GENERAL PETRAEUS TO CIA

Is He the Right Person to Replace Panetta?

Ed Ross | Monday, May 2, 2011

It seems painfully obvious that either the CIA didn’t do a good job of alerting President Obama to the upheaval sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa or the White House wasn’t reading or listening to what the CIA was telling them. In either case, the Director of the CIA takes a hit. Reports that the reason President Obama was shocked when Mubarak didn’t resign when Obama expected him to was because the CIA was basing its intelligence on American media reports are disturbing.

The White House and the State Department make U.S. foreign policy, but they rely heavily on CIA intelligence to do that. Can Petraeus do what Leon Panetta apparently hasn’t done—provide them with the information they need and the confidence in it to come up with a comprehensive Middle East-North Africa foreign policy that gets out ahead of the changes jolting the region?

GEN Petraeus will have all the world’s trouble spots to worry about; and he will have many counterparts to deal with. None are more important, however, than the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region and Pakistan’s infamous Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) organization. Petraeus is as familiar with the challenges of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region as anyone; and he is, no doubt, intimately familiar with CIA operations there. As the Director of the CIA he’ll have the opportunity to deal more directly with his counterpart Amad Shuja Pasha, director general of ISI, but can he wean ISI away from its long-time relationship with the Taliban?

The news late Sunday night that Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, was killed in a U.S. covert-action attack will greatly enhance the U.S. and General Petraeus' leverage with the Pakistanis. No doubt, General Petraeus played a role in Bin Laden's death; he has been a strong advocate of attacks on al-Qaeda in Pakistan.

Finally, will Petraeus have the President’s full trust and confidence? What kind of a relationship will he have with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper (LtGen U.S. Air Force, Ret.) or White House Homeland Security Advisor John Brennan? When he departs the CIA, will he leave it a better place than he found it, and will he stand out among his predecessors?

Of course we can’t know the answers to these questions in advance. On balance, however, having followed GEN Petraeus career closely over the past ten years, I believe he is as good a pick as President Obama could have made for the job. Petraeus certainly has his detractors. You don’t rise to the top of your profession without stepping on a few toes. Their criticisms, notwithstanding, I believe President Obama has made the right choice.