However the McChrystal crisis ends, “much is different going forward,” a senior administration official said. “It’s hard to brush past it.”…

“There is no question this is a distraction we could ill afford,” a senior defense official said. “It comes at an inopportune time. Although we believe it is fundamentally the right strategy and we are on the right course, we still have a lot of work to do to prove that to the American people, and this doesn’t help.”

The speed with which support for the strategy has seemed to unravel over the past several weeks has frustrated and concerned many senior officials, none of whom was willing, in an atmosphere of high anxiety within the administration, to speak about it on the record.