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Army General Stanley McChrystal will arrive at the White House today to hear whether he will remain as commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, where the war strategy he designed is at a critical juncture.

McChrystal offered to resign after a storm of criticism over comments he and aides made in a magazine article that disparaged administration officials over their handling of the war in Afghanistan, according to a government official.

President Barack Obama said yesterday that while McChrystal and his staff “showed poor judgment,” he wanted to speak to the general directly before deciding his fate.

“Whatever decision that I make with respect to General McChrystal, or any other aspect of Afghan policy, is determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there,” Obama said after a Cabinet meeting.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai pressed Obama in a video conference call last night to keep McChrystal, Karzai’s spokesman told reporters in Kabul. “The president believes that we are in a very sensitive juncture in the partnership, in the war on terror and in the process of bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan, and any gap in this process will not be helpful,” Waheed Omar said, according to Associated Press.

“We hope there is not a change of leadership of the international forces here in Afghanistan and that we continue to partner with General McChrystal,” he said.

Rolling Stone

The controversy over quotes from McChrystal and unnamed aides reported in Rolling Stone magazine threatens to fracture a unified front that Obama has sought to build for the war and the international coalition doing the fighting.

The president reacted with anger upon reading the article, his spokesman said, and officials from the White House to the Pentagon to Congress called McChrystal’s remarks a serious lapse in judgment. Asked if McChrystal will be relieved as commander in Afghanistan, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “All options are on the table.”

Obama has staked a major piece of his foreign policy on the outcome in Afghanistan. He re-confirmed his commitment to the war in December, when he authorized the deployment of 30,000 additional troops, even as support from the public and other nations flagged.

Kandahar Offensive

McChrystal, 55, commands 142,000 troops from the U.S. and 45 allied nations and is in the midst of leading the biggest, and possibly most decisive, military offensive of the war in Kandahar Province, the Taliban’s heartland. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told a Senate panel last week, “As goes Kandahar, so goes Afghanistan.”

The increased tempo of fighting has pushed the number of U.S. personnel who have died in Afghanistan to 1,114, more than 450 of those since the start of 2009, Pentagon figures show.

The profile in Rolling Stone’s latest edition, titled “The Runaway General,” quotes McChrystal and the unidentified aides as mocking Vice President Joseph Biden and criticizing special envoy for Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry, with whom McChrystal is supposed to carry out U.S. policy.

McChrystal issued an apology yesterday.

“I extend my sincerest apology,” he said in a statement e-mailed from his command office in Afghanistan. “It was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and should never have happened.”

Quit Offer

He made the offer to step down in a conversation with Defense Secretary Robert Gates before leaving for Washington, said the government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Duncan Boothby, a civilian adviser to McChrystal who was responsible for arranging the Rolling Stone interview, submitted his resignation yesterday.

The controversy echoes an incident in early 2008, when Gates accepted the resignation of the then head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, after an article in Esquire magazine depicted the admiral as at odds with President George W. Bush over Iranian policy.

Retired U.S. Army four-star General Barry McCaffrey said McChrystal has to resign because he has irreparably harmed his relations with other government officials.

“There’s no question he’s fatally impaired his effectiveness as combatant commander to deal with the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan as well as the White House,” McCaffrey said. “He’s gotta go.”

‘Too Many Shots’

While McChrystal has been an effective commander, the remarks create a breach in the tradition of civilian control over the military, said Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies who has written extensively about the U.S. civilian-military relationship.

“There are just too many shots at the vice president, at the president’s special representative -- no matter what you think of him -- at the ambassador,” said Cohen, who called McChrystal an effective commander. “It’s just not acceptable to leave him there as damaged goods.”

Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon, who knows McChrystal and Eikenberry, said the views reflected in the article are “highly uncharacteristic” of the general and that his performance in the field outweighs the incident.

“It would be a huge shame at this crucial moment to lose him,” said O’Hanlon, who specializes in foreign and defense policy at the Washington-based policy research center.

Potential Successors

Still, Obama wouldn’t have a hard time replacing McChrystal because nine years of war have honed a long list of experienced, effective military leaders, said McCaffrey, who received three Purple Heart medals in four combat tours and later served as the nation’s drug czar.

Two potential successors are Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, who runs day-to-day military operations, and Lieutenant General William Caldwell, commander of the NATO-led mission to train the Afghan army and police, McCaffrey said.

With all the friction surrounding McChrystal, that isn’t Obama’s biggest problem, McCaffrey said. A Washington Post/ABC news poll taken June 3-6 found that 53 percent of Americans say the war hasn’t been worth fighting, the highest recorded in that survey.

“The American people have essentially walked away from supporting the war, and they won’t come back,” McCaffrey said. “The question is what do you do about Afghanistan.”