Taliban endorses General Petraeus, say new US Afghanistan war chief 'not smarter' than McChrystal BY JAMES GORDON MEEK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Thursday, June 24th 2010, 6:17 PM Angerer/AP
Gen. David Petraeus, newly minted US commander for the war in Afghanistan, will be motivated to make the Taliban's spokesman eat his words.
It seems the evildoers were just biding their time to see how the Rolling Stone flap would play out. Now that President Obama has sacked his top war boss in Afghanistan, Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and replaced him with Iraq surge hero Gen. David Petraeus, the Taliban has finally weighed in.
Their verdict? The new boss is the same as the old boss. And Petraeus is a wimp, they claimed Thursday.
"(Petraeus) is not smarter than McChrystal," Taliban spokesman Qari Muhammad Ahmed Yusuf said in a statement. "Also, his losing consciousness last week in an investigative hearing before the members of the U.S. Congress brought his physical competence and his courage into question." That would be a reference to the decorated general fainting briefly during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Petraeus recovered quickly - blaming dehydration and skipping breakfast - but was told to come back the next day to continue his testimony.
"His military standing and his four-star rank greatly waned around the world" after the fainting episode, mocked the Taliban's Yusuf, according to a SITE Intelligence Group translation.
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