Petraeus, he was pressed on the seeming lack of progress, and whether President Obama's timetable for starting to take American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of July 2011 could be met. Petraeus said he was confident it could be, but that any pullout would still be conditioned by circumstances on ground. It is the same conditional comment that long plagued liberal Democrats regarding troop withdrawals from Iraq, and it concerns them anew.

Obama in announcing the Afghanistan surge deeply disappointed many supporters in and out of Congress who took seriously his campaign to get the country out of both wars. They grudgingly accepted his assurance of a timetable for withdrawal as a dependable condition.

The president has continued to give that assurance, but the appearances that the surge may not be working or is progressing too slowly are threatening another unwanted uncertainty. McChrystal's latest verbal indiscretion, no matter how well or inaccurately expressed by his aides, only adds to that hazy outlook.

Having replaced his earlier top commander in Afghanistan with McChrystal as the counterinsurgency expert best qualified to carry out the surge, Obama will be hard-pressed to do more than give him a verbal slap on the wrist for the damaging remarks for which he has apologized.

Whether McChrystal said them or not, and whether he intended to convey that he was keeping his eye on any wimps in the White House, the president would be seen as second-guessing himself if he were to remove him from his command.

Whatever the general's offense, he has been no Douglas MacArthur, who bucked Harry Truman on how to wage the war against the communists from North Korea and got cashiered for his audacity. At the same time, the episode is another distraction that Obama doesn't need right now.

As never before in his 17 months in the Oval Office, the president's toughness and decisiveness as a leader has been questioned in the Gulf oil spill, and in how long it took him to take BP to the woodshed. In that fiasco, he said it would serve no purpose to yell. Maybe he will feel differently in this one.

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General Stanley McChrystal: Off the Reservation