Word: mckiernan
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This cultural shift is even occurring where it has recently been used most sparingly: on the battlefield. That started last year, when Gates removed Army General Dave McKiernan from command of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, ending his career. Since then, several lower-ranking Army officers have received letters of reprimand - a potential career ender - for commanding U.S. troops caught and killed in ambushes in Afghanistan...
...launching an initiative. Things take time. For example: not all of the 21,000 additional forces that President Obama authorized for Afghanistan last winter have even arrived in the country yet. For another example: the battle plan those troops were asked to execute was devised primarily by General David McKiernan, who was replaced about the time the troops started arriving. McKiernan's plan reflected his experience in conventional warfare: he chose to deploy the troops where the bad guys were - largely in Helmand province on the Pakistani border, home of nearly 60% of the world's opium crop, a place...
...Upon his arrival in Afghanistan as McKiernan's replacement last June, General Stanley McChrystal was pretty much presented with a fait accompli: the troops were arriving in Helmand. "The ship was moving in that direction," a military expert told me, "and it would have been difficult to turn it around." Indeed, it would have taken months of planning to change course. The additional troops were needed immediately to blunt the momentum of the Taliban and also to provide security for the Afghan elections. The trouble was, the troops would have been better deployed in Helmand's neighbor to the east...
...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...
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...