General Stanley McChrystal was summoned to the White House for a dramatic meeting on Wednesday to explain himself, as Obama said the four-star officer showed "poor judgment," leaving open the possibility he would fire the commander.
In Rolling Stone magazine's profile entitled "The Runaway General," McChrystal aides mock Vice President Joe Biden, call the president's national security adviser "a clown," and say the general was "disappointed" by his first meeting with Obama.
McChrystal himself is quoted deriding the US special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, and saying he felt "betrayed" by the ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, who had raised pointed objections to his war strategy.
Obama said on Tuesday he wanted to first talk with his top commander in Afghanistan before making any decision on his fate, but US media reported that even before McChrystal arrived he had offered his resignation.
The stakes were high for Obama as he faced two unattractive options, firing McChrystal and possibly derailing the war effort, or tolerating the episode and risk appearing weak.
The scathing article brought to the surface lingering tensions between military leaders and the White House, just as the US deploys 30,000 more troops to the bloody war now in its ninth year.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama was "angry" when he read the article, and refused to rule out the commander-in-chief would fire McChrystal. "General McChrystal has fought bravely on behalf of this country for a long time.
Nobody could or should take that away from him, and nobody will," Gibbs said. "But there has clearly been an enormous mistake in judgment to which he's going to have to answer to."
After issuing a groveling apology, McChrystal flew from Kabul to attend in person on Wednesday's monthly war briefing -- normally a video-conference that he hooks up to from his Kabul headquarters.
"I have recalled General McChrystal to Washington to discuss this in person," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a terse statement. "I believe that General McChrystal made a significant mistake and exercised poor judgment in this case."
McChrystal issued a statement late on Monday apologizing for his remarks and one of his media officers, Duncan Boothby, a civilian, has already resigned, but the fallout is unlikely to stop there.
The general already received a dressing down from Obama last year over his remarks at a London conference in which he appeared to reject Biden's argument in favor of fewer troops in Afghanistan.
In one passage in the interview that caused dismay at the White House and the Pentagon, an unnamed McChrystal adviser says the general came away unimpressed after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," the general's adviser says. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged."
As McChrystal's future hung in the balance, speculation mounted about who might succeed the commander, with General James Mattis -- a Marine known as an expert on counter-insurgency warfare -- topping the list of possible candidates. Lawmakers in Congress condemned the general's remarks as troubling, but most of Obama's fellow Democrats stopped short of calling for McChrystal's removal.
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, said the article points to personality differences and "do not reflect differences in policy on prosecuting the war."
Afghan President Hamid Karzai endorsed the embattled commander and voiced hope the general would not be sacked, while Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen also backed McChrystal.
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