WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s decision to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal will create new complications for the troubled U.S. effort to stabilize Afghanistan, but selecting Gen. David Petraeus to replace him represents an attempt to minimize disruptions resulting from a change in command.
In his year as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, McChrystal forged the closest relationship with Afghan President Hamid Karzai of any senior American official. He selected the officers who populate senior ranks of the multinational headquarters in Kabul. And he created a campaign plan that outlines a series of troop movements and operations reflecting his interpretation of the strategy set by Obama and his national security cabinet last year.
With McChrystal gone, much of that will have to be built anew — at a moment when the military and civilian government agencies have little time left to generate the momentum needed to convince Afghans and Americans alike that the U.S. strategy, backed by 30,000 additional troops, will be able to marginalize the Taliban. Obama made clear as he deployed the new forces that some of them would begin to come home next summer.
Although Petraeus has met Karzai on multiple occasions, the two men will need to develop a better understanding of each other. Petraeus will have to form his own team; McChrystal’s inner circle was responsible for some of the most incendiary comments in the Rolling Stone magazine article that led to his downfall. And he may want to put his own tactical refinements on the war plan, even though overall counterinsurgency strategy remains largely unchanged.
“What was a really, really difficult mission just got even harder,” said a civilian official who works with the U.S. military in Afghanistan.
But Petraeus has a jump- start in dealing with all of those challenges. As commander of the U.S. Central Command, he was one of McChrystal’s two bosses, and he is more steeped in the Afghan war than any other four-star general in the military. He has been a regular visitor to Kabul and knows not just Karzai but many other senior Afghan government officials — last month he met for two hours with Karzai’s half brother, the chief power broker in the violence-plagued province of Kandahar. He also has worked closely with top U.S. civilian officials responsible for Afghanistan, including special envoy Richard Holbrooke, and he was an active participant in a three-month- long White House policy review that culminated in Obama’s decision last fall to send the additional troops.
“The decision to name Petraeus is the least disruptive way of removing McChrystal,” said Bruce Riedel, of the Brookings Institution and the leader of an Afghan strategy- review team for Obama in early 2009. “Petraeus knows the strategy inside and out, he knows the plans — he is as much of an architect of this as Gen. McChrystal.”
But, Riedel said, “it’s still going to be a setback because disruption is inevitable any time you change a commander.”
