Obama's Afghanistan divide

The Obama administration was split when General Stanley McChrystal was in charge of the war in Afghanistan. Will it remain so with David Petraeus running things?

E.J. Dionne has more:

Everyone on the president's team, including McChrystal, said they had signed off on the Obama compromise: to give McChrystal the troops he said he needed to improve the situation but to place a clear time limit on how long the troops would stay.

In practice, the president's advisers continued to feud, sowing uncertainty about what the policy actually was. Those who had been against McChrystal's proposed buildup said Obama's declared deadline of July of next year for beginning troop withdrawals was firm. McChrystal's backers said the deadline was flexible.

The administration was openly divided over how effectively it could work with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Unlike McChrystal, Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, think Karzai is a hopeless and hapless leader.

Given the factional war inside the administration, Karzai himself felt perfectly free to weigh in on the controversy let loose by the incendiary let-it-all-hang-out Rolling Stone article. Karzai let it be known he saw McChrystal as "the best commander the United States has sent to Afghanistan." The president of another country became a player inside our own country's political deliberations.

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