Crocker’s nomination, the administration official said, will be sent to the Senate immediately.
Lawmakers ‘pleased’
As news of Obama’s planned announcement emerged Wednesday, lawmakers of both parties were broadly approving. “The sum total of these picks is that the President has chosen experienced people with unique capabilities to serve our nation at a dangerous time,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement. “I could not be more pleased.”
Gates, who is highly respected on Capitol Hill, made his own calls to key lawmakers Wednesday to emphasize that Panetta is his recommended successor and that support for Allen is unanimous among the Pentagon’s civilian and military leaders. Allen also worked closely with Thomas E. Donilon, Obama’s national security adviser, when Donilon headed the National Security Council’s powerful deputies committee. Petraeus was also touted by Gates.
Obama’s status quo choices come at a time of rising concern about the nation’s fiscal health and appear designed to manage the end of the wars, rather than to rethink the way they are fought or consider how the United States might take advantage of wrenching political changes in the Middle East.
With public concern rising on domestic issues, the last thing the administration needs on the eve of a reelection effort are signs of internal discord or looming failure in expensive enterprises abroad. Already, a Washington Post-ABC News poll this week indicated that 49 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s management of the Afghan conflict, which he has described as a “war of necessity.”
The changes are consistent with what critics have said is Obama’s shift toward advisers he knows, rather than the team of political rivals, led by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, he initially brought to his Cabinet. Clinton has said she would not serve in a second Obama term, and Obama, despite his lack of foreign policy experience, has increasingly become his own chief theoretician.
Although Panetta has received high marks for his management of the CIA, he is more a political than a policy animal and can be trusted to protect Obama’s interests as the 2012 election approaches.
Reluctant nominees
Like Crocker, Panetta reluctantly agreed to his nomination only after a personal appeal from Obama; he committed to the job in a meeting with the president Monday. Obama had two private White House meetings with Petraeus last month.
Panetta and Petraeus were reportedly on opposite sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan debate during the White House’s policy review in late 2009, with the CIA chief — along with Gates and Vice President Biden — expressing doubt about Petraeus’s plans to implement the kind of expensive, troop-heavy counterinsurgency strategy that succeeded in Iraq.
But Petraeus and other advocates of the strategy won Obama’s vote in exchange for assurances that a withdrawal could begin this summer.
Since then, the general has worked to tone down a public persona that tended to set White House sensitivities on edge, while claiming welcomed progress in the Afghan war. Petraeus has said the planned drawdown of U.S. forces will begin as scheduled this summer.
The senior administration official declined to comment on any past differences on Afghanistan and emphasized that the policy currently moving forward is well in place, with a gradual turnover of security duties to the Afghan military and police and a final withdrawal of U.S., NATO and other coalition combat forces by the end of 2014.
“This is the strategy signed on to by the NATO partners” under Petraeus’s command in Afghanistan, and “the strategy Petraeus has been implementing,” the official said. “It will be implemented by General Allen” and Crocker, he said.
Crocker, as a senior State Department official during the first administration of George W. Bush, reopened the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. Karzai, in a call to Washington on Wednesday morning, has already signed off on Crocker’s ambassadorship, the official said.
Staff writer Scott Wilson contributed to this report.
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