Backing for McChrystal’s Afghan plan

LONDON – America’s allies in the fight to stabilise Afghanistan are hoping that the ouster of Stanley McChrystal as commander of international forces there leaves the general’s strategy intact, officials and analysts said Wednesday.Both friends and critics of McChrystal said his plan for fighting the country’s raging insurgency was still being tested – and that NATO partners fighting alongside the United States don’t have the stomach for another change of direction.In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, that while McChrystal would no longer be the commander, “the approach he helped put in place is the right one”.“The strategy continues to have NATO’s support, and our troops will continue to carry it out,” Fogh Rasmussen said in a statement.Analysts of the war agreed.“This is not the time for a new commander to come in to rethink strategy,” said Malcolm Chalmers, a fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute who also served as special adviser to two British foreign secretaries.A memo drawn up by one of Chalmers’ colleagues, Theo Farrell, underlined the success of McChrystal’s approach in Afghanistan, in particular in the Nad-e-Ali area of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, where many British soldiers are based. (AP)