Free Republic

General Stanley McChrystal and his staff spoke on the record and wanted to send a message to US President Barack Obama conveying their "frustration" with the Afghan war policy, the Rolling Stone article's author has said. Michael Hastings, the journalist who spent weeks with the blunt-talking commander of US forces in Afghanistan, also told ABC News it became clear during his time with McChrystal and his team that "there are serious skeptics (about the war) in the highest levels of his staff." McChrystal has been summoned to the White House on Wednesday to explain the article in which he and...

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation...

What Gen. McChrystal said "crosses the line of insubordination and it crosses the line of the military code of justice. He has challenged the commander-in-chief and legally, morally, ethically and professionally he ought to be canned."

Expect violent summer in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal says... Gen. Stanley McChrystal apologized from overseas Tuesday for ripping the administration in a magazine article. Now, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan will have a chance to say sorry in person. McChyrstal has been ordered to Washington to explain why he and his staff criticized the White House in a recent Rolling Stone interview, administration officials said Tuesday. Earlier, McChrystal had attempted to defuse the backlash over his comments in the piece, titled "The Runaway General." "I extend my sincerest apology for this profile. It was a mistake reflecting poor...

Noting signs that the new strategy in Afghanistan “is beginning to bear fruit,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also said during an interview aired last night that the effort to build up Iraq’s security forces and move forward with the U.S. drawdown plan there remains on track. The secretary noted signs of a possible turnaround in Afghanistan, as expressed last week at the NATO Ministerial in Istanbul by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander on the ground. “He thought the situation was still serious, but no longer deteriorating,” Gates said. “I think we are beginning to...

LONDON — The NATO commander in Afghanistan said his troop surge could lead to a negotiated peace with the Taliban, in an interview published Monday ahead of a major conference this week on the war. US General Stanley McChrystal also told the Financial Times he hopes his allies will leave Thursday's meeting in London with a "renewed commitment" to the increasingly bloody conflict. By using the 30,000-strong surge in US troops to secure territory stretching from the Taliban's southern heartlands to Kabul, the general said he aims to weaken the insurgency so much its leaders would accept a political settlement....

The ongoing debate over the way forward in Afghanistan has settled into the “light footprint,” counterterrorism approach, versus the “heavy footprint,” population-centric counterinsurgency approach. Reportedly, what is about to emerge from the Obama administration is a hybrid of the two, with the vast majority of troops providing security in Afghanistan’s major population centers and pulling troops out of less populated rural zones. Drone strikes and periodic raids would be employed to check the Taliban in remote areas. The danger in such an approach is that once rural villages are ceded to insurgent control, they may never be recaptured as the...

NATO defense ministers Friday endorsed the kind of broad counterinsurgency approach for Afghanistan that is the basis for the pending troop request by the NATO and the U.S. commander there, General Stanley McChrystal. The ministers, including U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, are meeting in Bratislava, Slovakia. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen says the defense ministers have a "general shared view" that the alliance must make Afghanistan strong enough to defend itself against militant forces. And he said the ministers also agree on the approach for accomplishing that. "There is the support of this counterinsurgency strategy, which means that ministers...

So our top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has told CBS's "60 Minutes" that he has spoken with President Barack Obama only once since June. This is a troubling revelation. Right now, our commander in chief is preparing to make one of the most important decisions of his presidency—whether to commit additional troops to win the war in Afghanistan. Being detached or incurious about what our commanders are experiencing makes it hard to craft a winning strategy.

SNIPPET: "CAMP LEATHERNECK, Afghanistan – U.S. Marines trapped Taliban fighters in a residential compound and persuaded the insurgents to allow women and children to leave. The troops then moved in — only to discover that the militants had slipped out, dressed in women's burqa robes.[...] On Monday, images from a Predator drone showed a dozen fighters and at least 15 to 20 civilians inside a mud-brick compound in the village of Khan Neshin, about 60 miles north of the Pakistani border. Because of the civilians, the U.S. troops held their fire, and instead used a military translator and village elder...