Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): A farewell to one of the most influential military leaders in modern U.S. history.
Kwame Holman has that story.
KWAME HOLMAN (Newshour): His four years overseeing the U.S. military have taken Adm. Mike Mullen around the world many times over, meeting with troops in two war zones, attending elaborate military ceremonies in China, coordinating disaster aid in earthquake-stricken Haiti.
But Mullen's greatest role was in helping wind down the war in Iraq and expand the war in Afghanistan. At his Senate confirmation hearing in 2007, he expressed characteristic candor about Iraq.
ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN, Joints Chiefs Chairman: Based on the political -- lack of political reconciliation at the government level, obviously, although I spoke earlier about some of it going on at the local level, which I think is important, I would be concerned about whether we'd be winning or not.
KWAME HOLMAN: On Afghanistan, Mullen played a bigger role, saying the U.S. needed to refocus its energies there and in the region. When President Obama asked for an Afghan war review, Mullen stuck by commanders in the field who demanded resources for a counterinsurgency approach.
David Ignatius of The Washington Post has traveled to the region frequently with the admiral.
DAVID IGNATIUS, The Washington Post: There is this view that the White House has that Mullen and the military kind of boxed the president in, and narrowed their options and pushed them down the road toward this 30,000 troop surge.
It didn't look that way to me as I was reporting it. It looked more like a kind of classic chain of command thing.
KWAME HOLMAN: In his final words to Congress last week, Mullen called out Pakistan for aiding the Haqqani terrorist network in recent attacks in Afghanistan.
ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN: The Haqqani Network, for one, acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan's internal services intelligence agency.
KWAME HOLMAN: Mullen made 27 trips to Pakistan during his tenure, cultivating a relationship with top military officials there, including Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. That relationship became strained after the killing of Osama bin Laden by American special forces inside Pakistan.
Kayani received no heads-up from Mullen, nor did the Pakistani government know of the raid on the compound in Abbottabad.
Ignatius says the Pakistan relationship has been a bitter pill for Mullen.
DAVID IGNATIUS: So, he'd go out to see Kayani. It sometimes seemed, every few weeks, he was flying halfway around the world to Pakistan.
I went on a number of those trips with him. And I'll tell you, it's a long way to go for what was often a meeting of just a few hours. But Mullen put in the time and believed that he was making progress.
KWAME HOLMAN: Adm. Mullen's tenure at the Pentagon may be best remembered for his strong advocacy for ending the military's don't ask, don't tell policy. For 18 years, it barred homosexuals from serving openly. It ended last week, 18 months after Mullen spoke out.
ADM. MICHAEL MULLEN: No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.
I salute you Admiral.
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