JOIN USFinding a new path for Afghan war
But the choice of a new and very different breed of general to take over the seven-year-old fight may mean the old mind-set has begun to change.
The new commander, Lt Gen Stanley A McChrystal, is an expert in counterinsurgency warfare who for years has viewed the violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan as one thorny problem. Among his last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border.
Administration officials cautioned that McChrystal would be given no explicit mandate to carry out military strikes in Pakistan, which have long been opposed by Pakistan’s government. At the same time, current and former officials said that McChrystal, with his commando background, is ideally suited to carry out a White House strategy that regards Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of a single, urgent problem.
“For him to be successful, he’s going to have fight the war on both sides of the border,” said Robert Richer, a retired CIA officer who worked with McChrystal when Richer was the agency’s head of West Asia operations and assistant director of clandestine operations.
Obama administration officials and lawmakers said that the decision by Defence Secretary Robert M Gates to install McChrystal in place of Gen David D McKiernan, a traditional armour officer, was driven at least in part by a desire to elevate a new generation of army leaders with fresh thinking to senior combat positions.
“This is less about McKiernan than it is about a new counterinsurgency strategy and a new leadership to reinvigorate that strategy,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who travelled to Afghanistan two weeks ago
Need to be aggressive
As head of the Joint Special Operations Command, McChrystal was a key advocate last year of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. Under an arrangement put in place as part of the more aggressive posture, a senior CIA official based at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan was put in charge of CIA and military commando missions in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
By contrast, one Pentagon adviser said there had been grumbling that McKiernan needed to be more aggressive in engaging village and tribal leaders who had begun to challenge the Taliban in contested areas of Afghanistan. McKiernan had argued that it would be difficult to carry out President Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan without additional American reinforcements, just now arriving in the country, to secure the population against militants’ attacks.
Army colleagues of McKiernan expressed surprise at his unceremonious ouster. But the general made no public comment, and his spokesman, Col Gregory Julian, said in an e-mail message that the general had cancelled all scheduled interviews with reporters.
A retired general, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid putting himself publicly in the middle of the issue, said he had become aware about three weeks ago that tensions existed between McKiernan and his boss, Gen David H Petraeus, the top American commander for Iraq and Afghanistan, “over all dimensions of the Afghanistan strategy: the number of American troops, what kind of troops, where would they go, what role would the allies play and whether to use Afghan forces more.”