Mcchrystal

Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was forced to retire because of remarks he made to a Rolling Stone reporter. Having read the article that led to his departure, I feel strangely validated. "The Runaway General" described by journalist Michael Hastings is exactly the arrogant individual I believed him to be. McChrystal was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command in 2004, when my son, Pat, was killed in Afghanistan. But I didn't become aware of him until March 2007. That's when someone anonymously sent an Associated Press reporter a copy of a high-priority correspondence.

Author Janet Malcolm once acidly wrote that any reporter who didn't agree that journalism was a "morally indefensible" act of betrayal was "too stupid or too full of himself" to notice what was going on. Michael Hastings doesn't agree. He sees journalism, particularly when writing about media-greedy public figures, as being "like the seduction of a prostitute. " In other words, publicity hounds who try to co-opt honest reporters get what they deserve. That helps explain the mystery of why U.S. ArmyGen.

Senior American officials on Sunday sought to smooth over a sharply quarrelsome interlude in U.S.-Afghan relations, with the special U.S. envoy to the region describing President Hamid Karzai's administration as "a government we can work with." Speaking to reporters in Kabul, Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, pointed to Karzai's participation in a major planning conference with Afghan, American and coalition officials. "We have a good relationship with this government," said Holbrooke, who has verbally clashed with Karzai in the past.

From 2007 to 2010, Sherard Cowper-Coles served as Britain's ambassador and special representative to Afghanistan, giving him an inside view of the struggle on the battlefield and in the corridors of power to stabilize the war-torn country. Since retiring last year, the veteran diplomat has become an outspoken critic of British and U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. Instead of pursuing a futile obsession with military supremacy, he says, the U.S. and its allies should lay down arms and concentrate on achieving a political deal, which means sitting across from the Taliban at the bargaining table, however distasteful that may seem.

As President Obama weighs whether to relieve his Afghanistan commander over inappropriate comments in a magazine article, he is also wrestling with the future of a war that he has taken on as his own. If he fires Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, Obama will be forced to consider revising his strategy, which relies on large numbers of U.S. troops and a far-reaching counterinsurgency effort to promote governance and development in Afghanistan. The White House now has to decide whether stability at the top of the war effort outweighs the need to discipline a commander who twice has seemed to publicly challenge civilian oversight of the war. Although some of Obama's closest advisors have warned that McChrystal's approach risked getting the U.S. bogged down in an unwinnable war, the president has shown no interest in revisiting the course he set last December.

As Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's helicopter flies over the steep mountains and deep valleys of Afghanistan, he gazes at a remote village below. Mud huts cling to the side of the peaks like barnacles. They are barely accessible by road. "I am sure many of the people living in that village have never left," McChrystal says. "It must be a harsh life, but also simple." He pauses, and adds, "There's something to be said for simplicity." There's nothing simple about McChrystal's life.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal said goodbye to the Army on Friday in a poignant ceremony that paid tribute to his three decades of military service and barely mentioned his firing by President Obama for insubordination. It was McChrystal who alluded most directly to his own precipitous fall, standing at the podium and looking out at formations of soldiers and former comrades. "Service in this business is tough and often dangerous, and it extracts a price for participation, and that price can be high," McChrystal said.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the commander of Western forces in Afghanistan, was summoned to Washington on Tuesday to explain unflattering comments about senior members of the Obama administration that appeared in a magazine profile. Earlier in the day, before his planned departure from Afghanistan, McChrystal issued a statement apologizing for the remarks that appeared in a forthcoming profile in Rolling Stone magazine. The dismissive comments were a "mistake reflecting poor judgment," he said.

Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal received swift and predictable punishment for his unprofessional and derisive comments regarding Obama administration officials, many of whom were in his direct chain of command. However, to formulate a generalization that this type of conduct is indicative of a much broader problem in the U.S. Armed Forces is misleading and insulting to all members of the military, officers and enlisted alike. This generalization was advanced in Bruce Ackerman's June 22 Times Op-Ed article, "An increasingly politicized military."

A Pentagon report made public Monday disputed the accuracy of a magazine article that forced Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to resign last year as U.S. commander in Afghanistan. In the article, a June profile of McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine, he was reported as making comments seen as disrespectful toward Obama administration officials. But on Monday, Acting Deputy Inspector General Michael S. Child said the inquiry concluded that "not all of the events at issue occurred as reported.

A Pentagon report made public Monday disputed the accuracy of a magazine article that forced Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal to resign last year as U.S. commander in Afghanistan. In the article, a June profile of McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine, he was reported as making comments seen as disrespectful toward Obama administration officials. But on Monday, Acting Deputy Inspector General Michael S. Child said the inquiry concluded that "not all of the events at issue occurred as reported.

Retired Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who was relieved of command in Afghanistan last year, will advise a new national campaign led by First Lady Michelle Obama to help the nation's troops and their families, a White House official said. McChrystal has been selected as an unpaid advisor to Joining Forces, an effort the first lady, along with Jill Biden, the vice president's wife, will unveil Tuesday at the White House. The goal is to enlist all sectors of society in ensuring "military families have the support they have earned," the first lady's office said.

"So, did you have your three cups of tea?" a U.S. infantryman, bulky in body armor, asked another soldier as he emerged from the mud-brick home of an Afghan village elder. In this case, it wasn't tea but slices of cool melon, served to the sweating troops who spent an hour crouched on a plastic tarp covering the dirt floor of the house in this hamlet in northern Afghanistan. But the phrase "three cups of tea" has entered the American troop lexicon as shorthand for any leisurely, trust-building chat with locals.

Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was forced to retire because of remarks he made to a Rolling Stone reporter. Having read the article that led to his departure, I feel strangely validated. "The Runaway General" described by journalist Michael Hastings is exactly the arrogant individual I believed him to be. McChrystal was in charge of Joint Special Operations Command in 2004, when my son, Pat, was killed in Afghanistan. But I didn't become aware of him until March 2007. That's when someone anonymously sent an Associated Press reporter a copy of a high-priority correspondence.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal said goodbye to the Army on Friday in a poignant ceremony that paid tribute to his three decades of military service and barely mentioned his firing by President Obama for insubordination. It was McChrystal who alluded most directly to his own precipitous fall, standing at the podium and looking out at formations of soldiers and former comrades. "Service in this business is tough and often dangerous, and it extracts a price for participation, and that price can be high," McChrystal said.

It can be a split-second decision, or one that plays out over long and agonizing hours: to kill or not to kill. "Rules of engagement" is the dry, legalistic term for the visceral battlefield calculus of when and whether to use deadly force to counter threat, real or perceived. Across Afghanistan, these rules serve as the marching orders that govern Western troops' daily encounters with Taliban fighters and color dealings with Afghan civilians. U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who on Sunday formally took command of Western forces here, must decide in the coming weeks or months whether to recalibrate the stringent rules of engagement laid down last summer by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently resigned over remarks that laid bare a dysfunctional civilian-military relationship.

Long before he'd ever heard of Rolling Stone magazine, Abdul Baqi harbored deep doubts about the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan. "The Americans are here for their own reasons, for their own benefit," the cleanshaven 23-year-old university student said, shaking his head. "If they really wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan, they could have done so already, whoever was in charge." For many Afghans, U.S. Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's dismissal over intemperate remarks in a magazine profile has served mainly to underscore their own weariness with a conflict that has dragged on for nearly nine years with no end in sight.

It is tempting to compare Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's criticism of Obama administration officials to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's defiance of President Truman during the Korean War. But something important has changed over the last 60 years. Although MacArthur challenged Truman, the larger officer corps was then thoroughly committed to principles of civilian control. But today, McChrystal's actions are symptomatic of a broader politicization of the military command. During the early 20th century, strict nonpartisanship was the professional norm.

AFGHAN-PETRAEUS Ten days after his predecessor was ousted over remarks that laid bare a dysfunctional civilian-military relationship, the new American commander in Afghanistan sought Saturday to put a unified face on the U.S.-led war effort. U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who arrived Friday to assume command of U.S. and Western forces here, made his public debut in Kabul at a Fourth of July weekend celebration at the U.S. Embassy. He and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who presides over the world's largest American diplomatic mission, used brief remarks there to drive home the message that they would heed President Obama's stern order to put aside internal rivalries.