The top US military officer was en route to Afghanistan yesterday to explain the sacking of the allied commander in Kabul as the Obama administration insisted the US was not “bogged down” in the fight against the Taliban.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, departed late on Thursday for a tour of Afghanistan and Pakistan to reassure the region’s leaders that the war effort would not be derailed by the departure of General Stanley McChrystal.
“My message will be clear. Nothing changes about our strategy. Nothing changes about the mission,” Mullen said.
He spoke a day after McChrystal was forced to step down as commander of the NATO-led force over disparaging remarks about administration officials in a bombshell Rolling Stone article this week.
McChrystal’s disrespectful display was “unacceptable” and US President Barack Obama’s choice as the new commander, General David Petraeus, was the “best possible outcome to an awful situation,” US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said at the same press conference.
Gates insisted there was forward movement in the Afghan war, in the latest bid by the administration to defend the mission in the face of troubling signs from the battlefront and a spike in allied and US troop casualties.
“I do not believe we are bogged down. I believe we are making some progress,” Gates said. “It is slower and harder than we anticipated.”
He said he fully supported the change in command and that allies or adversaries should not “misinterpret” the decision as a softening of Washington’s commitment to the war.
Obama said Petraeus would hit the ground running thanks to his work on Afghanistan as head of the regional Central Command, which oversees both war zones.
Obama faced calls from some lawmakers to shake up the diplomatic team for Afghanistan, which they said was needed to repair strained military-civilian relations and bolster ties with Karzai’s government.
The dismissal of McChrystal was met with dismay in Kabul, where Afghans and foreign diplomats praised his bold efforts to change the course of the war. The Afghan presidency credited McChrystal with helping to “increase the level of trust” with the Afghan people since he assumed command last year.
“We don’t care whether it’s McChrystal or Petraeus,” Taliban spokesman Yousuf Ahmadi said by telephone from an undisclosed location. “We’ll be fighting the invading forces until they leave.”
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