Florida Iraq War veteran Allen West (R), who is running against Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.), called Obama’s handling of the situation “immature.” He said, “I really do think it’s a very tragic thing that Gen. McChrystal was released. When I go back in history and look at some of the confrontations between American generals and American presidents, this is a very minor thing.” West, whom Sarah Palin endorsed as an “American hero” on her Facebook page, had a tenure in Iraq that wasn’t without its own share of drama.

Meanwhile, former Colorado Lt. Governor Jane Norton, who is running for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), used the occasion to take a few swipes at President Obama’s foreign policy in a press release:

Major strategic grievances shouldn’t be aired in Rolling Stone, but General McChrystal was dead right on one critical and alarming point: the Obama Administration’s foreign policy drips of inconsistency, timidity, and lack of a will to win. The Obama Administration is committed to a withdrawal date, not to victory. General Petraeus was an unquestionably shrewd choice, and the fate of the war in Afghanistan and the broader War on Terror hangs on whether he can convince the White House to show real resolve and steel in prosecuting this fight. Let’s hope this move sharpens the White House’s focus on implementing a strategy to win.

The response from Republicans in Congress couldn’t be more different. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) — who earlier justified McChrystal’s comments in Rolling Stone by saying the general must be “frustrated” with Obama — supported the president’s decision and said it was “his alone.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Good Morning America” Thursday, “It’s completely understandable why the president made the decision that he did, based on the civilian-military relationship that goes a long way back.” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, “There are lines you cannot cross in the military. … David Petraeus is our best hope.”

Gen. Petraeus is expected to win easy Senate confirmation next week for his new role as top commander in Afghanistan.

Army Lt. Gen. Stanely McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

In a London address on Thursday, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, repeatedly defended President Obama’s review of Afghan strategy; encouraged open debate on the controversial question of what to do about the bleak-looking war; recapitulated his argument that a counterinsurgency approach holds the best chance of success; and declined to answer any questions about increasing troop levels before Obama reaches a decision. Yet since then, McChrystal has been portrayed in the press as disloyal to Obama for saying anything at all, and all sides are trying to put an end to the controversy.

The New York Times portrayed McChrystal’s brief defense of the virtues of stabilizing Afghanistan as a public rebuke of Vice President Biden, who contends that restricting the mission to hunting terrorists and emphasizing Pakistan is the wiser course of action. In an op-ed in The Washington Post on Saturday, Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman said McChrystal had “no business making such public pronouncements” and was in “plain violation of the principle of civilian control” of the military. On CNN Sunday, ret. Gen. Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, curtly replied that “better for military advice to come up through the chain of command” than in public pronouncements. Speaking Monday morning to the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, “It is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations – civilian and military alike – provide our best advice to the president candidly but privately.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Shortly after Gates’ remarks, a spokesman for McChrystal, Air Force Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, signaled that McChrystal wished to end the controversy. “General McChrystal concurs with the secretary and shares his perspective that the president’s military and civilian policy advisers need to provide candid but private advice,” Sholtis told TWI. Sholtis added that McChrystal does not have any additional public appearances planned.

Sources close to McChrystal have privately expressed concern that the general’s remarks have been misinterpreted as insubordinate. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have lamented that many European allies have wavered in their support for the Afghanistan war, and so, far from engaging in what the Washington Post called a “public campaign” to influence Obama through the press, McChrystal has sought to address the concerns of skeptical troop-contributing publics since taking command in June. In London, speaking to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, McChrystal said, “I think the more deliberations we have, the more debate we have, the healthier this is gonna be.”

McChrystal’s London remarks, delivered at the U.K.’s premiere security think tank, the Institute for International and Strategic Studies, may have been delivered the day after Obama’s war cabinet met to debate Afghanistan, but they were the result of weeks’ worth of planning.  “The IISS invited General McChrystal to address the Institute, having learnt of his intention to travel to the UK,” said Adam Ward, the director of the Institute’s studies, who added that the institute’s invitation had been extended “some weeks before he came.” Ward added that McChrystal appeared “very careful to appear not to be overstepping any boundaries,” noting that the general, far from rebuking the adminsitration, repeatedly declined to answer questions about troop levels ahead of Obama’s decision.

“From our perspective, we just wanted to hear him set out his thinking on Afghanistan,” Ward said.

Far from breaking with Obama, McChrystal, in his talk to the IISS, defended the Obama strategy review repeatedly. “People are re-looking what our goals and objectives are and redefining and clarifying those, and I think that’s helpful,” the general said. His only remark that addressed a question up for debate in the strategy review was a contention that “a strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy,” something the Times reported as a shot at Biden. (Despite reports that McChrystal called Biden’s plan “Chaos-istan,” the full context for what McChrystal said was “A paper has been written that recommends that we use a plan called ‘Chaosistan,’ and that we let Afghanistan become a Somalia-like haven of chaos that we simply manage from outside,” an option he indeed rejected.) But for the better part of half an hour, McChrystal dodged questions on a prospective troop increase, and portrayed the strategy debate, rather than the troop request, the more urgent consideration, saying, “I don’t think we have the luxury of going so fast [on debating strategy that] we make the wrong decision,” a remark that, if anything, inverted an argument made by Obama’s domestic critics.

Nor were those remarks unique. In mid-September, after he completed his assessment of war strategy to the Pentagon in late August, McChrystal spoke to reporters at the Dutch Defense Ministry, where he likened his role to a “mechanic,” who tells the owner of a car “what the situation is and what it will cost to make the vehicle run correctly.” McChrystal also spoke recently at a Dutch security think tank, known as the Clingendael — also at its invitation — where he gave what Sholtis described as essentially the same speech he provided to the IISS.

Officials throughout the Obama administration, military and civilian, deny any rift and contend that the controversy over McChrystal’s remarks is a media-driven event with little substance. Some noted that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has set himself up as a key swing vote in the debate over changing Afghanistan strategy, has zealously guarded the administration’s freedom of action, and reacted very badly to the leak of McChrystal’s assessment — which did not, several civilian and military officials confirm, come from McChrystal’s staff. “The impact may be the opposite of the leaker’s intent,” said an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “This will increase the determination of the civilian leadership not to be rushed or pressured.”

In the past, Gates has not hesitated to rebuke or fire officials he has found lacking. Unlike predecessor Donald Rumsfeld, who allowed two wars to deteriorate and only fired the leadership of the Army for defending a scrapped artillery system and saying the occupation of Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of ground troops, Gates fired McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, over a perception that McKiernan was an insufficiently aggressive and innovative commander; and acquiesced in the departure last year of Adm. William Fallon, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia,for criticizing the Bush administration’s Iran policies in a magazine interview.

Gates’ willingness to fire senior leaders has been cited by uniformed personnel to play down media speculation over a civilian-military split. At the Army conference Monday, Gates attempted to preempt any such division, or a similar media narrative interfering with Obama’s decisionmaking, telling the hundreds of officers in attendance, “Speaking for the Department of Defense, once the commander-in-chief makes his decisions, we will salute and execute those decisions faithfully and to the best of our ability.” The defense secretary is scheduled to meet with President Obama Monday afternoon for a private talk.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

A forthcoming request from the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for additional resources for the war is likely to take the form of a palette of options, not simply an appeal for more troops, according to Obama administration officials. Combined with a recent congressional proposal to delay a troop request, the options request might allow President Obama to avoid the politically thorny question of ordering a second escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year.

Administration officials said that the widespread expectation within the administration was that Gen. Stanley McChrystal would present Obama with a series of options for how to resource the U.S. effort to combat the deterioration of security in Afghanistan, along with a discussion of the merits and drawbacks of each. Among the options anticipated by the officials: an accelerated increase in Afghan security forces; the transference of U.S. or Afghan troops to relatively volatile parts of the country; substituting U.S. support troops for U.S. combat troops while holding overall troop levels static; or increasing U.S. troops in total. The officials would not speak for attribution, citing the sensitivity of the internal Afghanistan debate.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

McChrystal, according to an aide, is finalizing his resource request this week, and the aide cautioned that it was unclear what precise format the resource request will take. During this same week, Obama will decide whether he agrees with the scope of a still-secret strategy review that McChrystal submitted to the administration earlier this month. A Pentagon official said that an ultimate decision on sending McChrystal additional resources will be completed within a month’s time.

Pending Obama’s approval of McChrystal’s strategy review, the subsequent resource request will present “several different ways forward, with [a presentation of] the risks and benefits of each,” said one U.S. official. “It wouldn’t neccessarily be ‘here is the way to do it,’ but rather really hashing through a combination of approaches for what makes sense.”

That approach may have a political benefit. Obama is in a tight spot: public and Congressional support for the Afghanistan war is diminishing, and Obama already ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in March. A recent Washington Post poll found only 24 percent of respondents backed a second such increase. Yet directly turning down a request for more troops from the commander chosen by the administration just three months ago to turn the war’s fortunes around is perilous as well.

“It has become a trope of American politics that a way of supporting the troops is to do what the troop commander wants from the field,” said Heather Hurlburt, the executive director of the National Security Network, a progressive security organization. Presenting Obama with options about how to resource the war is “substantively the right thing to do,” she said, but also allows Obama “to skip over that trope and move to the question of what the right strategy is and how do we implement that approach.” (The official said that it was doubtful that the administration had politics in mind by expecting McChrystal to present Obama with a palette of options, but conceded, “I suppose you could say it’s a benefit.”)

Recent polls have found that support for the Afghanistan war is cleaving along partisan lines. Almost 70 percent of Democrats say the war is not worth its costs, while an almost equal percentage of Republicans contend it is. Accordingly, several prominent Democratic politicians, from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) warned the administration last week that congressional support for another troop increase is thin. In an interview Monday with Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Penn.), the powerful chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, came out against a prospective increase. While Obama does not need the committee to approve a troop increase, he will need to go through the subcommittee to approve next year’s defense budget, of which the Afghanistan war will be a major component.

Similarly, a group of conservative foreign policy analysts and former Bush administration officials wrote an open letter last week calling on Obama to order more troops to Afghanistan and implicitly tying continued GOP support for the administration’s war effort to the option. “There is no middle course,” the letter states. “We will not support half-measures that repeat the errors of the past.”

Against that backdrop, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on Friday that the Obama administration should accelerate the fielding of capable Afghan security forces “before we consider whether to increase U.S. combat forces above the levels already planned for the next few months.” Some inside the administration view the proposal as a consensus position that might delay a decision on U.S. troop increases.

“There maybe some room for common ground as it will be several months before any follow-on combat brigades beyond what’s committed already are available to deploy,” said a Pentagon official. “That may allow for the wait-and-see that Levin wants.” Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said it was difficult to determine how many uncommitted combat brigades were available for additional use in Afghanistan, as the measurement depends on “what deployment standard is being used,” such as ordering soldiers back into combat without the required year’s worth of time at home or other factors that impact combat effectiveness.

An aide to McChrystal, who did not wish to be quoted, did not wish to comment on Levin’s proposal, but said that accelerating the deployment of Afghan security forces was a top priority for the general.

Much remains unsettled in the debate over Afghanistan. One official said it was still unclear where several key players in the administration stood on a prospective increase. Among the key swing votes is that of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who has expressed concern about overly Americanizing the war, out of fear of alienating the Afghan people. But in a press conference on Sept. 3 he indicated that McChrystal has compellingly argued to him that the real determinant of Afghan support is not troop size but U.S. conduct in prosecuting the war. McChrystal favors a counterinsurgency strategy that places protecting the population from violence as the key criterion of mission success.

Still, the defense secretary is said to be attuned to the political climate of rising skepticism about the U.S.’s ability to reverse its fortunes in the war. “Gates lives in the real world and understands the political realities the president faces,” said a Pentagon official, “so preparing on option for a moderate increase down the line, when troops would be available, depending on how things go for the next six months, may be the way ahead.”

Steve Biddle, a military analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser to McChrystal’s recent strategy review, said that he did not know what McChrystal would ultimately recommend or how the general would present the administration with its resource requests. He said it would be perilous for McChrystal to try and game out U.S. politics in the request itself. “In the Bush administration, too many senior military advisers tried to assess what was politically advantageous, and it led to a near catastrophe in Iraq,” Biddle said. “It would be a mistake for Gen. McChrystal to do that here.”

In addition to requesting some 45,000 additional U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the country’s top American military commander will ask the Obama administration to double the number of U.S. government civilian workers who are in the country.

(Wait, what? McClatchy’s saying it’s definite that McChrystal will ask for the full complement of troops that Anthony Cordesman recommended yesterday in a British newspaper? I dunno about this — both Youssef and Strobel are great reporters, but this seems too big a deal to breeze past in an unrelated piece … )

Anyway, the Congressional Research Service, as I mentioned in this piece yesterday, found recently that the Obama administration plans to almost double the civilian component of U.S. officials in Afghanistan to 900 from about 500-and-change. It’s not clear to me whether McClatchy is saying that McChrystal will request more than that. An anonymous official says the total will ultimately be “about 1,000″ civilians. But this is what they’ll do:

The military will move to population centers and wrest control from the Taliban, and civilians will move in afterward to rebuild communities. In many places now, the Taliban not only control areas by force but also have established local courts, government centers and businesses and have run government officials out of their communities.

“Government is the key, and you will see that in General McChrystal’s strategy,” said a senior military official, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity because he isn’t authorized to speak to the news media. “If all we achieve is security, then this won’t work.”

There’s a separate question, well covered in the McClatchy piece, about how fast the State Department and other civilian agencies can deploy their people. But has the question been answered about precisely what these civilians will do? If U.S. civilians end up establishing mechanisms of governance in areas cleared of Taliban and the Afghan government doesn’t send a larger complement of officials, doesn’t that look to a local a whole lot like, well, foreign domination?

Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal (defenselink.mil)

A former military interrogator who contributed to the manhunt for a senior Iraqi terrorist has urged the Senate Armed Services Committee staff to press Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the Obama administration’s nominee to lead U.S. troops in the Afghanistan war, on what he knew about detainee abuse committed by troops in Iraq under his command when McChrystal goes before the panel Tuesday morning for his confirmation hearing.

“Gen. McChrystal, he was there in Iraq often, and he may have been separated from these things by couple layers [of subordinates] but it would’ve been his responsibility to know what was going on,” said Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym of a former Air Force interrogator whose non-coercive interrogations in 2006 helped identify and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

McChrystal helmed the Joint Special Operations Command from September 2003 until August 2008. From 2004 until 2006, an elite Special Operations-led task force, known eventually as Task Force 6-26, hunted Zarqawi and other high-valued terrorists in Iraq, and in the course of attempting to extract intelligence from detainees it acquired in that pursuit, some task force members were found to employ abusive interrogation techniques and even cruel treatment outside the interrogation chambers. In June 2004, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, wrote to the top Pentagon intelligence official that Task Force 6-26 would send detainees to a temporary Baghdad holding facility “with burn marks on their backs,” and one of his interrogators “witnessed TF 6-26 officers punch a prisoner in the face to the point the individual needed medical attention.” According to a report by Human Rights Watch in 2006, McChrystal received Jacoby’s memo.

Additionally, at a Task Force facility known as Camp Nama, members of the task force were said to have “beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball,” The New York Times reported. A pseudonymous former interrogator identified as “Jeff Perry” who was part of the Task Force in early 2004 told Human Rights Watch that “written authorizations were required for most abusive” interrogation techniques, “indicating that the use of these tactics was approved up the chain of command.” Perry further told the human rights organization that he saw McChrystal at Camp Nama “a couple of times. I know what he looks like.”

A few weeks ago, Alexander spoke with Mark Jacobson, a top Senate Armed Services Committee staffer, by phone for about half an hour, about McChrystal. While Alexander did not say that he worked with McChrystal while serving in Iraq as an interrogator — and he declined to specify in an interview that he was a member of the secretive Task Force 6-26 — he communicated that the Senate panel ought to clarify what knowledge McChrystal had of the abuse. “He needs to answer what happened in Iraq in 2006 [with] detainee treatment,” Alexander said. “I don’t know what he knew or didn’t know, but he needs to be asked.” He added that he gave the committee a list of questions to ask McChrystal.

Alexander, who wrote about his Iraq experiences in his 2008 memoir “How To Break a Terrorist” and who works with Human Rights First to oppose torture, recalled that several of his colleagues attempted to use coercive interrogation techniques in the Zarqawi hunt, despite Alexander’s concerns over their dubious efficacy. “When I would go up to my boss and say there’s a better way” to interrogate detainees without torturing them, “his answer would be ‘I’m sorry… because there’s something above me controlling the interrogators and those interrogators have carte blanche to interrogate how they want,” Alexander said. “I don’t know Gen. McChrystal’s involvement in that, [or that of] his staff or below him. But i do know that mentality was extremely counterproductive and almost cost us our chance at finding Zarqawi.”

He continued, “We found Zarqawi in spite of the way the task force did business.”

McChrystal’s confirmation hearing is scheduled for Tuesday morning, when he is slated to testify alongside two other senior military officers nominated for top-level commands. Dave Pollock, a spokesman for the Senate Armed Services Committee, declined to comment on committee staffers’ interactions with Alexander or any other officer or enlisted servicemember under McChrystal’s former command. As to why McChrystal was not testifying on his own — which raises questions as to whether senators will have sufficient time to explore McChrystal’s role in the task force’s abuse of detainees — Pollock said, “It has been [committee] practice to deal with as many military nominations as require a hearing and are ready at the same time because there is not time to have a separate hearing for each nomination.”

There are deep pockets of support within the counterinsurgency and broader military communities for McChrystal, who is considered one of the finest, smartest and most distinguished Army officers of his generation. A senior Army official who served with McChrystal in Iraq recently described him to TWI as “unflappable.” On the Small Wars Journal website, the online nexus of the counterinsurgency community, a pseudonymous former subordinate of McChrystal’s described him as “the Pope” and said, “America’s mission in Afghanistan couldn’t be in better hands.”

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon intelligence analyst who co-wrote Human Rights Watch’s report on Task Force 6-26, lent personal support to McChrystal’s nomination. While Garlasco said, “we really don’t understand what [McChrystal's] involvement at Camp Nama was,” he added, “That doesn’t say whether or not he’s the right man for the job in Afghanistan. Personally, I think he may be.” Garlasco noted out the volume of civilian casualties in Afghanistan caused by Special Operations Forces and said that “put[ting] someone in charge who knows Special Operations Forces may be a good thing” in terms of “reining in” such mistakes.

Alexander didn’t go that far, but said that even if McChrystal did bear responsibility for detainee abuse, he would hardly be the only senior officer placed in such a situation. “Are they going to find a general officer now that hasn’t had detainee abuse [occur] under theircommand?” he said. “The answer is no, but there aren’t general officers who stood up and said no. There are not senior officers who ever stood up and said ‘I refuse to use enhanced interrogation techniques because it’s cruelty and it’s unlawful.” (An exception is Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus, who, as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq in 2007, instructed his troops not to abuse detainees.)

“We’re not going to find anybody who has a clean past,” Alexander said. “What I want to see now is someone who has reformed.”

Clarification: Alexander never used the word “torture” to describe any of the techniques he rejected using in Iraq. In the line  “’When I would go up to my boss and say there’s a better way” to interrogate detainees without torturing them,” the word torture is the author’s paraphrase, not Alexander’s quote.