President Barack Obama was to meet at the White House Wednesday with his commander in the Afghanistan war, amid speculation that the general may lose his job for disparaging remarks he made in a magazine interview.
General Stanley McChrystal was summoned to the White House for a dramatic meeting Wednesday to explain himself, as Obama said the four-star officer showed "poor judgment," leaving open the possibility he would fire the commander.
In Rolling Stone magazine's profile entitled "The Runaway General," McChrystal aides mock Vice President Joe Biden, call the president's national security adviser "a clown," and say the general was "disappointed" by his first meeting with Obama.
McChrystal himself is quoted deriding the US special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and saying he felt "betrayed" by the ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had raised pointed objections to his war strategy.
Obama said Tuesday he wanted to first talk with McChrystal before deciding his fate, but US media reported that even before he arrived in Washington he had offered his resignation.
The stakes were high for Obama as he faced two unattractive options, firing McChrystal and possibly derailing the war effort, or tolerating the episode and risk appearing weak.
The scathing article brought to the surface lingering tensions between military leaders and the White House, just as the US deploys 30,000 more troops to the war now in its ninth year.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama was "angry" when he read the article, and refused to rule out McChrystal being fired.
"General McChrystal has fought bravely on behalf of this country for a long time. Nobody could or should take that away from him, and nobody will," Gibbs said.
"But there has clearly been an enormous mistake in judgment to which he's going to have to answer to."
After issuing a groveling apology, McChrystal flew from Kabul to attend in person Wednesday's monthly war briefing -- normally a video-conference that he hooks up to from his Kabul headquarters.
"I have recalled General McChrystal to Washington to discuss this in person," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "I believe that General McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case."
McChrystal issued an apology Monday and one of his media officers, Duncan Boothby, a civilian, has already resigned.
The general had already received a dressing down from Obama last year over his remarks at a London conference in which he appeared to reject Biden's argument in favor of fewer troops in Afghanistan.
In one passage in the interview that caused dismay at the White House and the Pentagon, an unnamed McChrystal adviser says the general came away unimpressed after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," the adviser was quoted as saying. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged."
Obama named McChrystal to oversee a faltering Afghanistan war effort in May 2009, firing General David McKiernan.
The uproar comes at a critical time, with a spring offensive against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan moving slower than expected and attacks on the rise against US and coalition troops, with June likely to be one of the bloodiest months yet for Americans in the war.
With McChrystal's future hanging in the balance, speculation mounted about who might succeed him, with Marine General James Mattis -- an expert on counter-insurgency warfare -- topping the list of possible candidates.
Source: AFP