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At his inauguration on January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama immediately became a wartime commander in chief, responsible for not one, but two ongoing conflicts. Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War had provided much of the initial impetus for his candidacy. Once in office, the new president happily, if not quite explicitly, endorsed the verdict that the surge had achieved a notable success: Doing so offered a readily available rationale for winding down direct U.S. military involvement in Iraq, something that as a candidate he had vowed to do.

In Afghanistan, Obama faced a more difficult problem. To protect himself from the charge of being a national security wimp, candidate Obama had vowed, if elected, to reenergize the military effort there. Within weeks of taking office, he signaled his intention to make good on that promise. Just shy of a month after becoming president, Obama ordered an additional twenty-one thousand troops into the war zone. “This increase is necessary to stabilize a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which has not received the strategic attention, direction and resources it urgently requires,” the president announced.37

Getting things back on track was going to require more than just troops, however. Taliban fighters were on the march. Both literally and figuratively, the United States and its allies were losing ground. The new administration wanted “fresh thinking” and “fresh eyes.” So in May, Obama unceremoniously fired the commander immediately responsible for operations in Afghanistan. Deemed too stodgy and too conventional, Gen. David McKiernan was out. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, a career special operations officer close to Petraeus and specializing in counterterrorism—that is, targeted assassination—now reinvented himself as an expert in COIN.38

Commentators had wasted little time in dubbing Afghanistan “Obama’s War.” McChrystal’s job was to figure out how to bring that war to a successful conclusion. Under the tutelage of Petraeus—appointed by the outgoing President Bush to command U.S. Central Command and therefore McChrystal’s immediate boss—the new commander set out to do just that, undertaking a crash reevaluation of U.S. and allied efforts.

The revived cult of generalship endowed McChrystal with instant celebrity. Journalists wasted no time in designating Prince Stanley heir to King David. A gushing profile in the New York Times Magazine made the case succinctly: “And so if it was Petraeus who saved Iraq from cataclysm, it now falls to McChrystal to save Afghanistan.”39 Newsweek likewise depicted McChrystal in quasi-messianic terms, describing him as a “Zen warrior,” who “eats one meal a day, works out obsessively every morning at 5, and is so free of body fat that he looks gaunt.”40 Tall, lanky, earnest, and “fit as a tuning fork” was Time’s description, noting with approval that McChrystal’s Kindle included “serious tomes on Pakistan, Lincoln and Vietnam.”41 Here, according to a raft of press accounts, was no mere mortal, but something close to a superman.

After “consulting” with various civilian experts who had helped market the Petraeus surge in Iraq,42 McChrystal completed his assessment on August 30, 2009. Within three weeks, his report had leaked, landing in the lap of the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. The entire sixty-six-page document, intended for the president and his most senior advisers, promptly became available to anyone with Internet access. The impact was instantaneous: General McChrystal’s views now framed the ensuing Afghanistan debate. Would the president support his field commander? Or would he deny McChrystal the tools needed to get the job done?

The COIN experts to whom McChrystal had looked for advice promptly took to the op-ed pages and airways to demand that Obama accede to his general’s request. Max Boot called on Obama “to back General McChrystal who is a terrific general who has a great team with him, and has done a very careful study