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Officials: No rift between Obama, McChrystal

KABUL — Officials in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s headquarters here are strongly denying that the senior U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan is at loggerheads with the White House over strategy or is bucking his chain of command.

Their comments reflect concern here over how some commentators and politicians in the U.S. have characterized the debate about the way forward in Afghanistan in terms that appear to pit McChrystal and other military leaders against the White House.

“Our concern here is, why would individuals back there subscribe to Gen. McChrystal any notion that he’s got a difference of opinion with his civilian masters, in the White House, [the National Security Council], anywhere, the secretary of defense?” said a senior official with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, which McChrystal heads. “There’s nobody that understands better than he does his responsibility and where he fits in all that. And it’s really frustrating that this has become a Washington-contrived rift when there is no [rift].”

Pundits and politicians have seized on two events in particular to buttress their argument that the general is seeking to outmaneuver the administration of President Barack Obama and force it to accede to his request for a reported additional 40,000 more troops. The first was the leak in September of McChrystal’s classified assessment of the situation in Afghanistan to The Washington Post.

But the senior ISAF official “categorically” denied that the leak of McChrystal’s assessment had originated at this headquarters and suggested that Congress was the likely source of the leak, noting that it occurred “the day after [the assessment] went to the Hill.”

The second event that sparked controversy was McChrystal’s Oct. 1 speech to a think tank in London, in which he outlined his strategy. McChrystal was asked whether he would support a more limited campaign that focused less on fighting the Taliban and more on hunting al-Qaida using drones — an approach reportedly being pushed by Vice President Joe Biden. McChrystal replied bluntly: “The short answer is no.”

“You have to navigate from where you are, not from where you wish to be,” he added.

This prompted some commentators to accuse McChrystal of operating outside his chain of command. Bruce Ackerman, a Yale law professor, said in an Oct. 3 Washington Post op-ed article that McChrystal had “committed “a plain violation of civilian control.” McChrystal, according to Ackerman, had “no business making such public pronouncements.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, was also sharply critical of McChrystal. “His recommendations to the president should go up the line of command,” she said in an Oct. 5 interview with Charlie Rose. “They shouldn’t be in press conferences.”

But the senior ISAF official rejected the notion that McChrystal’s London speech was a sales pitch for his strategy. “Certainly [none] of his public appearances were ever about trying to ‘sell’ anything,” the official said. “He thought — and still believes — he had a role to explain to an international audience a perspective on how he sees things without necessarily getting drug into a sales kind of a thing. It’s just not his style.”

Indeed, McChrystal has reiterated to his staff that he “is not going to be a salesman for anything,” the official said. “He’s simply going to be pragmatic in providing as honest an assessment of the situation and as honest an evaluation of how to move forward as he possibly can, given what he believes to be the mission assigned to him by the president and by NATO. He thinks he’s done that and has been as candid as he possibly can. That candor has been somehow translated into having an agenda.”

The Obama administration’s public reaction to McChrystal’s comments was slightly more measured in tone than that of Pelosi or Ackerman. National Security Adviser retired Marine Gen. James Jones appeared to gently chide McChrystal when he said on CNN Oct. 4 that “it is better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates echoed Jones in a speech to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual symposium in Washington on Oct. 5. “In this process, it is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations — civilians and military alike — provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately,” Gates said.

The day after the London speech, Obama summoned McChrystal to a meeting on Air Force One as it sat on the tarmac in Copenhagen. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described the meeting as “very productive” but said little about the substance of the discussion. The senior ISAF official said he knew of no criticism directed at McChrystal from the White House, but the official acknowledged that the general and other senior leaders here had learned lessons from the furor generated by McChrystal’s speech.

“So to learn from anything is helpful, and he certainly learned how things can be perceived 6,000 miles away,” the senior official said.

Chris Maddaloni contributed research to this story.