It comes from a British newspaper, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true:
The relationship between President Barack Obama and the commander of Nato forces in Afghanistan has been put under severe strain by Gen Stanley McChrystal’s comments on strategy for the war.
According to sources close to the administration, Gen McChrystal shocked and angered presidential advisers with the bluntness of a speech given in London last week.
The next day he was summoned to an awkward 25-minute face-to-face meeting on board Air Force One on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president had arrived to tout Chicago’s unsuccessful Olympic bid.
Yesterday, in fact, President Obama’s National Security Adviser appeared to disapprove of McChrystal’s outspoken campaign:
Addressing Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s public call for more troops in Afghanistan, White House national security adviser James L. Jones said that advice to the president should come though the military chain of command rather than by open campaigning for a strategic decision.
“Ideally, it’s better for military advice to come up through the chain of command and I think that General McChrystal and the others in the chain of command will present the president with not just one option, which does, in fact, tend to have a … enforcing function, but a range of options that the president can consider,” Jones said.
President Obama and McChrystal, top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, held an impromptu meeting in Denmark a day after McChrystal’s speech to a British think tank. The general’s assessment is that the war effort may need around 40,000 additional troops to succeed.
Jones said he’s convinced the McChrystal is in for the long haul in Afghanistan no matter what President Obama finally decides is the correct strategic path. Jones stressed that additional troops are part of the answer in an increasingly difficult war in a country with a weak central government currently mired in a possibly fraudulent election.
Video:
It’s really unusual to see this kind of open disagreement between the President and his advisers and a Commanding General in the field. So unusual, in fact, that the only other times it’s happened in American history have been when General McClellan spent much of the first two years of the Civil War openly criticizing President Lincoln’s war policy and, of course, when General MacArthur publicly disagreed with President Truman over China and the Korean War.
The WH may have a point here, but it’s instructive to note that, in both McClellan’s and MacArthur’s cases, the general got at least one free bite at the president’s ankle before eventually being relieved of his command (more than one, actually). I suspect the same will hold true for McChrystal. It’s politically unfeasible for the WH to do anything about McChrystal now as it would look like they were trying to sweep the troubling questions surrounding Obama’s Afghanistan policy under the rug, rather than simply acting to uphold the integrity of the chain of command. McChrystal will be dealt with eventually, but for now his “going rogue” strategy is likely going to pay dividends in terms of pressuring Obama to make a firm commitment on Afghanistan.
[...] Doug Mataconis at Below The Beltway [...]
There is no parallel with MacArthur or McClellen for the simplest of reasons: unlike those guys, McChrystal has not disagreed publicly with ANY aspect of US policy as restated by the President as recently as August. McChrystal’s offense seems to be not toeing what could possibly be a changed US policy, if news reports quoting unnamed officials turn out to be correct. It’s a bit much to ask a high-level commander not to elucidate what he thinks about a strategy that has already and recentlu been proclaimed when he was chosen to carry it out.
I suppose the President has a right to say to McChrystal, “I’m looking at this again and I want you to lay low until I work it out.” But why should one assume that anything like that was said? A more relevant chain of command question might be: is McChrystal on the same page as Petreaus and Mullen? After all, neither Biden nor Jones has a place in that chain.
The white house has been sitting on McChrystal’s letter laying out what he needs since late August, and done nothing.
At some point he should be expected to get a little more vocal to get his troops the support they need to win.
Considering that it could be a decision that ties us down in a quagmire for a decade or more, I have absolutely no problem with the President taking time to make a decision here. I’d rather see him take time and get it right, then act on impulse like a certain former President now residing outside Dallas.
Also, just because McChrystal is asking for more troops, doesn’t mean the policy he recommends is the right one
Maybe since this is a “NATO” fight we could get some of them to pony up more troops, ha ha ha ha.
My actual point is that while the guy outside Dallas didn’t do everything right, one thing he was chided for was not listening to the “commanders on the ground”. Which wasn’t exactly true. He did listen to them. He met with them quite a bit. He just didn’t necessarily do exactly what they asked all the time. When he did finally listen to them (the surge) the guy currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania said it couldn’t work, and he shouldn’t listen to the commanders.
Now, the guy in the White House seems to have a new strategy, just ignore the commanders on the ground, completely, until they become a pain in the ass. Find me a time where GWB sat on a recommendation for six weeks without even acknowledging it, or debating it.
Who knows, maybe BO was too busy working up a strategy for Letterman and the Sunday talk shows to get to what the guys on the ground are saying.