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All three newscasts led with reporter Michael Hastings' profile of Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of US military forces in Afghanistan. ABC treated it as a White House story, kicking off its newscast with Jake Tapper. NBC gave Andrea Mitchell the assignment, its diplomatic correspondent. CBS went to the Pentagon and David Martin. Martin called Hastings' portrait of McChrystal and his aides "a jaw-dropping display of disrespect and indiscretion." Tapper noted that the general and his team "let almost no top administration official go uninsulted." For her part, Mitchell characterized McChrystal and his aides as expressing "contempt for everyone up the chain of command from the National Security Advisor to the Vice President, even the Commander-in-Chief."
It is true that most of the badmouthing of diplomats and National Security Council members cited in the article did not come from the general's mouth. It reflected the attitudes of his inner circle of aides instead. ABC's Martha Raddatz quoted Rolling Stone's Hastings: "I think they say these things all the time in private and I just happened to, sort of, see them, how they acted in private." Raddatz called it "baffling" that McChrystal's team would be so open with the reporter.
From the Pentagon, CBS' Martin provided the perspective that "the White House has long suspected the military of mounting a campaign of press leaks to coerce the President into sending more troops." Martin quoted Obama's answer to journalist Jonathan Alter's question about whether the military brass had "jammed him" on the troop decision. "I neither confirm nor deny that I have gotten jammed," the Commander-in-Chief stated.
At the White House, NBC's Chuck Todd pointed out that the quarrel with McChrystal is not about his conduct of the counterinsurgency but about his "leadership and judgment…the importance of civilian control and the idea of a chain of command." Opined George Stephanopoulos, anchor of ABC's Good Morning America: "The President has really been put in a real political box. If he fires McChrystal he risks looking thin skinned and petulant but if he accepts these words, which some consider insubordination, then he risks looking weak."
NBC's Richard Engel filed his own profile of the general from Kabul, calling McChrystal "blunt, disciplined and secretive, known for his austere living. He ran covert "black ops" assassination programs against al-Qaeda militants in Iraq and was accused of covering up the death of Pat Tillman, the NFL player turned USArmy Ranger, at the hands of his own comrades in Afghanistan. "McChrystal had tremendous latitude. Few questions were asked, his activities all classified." ABC's Raddatz added the tidbit that the general "loves the military. It is his life. He has been married 30 years. Some of those years he has been able to see his wife for fewer than 30 days."
It should be noted that the Pentagon's doctrine of counterinsurgency insists that all aspects of the United States' involvement in Afghanistan--not only warmaking but diplomacy and nationbuilding and training and development aid and political contact--is centralized under the command of the military. So belittling for civilians may be an inevitable consequence of such a structure. CBS' Lara Logan claimed that US foreign policy in Afghanistan is identified with the general himself: "The strategy needs McChrystal to fight for it and with so much political opposition in Washington it is unclear that it will be able to survive." NBC's Engel drew this conclusion from Rolling Stone: "The article suggests McChrystal and his inner circle have become disdainful of authority, calling themselves Team America, believing only they know how to run a war."
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