We’re going to live blog the House Armed Services Committee hearing tomorrow morning at 0930 featuring Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Amb. Karl Eikenberry. We’ll have panelists and guests swooping in and out of the CoveritLive-style blog during the hearing, and we’ll also be keeping an eye on the DoD Buzz Twitter feed as Colin Clark posts his up-to-the-minute content at the hearing.
You can watch along by visiting the HASC web site and clicking on their live hearing link.
See you then…
– Christian
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From the WoPo.
In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a PowerPoint slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”
“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of the participants asked.
In the first place, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a major part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to one participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”
But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.