(As President Obama weighs alternatives to sending more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, an NBC News/WSJ poll shows support falling. "Meet the Press" moderator David Gregory discusses.)
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McChrystal Request to Reach Pentagon by End of the Week
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's request for more troops and other resources to fund the expanded counterinsurgency campaign he has proposed in Afghanistan will arrive at the US Defense Department by the end of this week but will not be immediately turned over to the White House, a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.
"It is simply premature to consider additional resources until General McChrystal's assessment has been fully reviewed and discussed by the president and his team," spokesman Geoff Morrell said.
President Obama's national security team is still in the preliminary stages of considering the Aug. 30 assessment by McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, that the war will probably be lost unless more troops are sent there within the next year.
Senior administration officials have said that McChrystal's report is only one "input" the White House is considering in a more wide-ranging review of strategy, including a possible shift from counterinsurgency in Afghanistan toward stepped-up attacks against al-Qaeda in Pakistan and elsewhere.
"There are many other considerations that we have to take into account," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on PBS's "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" on Monday. "There are other assessments from very expert military analysts who have worked in counterinsurgencies that are the exact opposite" of McChrystal's.
Asked about the experts Clinton was referring to, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said she was making the "broader point" that an ongoing assessment will "involve a range of views -- military, civilian and outsiders" and a "Red Team" to probe for weaknesses in official views.
Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, is preparing a separate assessment of Afghanistan's political future and the controversy surrounding the recent presidential election there. Although President Hamid Karzai has said he won, based on a tally by the country's electoral commission, international monitors are investigating allegations of widespread fraud.
Some administration officials have questioned whether the absence of a legitimate government in Afghanistan should lead to a full-scale reconsideration of the plan for major military and development efforts that Obama outlined in March.
Obama's determination not to be rushed in deciding the way forward has led to frustration within the military, where many argue that McChrystal's request -- and trying to reverse the momentum gained by the Taliban this year -- is necessary and urgent.
McChrystal, in an interview published on the New York Times Web site Wednesday, rejected reports of a rift between the military and administration civilians on the subject. Asked about rumors that he was considering resigning, which the Times said were being "whispered around the Pentagon," he said, "I have not considered resigning at all."
Although he warned against taking too long, McChrystal said that "a policy debate is warranted. We should not have any ambiguities, as a nation or a coalition."
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, said Wednesday that he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, had endorsed "General McChrystal's assessment" of the situation in Afghanistan. Petraeus spoke at a counterinsurgency conference at the National Press Club.
Morrell, in a briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, said administration discussions on Afghanistan were awaiting the return of Obama and other senior officials from the U.N. General Assembly meeting in New York and the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh this week. "Once he gets back to town," Morrell said of the president, "the discussions will resume in earnest . . . but without rushing it."
McChrystal compiled his report in two parts: the assessment sent to Washington late last month and the separate request for additional resources that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates suggested he withhold until he was asked for it.
Morrell said Gates had not yet made up his mind whether he agreed that more troops should be deployed in addition to the 21,000 Obama has approved. Total U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan is scheduled to reach 68,000 by the end of the year.
Asked why it made sense for McChrystal to send a resource request based on a strategy that is still under review, Morrell said that any "adjustments" in the strategy may require "adjustments made in terms of what's required to achieve the mission." For the moment, he said, McChrystal "is operating under the assumption that his job is to defeat al-Qaeda and use [counterinsurgency] to do it."
A D.C. whodunit: Who leaked and why?
Bob Woodward’s Monday-morning exclusive on a 66-page report from Gen. Stanley McChrystal to President Barack Obama about Afghanistan policy was a rite of passage for the new administration: the first major national security leak and a sure sign that the celebrated Washington Post reporter has penetrated yet another administration.
White House officials greeted the leak with a grimace, but none suggested they’d begin a witch hunt for the leaker. Woodward is famous for his access to the principals themselves — he recently traveled to Afghanistan with National Security Adviser James Jones — and leak hunters couldn’t expect with confidence that they’d find themselves disciplining just an undisciplined junior staffer.
But inside the White House and out, the leak touched off another familiar Washington ritual: speculation about the leaker’s identity and motives.
This is a capital parlor game that, for the Obama administration, has some dire implications. Unless the West Wing somehow orchestrated an elaborate head fake — authorizing what looks at first blush like an intolerable breach of Obama’s internal deliberations — the Woodward story suggests deeper problems for a new president than a bad news cycle.
Woodward — like other reporters, only more so — tends to shake loose information when he can exploit policy conflicts within an administration. There is now a big one over a critical national security decision, along with evidence that some people who ostensibly work for Obama feel they can pressure him with impunity. It took several years within former President George W. Bush’s administration before deep personal and policy fissures became visible.
So who did it?
The simplest theory — and one most administration officials Monday were endorsing — is that a military or civilian Pentagon official who supports McChrystal’s policy put it out in an attempt to pressure Obama to follow McChrystal’s suggestion and increase troop levels in Afghanistan.
But not everyone in Washington is a believer in Occam’s razor, so all manner of other theories flourished.
There are believers in the reverse leak, in which the leak itself is meant to damage McChrystal’s position by inducing White House anger at the general. There’s the fake leak, in which the White House may have been trying to back itself into a corner. A former government official with ties to the Pentagon said the talk in the building was that a senior military official had given it to the reporter for his book on the Obama White House — not realizing it could end up in print sooner.
“That places the ball clearly in the president’s court,” former Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen said, noting that Obama had already publicly placed his trust in McChrystal’s judgment.
“It’s an effort — whether by [McChrystal] or by somebody in the Pentagon or maybe the White House — to say, ‘You’ve asked the military to give you not what you want to hear but what you have to know. Now it’s up to you as commander in chief to decide if you think you have a better idea.’”
The leak is a shot across the bows, he said, of Vice President Joe Biden and of leading congressional Democrats who oppose a buildup in Afghanistan.
Another Clinton veteran with experience in national security matters was not so sure, however, that Obama wasn’t helped by a piece that lays the public ground for an inevitable troop escalation. “This thing has to have some airing and consideration by the public — so in the tactical sense, there’s a benefit to considering it,” the official said.
But some said all this speculation may be overthinking the matter. Many people in Washington, after all, are motivated by personal vanities as much as by policy convictions.
“It’s most likely someone who has or is cultivating a personal relationship with Bob Woodward and positioning himself to look good in Woodward’s next book,” said Matt Bennett, vice president at the Democratic-leaning think tank Third Way, echoing the views of many inside government and out.
The history of Woodward sources portrayed as heroes is long, including the likes of Colin Powell and, for a time, George W. Bush. But Woodward’s take on the Bush administration also changed dramatically with time, and some portrayed positively in his early books were savaged in the later ones.
Whatever the motive, the appearance of McChrystal’s report makes it more difficult for Obama to defer, through an extensive series of consultations, a decision over which side he will take in a debate over the recommendation of adding more soldiers and civilians to a more robust mission with the goal of giving Afghanistan — perhaps for the first time — a strong, functioning central government. The release follows a letter from a range of Obama’s usual critics — from neoconservative foreign policy thinkers to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Bush adviser Karl Rove — pressing Obama to follow just that policy.
“The Pentagon hasn’t changed and there are a lot of people within the Pentagon who understand the strategic use of the leak,” said Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the Democratic-leaning National Security Network. One possibility you have to look at is this being leaked by someone who is in league with the neocon assault on Obama, where anything short of ‘all in’ is framed as weak and a defeat.”
In the larger sense, the document’s contents are completely unsurprising — McChrystal’s views were widely known, and the assessment just spells them out. But giving the document to a brand name like Bob Woodward, who has a flair for the dramatic, ensures big play in The Washington Post and broad pickup by other media.
“This leak would, by all appearances, be the act of someone who supports an increase in troop strength and resources,” said Kevin Kellems, a communications director for former Vice President Dick Cheney, who noted that “the power of Woodward going on page A1 is exceptional” in its ability to dictate to wire services and cable outlets, a vanishing power of the newspapers. “This is the act most likely of a civilian who is an advocate of this position and believes they were right to do this because lives were at stake.”
Third Way’s Bennett, whose group backs a bigger commitment in Afghanistan, said he thought the document would do McChrystal’s position more harm than good.
“It’s not going to pressure the president to go the way they want him to go,” he said. “It’s going to annoy people in the White House, and that’s never a good idea.”
Others argued that the White House itself benefits from the leak.
“It’s a helpful thing to have out in the ether for the White House,” said Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, who said the report would help beat back criticism on the left. “I think the White House wants to convey how much pressure they’re under from the military,” he said, adding that he wouldn’t speculate on the source of the leak.
Others simply welcomed the fact that the leak might force a quicker decision on an urgent question.
“It at least, for the first time, gives people a tangible picture of what the recommended options are, and it to some extent forces the issue,” said Anthony Cordesman, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has been critical of an Afghan buildup. “The tendency in the White House is to try and slip this until health care and possibly the economy are taken care of, but nobody has that kind of time.”
Sources: Washington Post, Politico, MSNBC, Meet the Press, US Dept of Defense, Wikipedia
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