Looking back, it is ironic that Pentagon brass thought Gen. Stanley McChrystal needed to make himself more available to the media.

That was before an embedded Rolling Stone magazine reporter reported sarcastic comments by McChrystal and his aides about President Obama and other White House officials, ending the general's command of allied forces in Afghanistan.

That left a lot of people wondering why the general gave so much access to a reporter for a rock 'n' roll magazine in the first place. In fact, military leaders have known at least since the Vietnam era, when I was a low-level Army public-information specialist, that you can't win many hearts and minds overseas if you can't make some gut-level connections with the folks back home.

And war reporting is nothing new for the pop culture magazine, as anyone knows who is familiar with "Generation Kill," the book or the HBO series that came from Evan Wright's excellent reporting for Rolling Stone with a Marine unit during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

This time it just happened to be reporter Michael Hastings' luck that he received more access than he expected. Dust from the Iceland volcano eruption turned an expected two days with McChrystal and his "Team America" aides, as they humorously called themselves into 10 days in Europe -- with alcoholic beverages.

McChrystal's mistake was to forget the phrase, "That's off the record," judging by accounts given by Hastings since his scoop hit the fan. As a result, the Obama White House was plunged into a weird but serious crisis.

McChrystal had said nothing in the report that disagreed with the president's Afghan policy, but a disagreement to the point of disarray within the ranks of Team Obama had been exposed to an intolerable degree. "I welcome debate among my team," said President Obama, "but I won't tolerate division."

Yet the lines of division follow those of a big debate that becomes even more divisive as casualties mount and the war fails to produce much measurable progress.

The "debate" centers on the difference between two strategies: "counterterrorism" and "counterinsurgency." Counterterrorism was the mission that took us to Afghanistan, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to topple the Taliban government and deny a safe haven to al-Qaida and other terrorists who might take root there. Obama installed McChrystal to pursue a counterinsurgency -- to fight the resurgent Taliban, try to win hearts and minds with economic development, and help the Afghan government build a strong enough military to manage its own security.

On the other side of the debate, the counterterrorism approach is preferred by Vice President Joe Biden, who is sarcastically referenced as "Bite me" by a McChrystal aide in the article, apparently without objection from McChrystal. Biden has criticized counterinsurgency as an invitation to a quicksand pit, bogging us down in Afghanistan when we should be chasing al-Qaida terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere.

That view is increasingly popular among Americans, particularly in Obama's liberal base, according to polls. The president leaned in Biden's direction last year when he set July 2011 as the beginning of a large troop withdrawal to push the government of President Hamid Karzai to fight corruption and get its security act together.

But a day after replacing McChrystal with his former boss, Gen. David Petraeus, Obama emphasized in a news conference that the August deadline is flexible, depending on conditions. Petraeus, by taking a demotion from command of Iraq and Afghan forces, neatly ended one dilemma for Obama while also signaling the depths of another: how to duplicate his Iraq stabilization in Afghanistan, a poor country with very little government control outside its largest cities.

If Petraeus can pull off a turnaround like the "Sunni awakening" he encouraged in Iraq, his replacement of McChrystal may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Both men have reputations as outstanding military leaders. But, off the battlefield, the Rolling Stone article reveals McChrystal's sad vulnerabilities as a diplomat. Petraeus' record shows he has public relations and people skills that he will sorely need, not only to help build a security infrastructure over there but also to explain its purpose and smooth ruffled features back home.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

 

 

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