Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: Obama entrusts fortunes into Petraeus' hands
In the delicate balancing act of civil and military relations, presidents have always cashiered generals who seemed to make war policy on their own or bypassed traditional civilian controls on their conduct.
And generals courted their demise by ridiculing bosses in the White House or Congress. That’s what printed Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s pink slip before he ever jetted from his Kabul command last week to meet with a displeased President Obama.
But experts contacted by the Trib can’t point to any week in more than two centuries of American warmaking that was quite like these waning days of June.
Rolling Stone magazine Tuesday exposed McChrystal’s salty slur of Vice President Joe Biden and a toxic command climate contemptuous of civilian leaders, triggering the four-star general’s firing.
War hero Gen. David Petraeus — chief of the military’s Central Command that stretches from Egypt to Pakistan — demoted himself Wednesday to replace McChrystal, his personal pick to lead in Afghanistan. If confirmed by the Senate after hearings that begin Tuesday, Petraeus will continue a strategy they both designed but hasn’t seemed to work well yet.
Petraeus declined to speak to the Trib until after the hearings.
Rolling Stone highlighted the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between McChrystal’s staff and retired Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry — former military boss of Afghanistan and the ambassador to Kabul — and Richard Holbrooke, the presidential envoy to South Asian powers. By Thursday, calls had grown to fire the diplomats, too.
So far, they remain at their posts.
“My sense is that the president knows that Afghanistan is ‘his’ war. He may have some buyer’s remorse about endorsing McChrystal’s (counterinsurgency) strategy, but endorse it he did,” said Andrew Bacevich, a conservative professor of international relations at Boston University.
“Appointing Petraeus is the best way to guard against a return to square one. None of that changes the fact that the president has promised a strategic review in December and the beginning of a troop withdrawal next July. The clock is ticking. There’s not much time left. Unless Petraeus can pull a rabbit out of his hat, Afghanistan will pose a huge problem for the president as he prepares to run for re-election.”
National security experts on the left and the right echo Bacevich.
“This point in history is ironic. In his bid to reassert civilian control of the military, President Obama has placed his presidency’s future into the hands of the military like never before,” said Harvey Sicherman, president of the conservative Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a former aide to many architects of U.S. power, including Alexander Haig, George Schultz and John Lehman Jr.
“The White House shares some of the blame for this. You have an ambiguous date for when troops will begin to withdraw. Two of the three parties discussed in the Rolling Stone article still seem to disagree with the military on the strategy that is to be implemented. That critical civilian part of the counterinsurgency plan seems to have been bungled because of multiple conflicting voices. Now is the time for the White House to fix it.”
Picking Petraeus shocked longtime Beltway observers like Bernard Finel, a senior fellow of the left-leaning American Security Project and a counterterrorism expert.
“There’s a political calculus at work,” Finel said. “Naming Petraeus to succeed McChrystal neutralizes criticism that says Obama’s personal views about him were more important than the war effort. Petraeus has unique credibility when it comes to counterinsurgency operations, and it solves the problem of his confirmation in Congress. He gets through easily, and they won’t debate the strategy, which he developed.”
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