Former general sworn in as 20th director of CIA

DAVID PETRAEUS, the former general who gained prominence charting US strategy in the Afghan and Iraq wars, has been sworn in as director of the CIA.

After 37 years in the army, Petraeus retired last week and was sworn in as the 20th director of the so-called silent service in a private ceremony yesterday.

Silent is what some in the White House want the well-connected four-star general to remain, according to one former and two current US officials.

Admirers and detractors alike are watching to see if Petraeus will use his influence with the media and Capitol Hill to pursue policies discordant to White House officials who disagree with him over Afghanistan.

At a time when top figures close to President Barack Obama were arguing for a troop drawdown, Petraeus persuaded Obama to increase troops in Afghanistan in a repeat of his counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq, a strategy credited with producing tangible, if fragile, progress.

That ran counter to the strategy favoured by vice-president Joe Biden, among others, to leave the job to a smaller force of trainers and special operations troops to hunt terrorists.

There is some unease among officials as Petraeus assumes leadership of an organisation that has produced a series of grim assessments of conditions in Afghanistan, where the general oversaw the war for more than four years.

He has acknowledged differences with CIA analysts in the past, saying they were reliant on old data rather than his more current battlefield data.