In a remarkable New York Times story just posted, we learn that Stanley McChrystal now is trying to bring under control the types of reckless actions from Special Operations forces that were the trademark of such forces when they were under his command. Here is how the article opens:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, has brought most American Special Operations forces under his direct control for the first time, out of concern over continued civilian casualties and disorganization among units in the field.

“What happens is, sometimes at cross-purposes, you got one hand doing one thing and one hand doing the other, both trying to do the right thing but working without a good outcome,” General McChrystal said in an interview.

If anyone should be able to recognize "cross-purposes", it should be McChyrstal. As Jeremy Scahill reported, McChrystal worked very much outside the normal chain of command when he ran JSOC, often answering only to Dick Cheney.

This interview with the Times is part of an ongoing "charm offensive" aimed at rehabilitating the image of McChrystal and the US effort in Afghanistan. An eight part YouTube series with McChrystal explaining the warm and fuzzy aspects of his COIN strategy can be found here. I’ve only been able to sit through the first and a portion of the second segment, but did see enough to get the full story behind the photo (obviously from the same talk) that was the subject of this diary. Here is segment number one for your viewing pleasure:

After recounting three recent episodes of reckless actions by Special Operations forces resulting in civilian deaths, including claims by Afghan civilians that these US forces shot and killed two pregnant women in a night raid of a home, the Times article then goes on to describe the tensions between conventional forces in Afghanistan, who are said to be more careful about civilian deaths and Special Operations forces, which are blamed by most observers for the worst actions. Mysteriously, the article ends with this paragraph:

Tension between Special Operations and conventional commanders has often surfaced in the American military, but General McChrystal himself has a great deal of credibility in the black operations world. Before he became the top commander in Afghanistan, he was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan, which ran elite, secretive counterterrorism units, believed to include Delta Force and the Seals, hunting high-value targets.

This is the same Stanley McChyrstal who is famous for hiding Camp Nama from the ICRC in Iraq and who, even when the Times endorsed him for heading US forces in Afghanistan, was acknowledged to achieve part of his COIN "success" through widespread detention that inevitably sweeps up innocent civilians.

So yes, McChrystal does indeed have "credibility" in Special Operations stemming from his time as head of JSOC, but there was much of the same sort of mayhem in his wake then that he now is being portrayed as trying to prevent.

As a postscript, note that with this announcement of Special Operations forces in Afghanistan being mostly under McChrystal’s control, when coupled with the disclosure in this diary that McChrystal has command authority over detention operations, there now are virtually no gaps in McChrystal’s command authority in Afghanistan, even though there was an attempt at diversion in announcements made almost two weeks ago claiming that Special Operations and prisons were exempted from his command. It seems likely that just as I was informed by Central Command that McChrystal’s authority over detentions in Afghanistan stems from his USFOR-A hat, rather than his NATO hat, his authority over the bulk of the Special Operations forces in Afghanistan is derived in the same way.