With Leadership Change, Obama Renews Commitment
Naming Gen. David Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal will go down as President Obama's "all in" moment in Afghanistan. That's what Petraeus famously told President Bush when he was named to lead the surge in Iraq.
"This is not double down, this is all in," Petraeus said.
That's what President Obama said in so many words today, reports CBS News correspondent David Martin.
"I have a responsibility to do whatever is necessary to succeed in Afghanistan," Mr. Obama said.
"It's a critical moment for the Obama presidency," said Eliot Cohen, the director of the Strategic Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. "One of the great problems in Afghanistan has been Obama's own ambivalence about the war."
The president is sending America's most famous and successful general, who literally wrote the book on counter insurgency doctrine. As head of the central command, which oversees both Iraq and Afghanistan, he has walked the ground of critical battlefields like Marjah and Kandahar.
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In Afghanistan, a New General -- But An Old Strategy
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McChrystal: I Resigned to See the Mission Succeed
"He really took someone who had been working Afghanistan on a day-to-day basis and also has a lot of the authority and experience to really try and hit the ground running and try to turn things around there," said Richard Fontaine, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
Petraeus has said many times Afghanistan will be more difficult and take longer than Iraq.
"It's not in Afghanistan so much as a matter of reconstituting a state but one of building one from scratch, and that is a far tougher and long-term proposition than even what we saw in Iraq," said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations.
Petraeus is assuming command of a war which is a stalemate at best, which to many of the solders seems like a groundhog day war - each day like the last.
"The urgency he will feel once he is in the hot seat in Kabul will be there in every way that it was for General McChrystal," Markey said. "He can't pause. This thing has to move as quickly as possible otherwise it will certainly be a failure."
Judging by his halting answer shortly before he collapsed from dehydration at a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting last week, Petraeus has real doubts about whether the United States can begin withdrawals from Afghanistan by July 2011, the date set by the president.
"In a perfect world, Mr. Chairman, we have to be very careful with timelines," Petraeus said on June 15.
Much of his success in Iraq was due to the so-called Sunni Awakening - the decision by Iraqis themselves to rise up against al Qaeda. There are only hints of a similar awakening in Afghanistan. In Iraq, Petraeus formed a close working relationship with the U.S. Ambassador, Ryan Crocker. In Afghanistan, he will an ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, who believes the war cannot succeed with a partner as weak and corrupt as the government of President Harmid Karzai. McChrystal was only one member of what former State Department official Eliot Cohen calls a rather dysfunctional team.
"Where you've got the senior military commander, an ambassador and the president's special representative who clearly don't get along and some very fundamental disagreements about where people ought to go," Cohen said.
McChrystal's final service to his country may have been to force a moment of ugly truth.
CBS News anchor Katie Couric asked Martin what people at the Pentagon are saying about what happened to McChrystal.
"Almost everybody here admires McChrystal, but agrees that he was so disrespectful of civilian authority that he had to go," Martin said.
