Person of Interest

Afghanistan Now 'Obama's War'

New general signals president is taking over.

“This is a very big deal,” Fred Kaplan writes at Slate of President Obama’s plan to replace General David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, with General Stanley McChrystal. “McKiernan's ouster signals a dramatic shift in U.S. strategy for the war in Afghanistan. And it means that the war is now, unequivocally, ‘Obama's war.’” So who’s the man Obama may be staking his presidency on? “Gen. McChrystal, a Green Beret who has spent most of the last year as the top staff officer to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent the previous five years commanding special operations forces in Iraq—units that specialize in guerrilla warfare, including the training of indigenous armies,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Like Gen. David H. Petraeus, who will become Gen. McChrystal's new boss and is credited with turning around the Iraq campaign, Gen. McChrystal has won over converts in the Pentagon because of his intellectual rigor and a flexible decision-making process that lends itself to irregular warfare.”