As the war in Afghanistan intensifies, the New York Times has relieved its Kabul bureau chief Carlotta Gall of her duties, ostensibly so she can do more reporting. She's not happy about it and hasn't been showing up for work.

UPDATE: Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty responds: "Carlotta is on a long planned two month break so this is not going off the reservation. She left on December 8, and is due back in Kabul at the beginning of February. Carlotta had expressed a desire to do more reporting—she'd lost so much time to the kidnappings and security logistics."

According to a memo from Times foreign editor Susan Chira, Gall will stay on at the bureau as a "senior Afghanistan correspondent" focusing on "the intersection of Pakistan with the Afghan conflict." Former Baghdad bureau chief Alissa Rubin will take over running the bureau, which is usually staffed by a small rotating handful of Times reporters and a larger number of local Afghan reporters.

Chira's memo portrays the move as an attempt to take the day-to-day management of the bureau off Gall's plate so she can write more stories. But we're told Gall was furious at the decision—so much so that she's "gone off the reservation" on an unplanned vacation and has been out of contact with her colleagues at the Times for a week-and-a-half. Not that there's anything wrong with that—as far as we're concerned, Gall has earned the right to blow off steam any way she pleases by breaking the story of a taxi driver named Dilawar who was murdered by U.S. forces at Bagram Airbase in 2002. That story was later expanded into a lengthy dispatch by Gall's colleague Tim Golden that got much more attention than her original report and became the basis for the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

Still, as is often the case with foreign correspondents, Gall has a reputation as a difficult person to work with, and the Times' decision to pull her out of the bureau chief role at the very moment that Kabul becomes the paper's most crucial foreign outpost doesn't look like a vote of confidence in her leadership abilities. We hope she returns to the bureau soon and gets to work. Chira's full memo is below; An e-mail to Gall seeking comment wasn't immediately returned.

It is widely acknowledged, even among our competitors, that there is no reporter who knows more about Afghanistan than Carlotta Gall. For eight years, even while the world's attention shifted to Iraq, Carlotta continued to live in Kabul, where her brave and prescient reporting kept breaking new ground - and was an essential contributor to our Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2008. Now that all eyes are focused on Afghanistan again, and American troops and journalists are surging back, Carlotta's knowledge is more valuable than ever. That's why we've agreed that she will return to reporting full time, after years when she has also assumed the increasingly time-consuming duties of bureau chief presiding over a rapidly-expanding bureau. To those duties, especially in the past year, Carlotta has given heart and soul. We have a bureau that continues to produce scoops and works in close collaboration with Washington. And Carlotta has helped ensure that our dedicated and talented Afghan staff has received continual training in journalism, video and writing for the Web. But the price has been been fewer bylines by Carlotta Gall. So now she will become Senior Afghan Correspondent, and her brief will include the intersection of Pakistan with the Afghan conflict.

We are very lucky that Alissa Rubin has agreed to shoulder the daunting task of bureau chief. She brings to this task exceptional journalistic skills, as her acute and wide-ranging reports from Iraq demonstrated. Alissa also has considerable experience in the security and logistical challenges posed by a wartime bureau, acquired in Iraq as bureau chief for us and for the Los Angeles Times.

As Baghdad Bureau Chief, she was able to juggle the considerable journalistic task of thinking strategically about a rapidly-changing conflict with the harrowing demands of keeping Western and local staff safe in what was certainly the most dangerous war zone our journalists had ever operated in. Afghanistan is beginning to challenge Iraq's record on that score, and Alissa's dual experience will be a sure guide.

Her time in Iraq showed her to have a sure sense of the big themes of a big story, She is no stranger to Afghanistan,where she reported with great rigor and compassion about the war and the toll it took on Afghans and their society, beginning in 2001 for the Los Angeles Times.

Alissa and Carlotta are members of a very strong team in Afghanistan and Pakistan that includes some of our finest and most seasoned war correspondents. We will be well positioned to continue our searching coverage of this conflict in a crucial year.