General Stanley McChrystal has reportedly offered his resignation to President Barack Obama over an interview highly critical of the US leader and the White House.
A source has told TIME magazine that McChrystal has already made the offer to step down, leaving the ultimate decision to the president.
But Obama has told members of his cabinet that he wants to wait until a face-to-face meeting with the general in Washington before rendering a final verdict, TIME reports.
General Stanley McChrystal was summoned to the White House to explain himself as President Obama considered whether firing the general could carry too high a cost for the struggling Afghan war effort.
The unflattering article in Rolling Stone magazine exacerbated lingering tensions between McChrystal and the White House at a pivotal moment as the US deploys thousands more troops to the bloody war now in its ninth year.
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General James Mattis, the outgoing head of the US Joint Forces Command and due to retire after being passed over as US Marine Corps commander, and Lieutenant General William Caldwell, commander of Nato's Training Mission in Afghanistan, were being discussed as possible replacements, a senior congressional source told the Telegraph.co.uk.
In the profile entitled 'The Runaway General', McChrystal aides mock Vice President Joe Biden, call the president's national security adviser "a clown," and say the general was "disappointed" by his first meeting with Obama.
McChrystal himself is quoted as saying he felt "betrayed" by US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, a former commander in Afghanistan who raised pointed objections to his onetime subordinate's war strategy.
An unnamed McChrystal adviser says in the article that the general came away unimpressed after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office a year ago.
"It was a 10-minute photo op," the general's adviser says.
"Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was... he didn't seem very engaged."
McChrystal 'wanted to send a message'
General Stanley McChrystal and his staff spoke on the record and wanted to send a message to US President Barack Obama conveying their "frustration" with the Afghan war policy, the Rolling Stone article's author said.
Michael Hastings, the journalist who spent weeks with the blunt-talking commander of US forces in Afghanistan, also told ABC News it became clear during his time with McChrystal and his team that "there are serious sceptics (about the war) in the highest levels of his staff".
The magazine's executive editor Eric Bates insisted that "everything we published was on the record".
"We got a lot of stuff off the record and didn't use it. We respected all of those boundaries," he told CNN.
"These weren't off-the-cuff remarks by his staff he didn't know about."
Reporter stranded with McChrystal due to ash
Bates said the stunning profile, entitled 'The Runaway General', was helped by the fact that the author was stranded with McChrystal and his entourage when their flights were cancelled due to ash from an Icelandic volcano in April.
"One of the reasons we got so much access was Michael Hastings was with the general and his staff in Paris, and they got stranded by the volcano in Iceland and couldn't fly to Berlin and had to take a bus.
"So our reporter was on the road with him for a number of days, went out drinking with them, saw them preparing for speeches, saw them going to meetings and then also went to Afghanistan."
"We were really behind the curtain and hearing how the general and his top staff talk among themselves amidst this war.
They are a close knit group," Bates said.
"They are in the war and this is how they talk behind the scenes when they are blowing off steam by themselves."
They were 'drinking the all way'
Hastings told NBC News that McChrystal and his aides were drinking "the whole way" on the bus trip to Berlin.
"They let loose," Hastings told the network.
"I don't blame them; they have a hard job."
Hastings had familiarity with the top echelons of the US military from reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past three or four years.
On Tuesday, Hastings said McChrystal and his team were thoroughly aware that the reporter in their midst was using their quotes.
"There were no ground rules given to me. I had a tape recorder and notepad out the entire time," he told CNN by telephone from the Afghan city of Kandahar.
"I think it was all very clear that it was on the record."
Hastings told ABC he attributed the shock statements to "a natural kind of recklessness that General McChrystal has, which has been with him through his entire career, as I understand it".
Bates said no one had asked them to pull the article, which he said was checked thoroughly by McChrystal's team, and he suggested its impact would be significant.
"These comments show a deep division, a war within the administration over the war itself and the strategy," he said.
"That war has been going on since the beginning over the troop escalation and continues very clearly between the military side and the diplomatic side, and it's very hard to see how we can win a war when we're divided ourselves."
Obama named McChrystal as commander in May 2009 to bring a fresh approach to the struggling Afghan campaign, but Hastings said the relationship "has been strained from the beginning".
"I think the frustration is that the president really believes in the mission in Afghanistan. That, I think, is at the root of the problem," he told NBC.
