Tales from the Trail

They smiled at each other and publicly said “I do.”

General Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, widely reported to have had a falling-out over sending  30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, on Tuesday pledged their support for President Barack Obama’s strategy and for each other.

The congressional hearing was on the Afghan war, but it had moments that almost seemed borrowed from a wedding ceremony.

“Do you support the president’s plan (for Afghanistan) in each of its elements?” asked Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin.

“I do, Mr. Chairman,” responded Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Levin turned to General McChrystal, the U.S. battlefield commander. “General, do you fully agree with the July 2011 date which the president directed as the start of reduction of some U.S. forces?”

It sounded like a pretty sexy story — a clash of the titans between President Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain in the big White House meeting yesterday on Afghanistan.

But the McCain folks are pushing back against this notion that tempers were flaring between Obama and McCain as reported by major media outlets.

McCain has made no secret of what he feels is an urgent need to increase U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and he repeated that appeal in the meeting, saying he hopes the president will make his decision soon and “not in a leisurely fashion,” according to McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan.

When U.S. law enforcement authorities launched a series of raids in New York City that culminated in the arrest of an Afghan-born airport shuttle driver (Najibullah Zazi) for an alleged bombing plot, there was a fair bit of speculation afterward questioning whether the FBI or the New York Police Department bungled the investigation by acting too early.

But at a Senate committee hearing, Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller insisted that the two organizations were getting along despite the reports which he said were exaggerated.

“I believe our relations are exceptionally good, as good as they’ve been in a long time,” he told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Republican Senator John McCain is clashing with Democratic Senator Carl Levin over Levin’s comments that he does not want to send additional troops to Afghanistan.

McCain, the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Reuters a surge is needed like was done in Iraq and that Levin’s recommendations remind him of how then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to fight the Iraq war — “He thought that we could win on the cheap and at one point the entire Iraqi army collapsed,” McCain said.

“So in all due respect to Senator Levin and the others, we have to have a significant troop increase, otherwise we’re going to lose.”