Word: mcchrystal
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...more than 90,000 troops from 41 countries, its staff officers roaming the halls in each nation's distinct patterns of camouflage. On July 3, on a wooden deck at the back of his office in the compound, shaded by trees and a garden umbrella, U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal, who recently became ISAF's commander, and that of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, sat down to discuss his new role. Tall, lanky and earnest, with the loping stride of a long-distance runner - McChrystal runs 10 miles before his morning coffee - the general went to Afghanistan after...
...precisely because so many Afghans have been killed that the war is, in effect, starting anew. McChrystal's task is to recalibrate the war effort so local people can see that the coalition's actions increase their security, in turn allowing them to get on with their lives. Up to now, the deaths of Afghans in the fighting have done little to aid the allies and a lot to turn locals against foreign forces and the government of President Hamid Karzai, which those forces sustain. This is a place - as British and Russian armies discovered and were sent packing after...
...just might, one day, heal the wounds of 30 years of war, President Barack Obama and his generals are shifting strategies. Their new doctrine emphasizes protecting the Afghan people over killing insurgents. "What we really want is the equivalent of a peaceful takeover, where the Taliban are forced out," McChrystal told TIME. Three days later, the general issued a "tactical directive" to ISAF forces reinforcing the point: "We will not win based on the number of Taliban we kill," McChrystal wrote, "but instead on our ability to separate insurgents from the people." To that end, the directive explicitly enjoined force...
...change in tactics and command (McChrystal was brought in to replace Army General David McKiernan, who had led ISAF since June 2008) was necessitated by a grim truth. The war in Afghanistan is not going well. The Taliban, funded in large measure by the opium trade, which is centered in Helmand, now controls wide swaths of Afghanistan. Over the past four months, a recent U.N. report says, the number of "assassinations, abductions, incidents of intimidation and the direct targeting of aid workers" has been higher than last year. Increasing numbers of foreign fighters - "most likely affiliated with al-Qaeda...
...incident ... [McChrystal was a lieut. colonel with the 82nd Airborne Division when a flaming F-16 jet plowed into a parked C-141 at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, killing 18 of his troops as they prepared for parachute jumps. This mention in the interview was accompanied by an instant change in tone. He went from animated to muted, and there was a long silence of nine seconds.] I had been in command for almost a year ... We had just finished a joint readiness training, where you build up a team. What we had done, we had a year...