Word: mcchrystal
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...however much the Pakistanis help, McChrystal does not have an easy job. He concedes that Afghanistan's current security forces - 86,000 soldiers and 82,000 national police - aren't enough to protect the country. And U.S. commanders have made it clear that even with reinforcements in the pipeline, they don't have enough troops to run a full-fledged counterinsurgency campaign. That is one reason U.S. commanders came to rely on airpower, which only perpetuated a feedback loop that made the job of winning trust among Afghans even harder...
Long Career, Fresh Eyes In Washington there had been a sense for months that the Afghan train was off the track and that McKiernan - an able armor officer - wasn't the right fit. On May 11, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, with Obama's blessing, tapped McChrystal for the Afghan post, saying "fresh eyes" were needed...
...McChrystal's official career is 33 years long, but he has, in effect, been in the Army for all his 54 years - both his father and paternal grandfather were Army officers, his father making it to two-star general. After graduating from West Point in 1976 - 31 years after his father - McChrystal climbed the Army ladder. He's seen some tragedies. In 1994, McChrystal was a lieutenant colonel with the 82nd Airborne Division when a flaming F-16 jet plowed into a parked C-141 at Pope Air Force Base. The cargo plane's 55,000 gallons of jet fuel...
Asked about the incident, McChrystal pauses for nine seconds, his mood shifting from animated to muted. "We sent our own paratroopers to bury each of our own killed," he says, saying the tragedy taught him the importance of teamwork. Others say it showed his leadership. McChrystal and his wife Annie attended all the funerals and memorial services. "That was real moral courage," says Dan McNeill, who was McChrystal's commander at the time and who later ran the war in Afghanistan. "I don't know if I could have done that...
...between stints with various special-operations units, McChrystal pulled tours at the Council on Foreign Relations and Harvard. Before coming to the Pentagon, he spent 2003 to 2008 heading up the Joint Special Operations Command, the secret corps of Army Delta Force and Navy Seals based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, although McChrystal deployed regularly to its forward post inside Iraq. In 2006 his unit succeeded in tracking down and killing Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. McChrystal's record has not been without controversy. After the 2004 death by friendly fire of former...