Afghanistan Commander Replaced
James Joyner | May 11, 2009
The United States is making a shocking shake-up in the leadership of the Afghanistan mission, replacing General David McKiernan with Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, according to various reports. McKiernan has been in his post less than a year.
Ann Scott Tyson for WaPo:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected today to accept the resignation of the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, and to recommend that the critical job go to veteran Special Operations commander Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Gates is expected to make the announcement in a hastily called Pentagon new conference along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen at 2 p.m. today, Pentagon officials said.
The leadership shift comes as the Obama administration works to execute a new counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan to quell surging violence in those countries.
McChrystal is currently the director of the joint staff. From 2006 to August 2008 he was the forward commander of the U.S. military's secretive Joint Special Operations Command, responsible for tracking down high-level leaders of the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, including its former leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was responsible for a brutal campaign of bombings and beheadings until he was killed by U.S. Special Operations Forces in April 2006.
Elisabeth Bumiller adds for NYT:
Defense officials said that General McKiernan was being replaced because of what they described as a conventional approach to what has become one of the most complicated military challenges in American history.
He is to be replaced by Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, a former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command who recently ran all special operations in Iraq. The decision, to be announced this afternoon by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reflects a belief that the war in Afghanistan has grown so complex that it needs a commander drawn from the military’s unconventional warfare branch.
AP's Pauline Jelinek and Anne Gearan add:
McKiernan, on the job about a year, has asked repeatedly for additional forces. He has argued that his forces, while technically far superior, cannot hold ground against the Taliban in the volatile East and South. Obama's revamped strategy for Afghanistan does markedly increase the number of U.S. forces in the country but focuses on nonmilitary solutions as a better long-term approach.
I don't pretend to be privy to the inside details that Gates, Mullen and other decision-makers have. From my outside perch, however, this strikes me as both unfair and counterproductive. For one thing, based on McKiernan's appearance here at the Atlantic Council [transcript here] and various statements in the press that I've read, the man very much understood that Afghanistan was a complex operation that couldn't be won simply by shooting the bad guys. But the ISAF commander is in charge of the shooters, not the civilian operations. Further, unless McKiernan was truly headed in the wrong direction — and I have no evidence that he was — it simply doesn't make sense to change horses at this juncture. While McChrystal is by all accounts a rising star and likely to be superb at this assignment, another change in command is another period of adjustment at a critical time.
Adding intrigue to this development is that it comes only three days after a WSJ report by Peter Spiegel that, "Last month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, quietly assigned his top staff officer, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to head the task force with the aim of improving the effectiveness of the Afghan strategy. Such strategic planning is usually left to commanders in the region." I'm reminded of George W. Bush's appointing Dick Cheney to head up his vice presidential search committee in 2000 only to decide that he was looking for a man a whole lot like Dick Cheney.
Policy wonk Mark Safranski guesses that this has to do with tensions between McKiernan and new CENTCOM boss David Petraeus. Via email, he suggests that the recent decision to treat Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single theater "requires somebody very comfortable with close coordination with CIA special activities staff and the AF-CIA joint targeting shop, who is used to having the White House looking over his shoulder as operations are conducted." He adds that, "Traditionally, the regular Army has never made appropriate use of special forces, a history that goes back to the Vietnam War - and definitely an issue in Afghanistan since at least late 2002. If McKiernan continued that hallowed tradition, it would have been an added irritant in his relations with Petraeus, who as CENTCOM boss is the 800 pound gorilla. I would expect, further, that Petraeus and Gates are on the same page in regard to how special operations troops are to be integrated into any strategy in Afghanistan."
My colleague Magnus Nordenman reminds me, too, that Bob Woodward has been extolling JSOC's impressive but off-the-radar role in turning around the situation in Iraq that, in Woodward's view, has been overly credited to the Surge. Perhaps those in the know are hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time.
James Joyner is managing editor of the Atlantic Council. AP Photo.
Comments
I'm not worried. There's a new sheriff in town, and he gets to pick his deputies. Or there's a new head coach, and some of the old assistant coaches are bound to be fired and replaced. Whatever metaphor you prefer, McKiernan was Bush's guy. Now if we could just get rid of the odious Odierno in Iraq.
A few notes:
General McKiernan was sacrificed for POLITICAL reasons, not military reasons. THe decision to cut him loose and arbitrarily end his career with an embarrassing relief such as this is beyond any understanding. Was he guilty of some horrible transgression? Was he guilty of something such as dereliction of duty or worse?
In the early part of this year, he was part of the discussion on strategy in Afghanistan and they hacked off on him by assent when the new policy was decided. The time to replace him if he was, in fact, not the right man was in February, not May. Between then and now, a lot of time has been lost in terms of the Afghan War.
This adherence to COIN is going to backfire, and soon. McKiernan is an infantry officer. After all of his years as an infantry officer, you mean to tell me there's some aspect of warfighting that he doesn't get? That he's not in understanding of switching to COIN tactics? That's unadulterated BS. An infantryman with 4 stars on his shoulders knows COIN better than a showhorse like Petraeus and he understands leadership better than McChrystal, who was involved in torture AND in the Pat Tillman fiasco.
Petraeus, Mullen and McChrystal couldn't carry McKiernan's boots. McKiernan IS a warfighter, and a quiet one at that. He is not a political general in a time when political general officers are the norm, not the exception.
From now on, Obama OWNS the Afghan War. McKiernan now pays the price for the years of neglect that preceded him before he took the job 11 months ago. He is being sacrificed because of that neglect.
When General Petraeus was responsible for training Iraqi troops, he failed miserably. When General McKiernan was responsible for getting the Afghan Army and security forces trained up, his eleven months in the job far and away exceed expectations. Is that the real reason for his firing?
Perhaps "asking for more troops" and actually accomplishing vital improvements in Afghanistan doomed McKiernan. Who knows? I can't wait to read what he writes about his experience with these men.
I wondered when I saw McChrystal's background of Special Ops in Iraq what issues he might have re: abusive treatment of Iraqis, and now I see that Fred Kaplan and Andrew Sullivan have picked up on that.
Presumably that's not part of what he's bringing to Afghanistan?
congratulation with him.
? shall we??
Afghan strategy is usually left to commanders in the region.
can we stop killing and war?? it is really sad.
I wonder where will this war lead.
Mike - the external drive dude.
I wonder when will this war end
How can it ever be won, there are so many different tribes/factions, it is impossible to win a war against so many different groups. Russia found that out, now America is finding it out
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