The McChrystal problem may be solved, but others remain

From the commentary, I see that I was prepared to cut General McChrystal and his team much more slack than most other people, including Eliot Cohen and our own Peter Feaver.  While they made valid points, I still think the President could have managed to call McChrystal on the carpet and sent him back to work. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, had a terrific piece in the New York Times postulating that President Lincoln would have put up with more disrespect than this if he thought McChrystal was advancing the war effort.  And McChrystal was certainly advancing the war effort.

But the President managed the firing shrewdly, selecting General Petraeus to replace McChrystal. This will minimize the turbulence of transition and be good for the war effort.  Petraeus is good at counterinsurgency warfare, being both an architect of the surge strategy in Iraq and an author of the Marine Corps Army Counterinsurgency Manual. As McChrystal’s immediate superior, he is intimately familiar with the plans and their resourcing requirements. As CENTCOM commander, he has a regional perspective and regional relationships that will give continuity to the policy, perhaps even improve on its execution.  And there is little question that General Petraeus is more graceful than General McChrystal in dealing with his civilian counterparts.

Moreover, the president’s Rose Garden statement was properly austere and commanding, emphasizing agreement on the strategy and the need for unity in the war effort.  But most of the nasty things recounted in the Rolling Stone article about the disfunctionality of the Obama administration’s AFPAK team or their strategy are not contested by most journalists or even participants in the policy process. It is a searing indictment of both Ambassador Holbrooke and Ambassador Eikenberry that General McChrystal had to carry the burden of political relationships with President Karzai and regional leaders, and a sad reflection of how isolated President Karzai feels from the administration that he and other Afghan politicians released letters supporting General McChrystal.

The White House has lots of reasons to try and make this look like a McChrystal problem, but the problems remain. Their objectives do not match their timeline, as the delay in commencing operations in Kandahar or consolidating the "hold" part of operations in Marja once again remind.  General Petraeus was raked over the coals last week by the Senate Armed Services Committee for tepidly supporting the administration’s withdrawal timeline. Both Senator McCain and Senator Levin challenged his evasiveness. Levin even called on him to give the committee his best military advice — directly suggesting General Petraeus had politicized his answer. General Petraeus can expect Congress to continue to batter away on that inconsistency in confirmation hearings, because they’ve rightly identified a crucial mismatch in the administration’s approach to the war.

The president said today that "I welcome debate among my team, but I won’t tolerate division." He ought to use the opportunity General McChrystal’s mistakes afford him to actually make that true. He has never held his civilians to the same high standard at which our military has performed in developing and executing a strategy for achieving the president’s political objectives in Afghanistan. Obama needs to put people in place who are capable of getting the political and economic pieces of the strategy into alignment so that our military effort is a supporting arm rather than carrying a disproportionate amount of the weight.