Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Washington Post piece on why Gates and Mullen cashiered David McKiernan in favor of Stan McChrystal is a wonderful piece of how to do Beltway reporting right. It’s not just about personalities, it’s about the perspectives underlying the personalities. I flagged this graf over at the Windy, about McChrystal’s recent thinktank-expert strategy review,because it made a point that I felt absolutely stupid for missing in plain sight:

There were few revolutionary ideas in the document, but McChrystal may have received something far more important through the process: allies in the U.S. capital, on the political left and right, to talk about the need for more troops in Afghanistan — in advance of his assessment to Gates, which will probably be submitted this month.

 A premier concern for Gates and Mullen is retaining support for the war among the public and in Congress. They seem to have calculated that support for the war could only diminish with attention — a sensible prediction, if they indeed made it — and so a key concern was finding a general who could serve as a good salesman. Chandrasekaran refers to how McKiernan didn’t "fawn over visiting lawmakers like Petraeus did in Iraq" and how McChrystal "is regarded as a leader in the Petraeus mold: able to nimbly run the troops on the ground as well as the traps in Washington."

Now, read the piece and you’ll see that there’s little evidence that McKiernan and McChrystal are really so far apart. If McChrystal is really out to earn Beltway allies — and his recent on-the-record interviews with the LAT’s Julian Barnes and the WSJ’s Yochi Dreazen suggest he is; and that makes perfect sense for someone in his position — so was McKiernan. In October, McKiernan visited Washington and held a press conference at the Newseum to supplement one at the Pentagon (I attended the former), a clear signal of Petraeusian respect for the press. Much of what he said exhibited both a strong desire to implement counterinsurgency best-practices and a bit of a learning curve with them. For instance, McKiernan spent more time talking about how he’d spin civilian casualties than how he’d minimize them. McChrystal’s put rules in place to restrict civilian airstrikes and to cease engagements with insurgents who enter civilian-heavy areas. Time will tell whether the casualties actually drop as a result, but it’s clear that McChrystal sees civilian casualties as more than a PR problem. 

That said, it’s hard to adjudicate some of the merits for McKiernan’s firing. For instance, I don’t know what to make of this:

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.

What was that plan? How much buy-in did it secure from NATO? Why did it not impress Gates and Mullen? How was the thinking behind it insufficiently "sharp"?