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But his eyes watered at the memory of telling his wife, Annie, that his 34-year Army career was at an end. "Annie said, Good. We've always been happy, we'll always be happy, and we have been, every day since," he said. McChrystal now teaches at Yale University, and runs his own consulting group. First lady Michelle Obama later asked McChrystal to work on Joining Forces, the White House initiative for military troops and their families. He said he'd spoken to the president at several Joining Forces event, but had never again discussed the resignation with him. Part of the friction between McChrystal's staff and the White House was over McChrystal's request for an extra 40,000 troops, which Obama chose over a proposal by Vice President Joe Biden to limit the mission to a small number of counterterrorism forces and trainers. The retired general insisted the strategy known as counterinsurgency worked, saying the Afghans are much better able to stand on their own. "If you had tried to bring big American forces in and do search and destroy, or do just raids, it would have been pointless. The Afghan people needed to buy into this," he said. "They needed to believe we were there to protect them...and we weren't just using Afghanistan as a place to fight our enemies." He called the looming drawdown of U.S. forces "inevitable," and said that while Afghan troops still needed to "mature rapidly," being forced to work on their own would help. "You are never ready to do something by yourself until you actually do it, and then you are surprised you can," he said.
[Associated
Press;
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