01 December 2009: Times
By Giles Whittell, Washington
The man who wrote the blueprint for President Obama’s new Afghan strategy is the man who must now make it work. General Stanley McChrystal is a lean, ascetic workaholic who combines unique experience as commander of US “black ops” in Iraq with a disarming modesty.
Two months ago he came to London to give a speech that he prefaced with the line: “If my plan fails, as most of mine do, I will be happy to field any questions.”
A joke maybe, but there’s nothing funny about the ambitious plan that he must execute to clear the Taleban from main population centres, protect Afghanistan’s civilians and train its fledgeling army to secure the country and allow Nato to leave.
General McChrystal’s admirers say that he was born to the task. “He’s lanky, smart, tough, a sneaky stealth soldier,” said one former colleague. He has defied the threat of censure for his association with prisoner abuse in Iraq to win promotion to the toughest job in the US military.
Born in 1954 into a military family, he graduated in 1976 from the West Point Military Academy, where President Obama was due to speak last night, and was singled out there as a leader, despite violating the academy’s drinking ban and risking live fire from campus police when he organised a mock attack on one of its buildings.
General McChrystal missed the chance of combat in Panama and Grenada in the 1980s and admitted that it bothered him. “You always wonder how you’ll do,” he said. He has found out since. He was a public face of the Pentagon early in the Iraq war, delivering televised
Defence Department briefings, but in 2003 he was appointed commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. In that role he oversaw the targeted killings of militant leaders, a vital secret component of the 2007 surge led by General David Petraeus, and was credited with bringing relative stability to Iraq.
General McChrystal has acquired a reputation in Kabul as being even better qualified than General Petraeus to dig US forces out of their Afghan morass. He has banned speeding by US military vehicles on Afghan roads and drinking by his officers inside their bases.
“The insurgents cannot defeat us militarily, but we can defeat ourselves,” he wrote in his assessment of the security situation. The world is about to find out exactly what he meant.
