Afstan: Why Gen. McKiernan was fired--too NATO-centric, for one thing

So much for the Obama administration's being oh-so-more multilateral than President Bush's (excerpts from long Washington Post article):

...
[Defense secretary] Gates and [Joint Chiefs chairman] Mullen had been having doubts about McKiernan since the beginning of the year. They regarded him as too languid, too old-school and too removed from Washington. He lacked the charisma and political savvy that Gen. David H. Petraeus brought to the Iraq war.

McKiernan's answers that day were the tipping point for Mullen. Soon after, he discussed the matter with Gates, who had come to the same conclusion.

Mullen traveled to Kabul in April to confront McKiernan. The chairman hoped the commander would opt to save face and retire, but he refused. Not only had he not disobeyed orders, he believed he was doing what Gates and Mullen wanted.

You're going to have to fire me, he told Mullen.

Two weeks later, Gates did. It was the first sacking of a wartime theater commander since President Harry S. Truman dismissed Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1951 for opposing his Korean War policy...

...With Washington then [late summer 2008] viewing NATO as the solution -- not the problem -- McKiernan seemed like the right general to help win over the allies. Before coming to Kabul, he had been the top Army commander in Europe, and he had been part of the NATO mission in the Balkans in the 1990s.

He deemed management of the alliance in Afghanistan one of his chief responsibilities. He met with an almost daily stream of visiting delegations from European capitals, and he sought to change some of the more Byzantine troop rules.

But back in Washington, McKiernan was increasingly seen as too deferential to NATO. By November, when it became clear that the Europeans would not be sending more troops, senior officials at the Pentagon wanted him to focus on making better use of the existing NATO forces -- getting them off bases and involved in counterinsurgency operations. Although McKiernan sought to do that, his superiors thought he was not working fast enough. Of particular concern was the division of the country into five regional commands, each afforded broad autonomy to fight as it pleased.

"He was still doing the NATO-speak at a time when Gates and Mullen were over it," a senior military official at the Pentagon said...

In February, with a new administration in power, Obama ordered 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, giving McKiernan much -- but not all -- of what he wanted. He planned to send most of the new forces to the south, where Taliban attacks were becoming increasingly frequent and potent.

In Washington, doubts about McKiernan were growing among Gates and Mull en and their staffs. McKiernan's plan to integrate civilian and military resources, which Gates had asked him to draw up, did not impress many who read it in the Pentagon. Once again, they faulted McKiernan's perceived deference to NATO. What the document needed, they thought, was sharp thinking from the U.S. military, not a casserole of inputs from a dozen allies...

More on the new administration's unilateralism here. Why have our media been so strangely silent about President Obama's apparent disregard for allies?

Mildly related: A comment by E.R. Campbell at Milnet.ca about NATO attitudes toward Canada:

I think that at some senior political, military and bureaucratic levels of the alliance there is rather a lot of left-over ill will towards Canada for the late ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s when we appeared intent on getting a major free ride.

It is important to remember that, in 1970, when we decided, unilaterally, to shrug off our share of the common defence burden, many Europeans and Americans were still very worried about a potential (not just possible) Soviet attack. This was long before Gorbachev came on the scene, a generation before the wall fell and the USSR collapsed. Canada decided to become a military freeloader. That might not have been quite as bad if we had been a quiet, polite military freeloader but that was not the case. Canadians hectored their allies, wagging prissy, generally anti-American, fingers in the faces of the people who were carrying a full load. It was bad policy (stupid is not too strong a word) and it was badly implemented – but it was good domestic politics. It “played” well in several parts of the country.

A lot of NATO folks have very, very long institutional memories and our considerable contribution and sacrifices in the Balkans and Afghanistan have not erased our reputation as weak sisters.

Update: President Obama, in speaking about Afstan to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Aug. 17, did not mention NATO or allies once (transcript here). Hmmm.