Hot Topic (12/2): Obama orders additional troops to Afghanistan
With narrower military goals, Obama ups the ante
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Six months after saying he doubted that "piling on more and more troops" was the road to success in Afghanistan, and then warning his commanders not to ask for more, President Obama has given Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal nearly all the troops that he wanted.
But in granting much of McChrystal's request, Obama has set narrower and more explicit objectives than the broad, Afghanistan-wide counterinsurgency his top military commander in the country had outlined, and given him a short timeline for achieving them.
In Tuesday's prime-time speech, the president asked international allies for tangible proof of the new closeness they have affirmed with his administration, reviving demands for help that both he and his predecessor had largely abandoned. He issued sharp warnings to the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan to embrace his strategy.
By upping the ante on all fronts, Obama is attempting to change the metabolism of a war that has sputtered along for more than eight years. His order to deploy 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan by summer, and then start withdrawing them a year later, constitutes an acknowledgment that the situation is dire, and that both the resources and the patience for dealing with it are limited.
If the strategy is successful, control of Afghan provinces and districts will begin to be turned over to local officials as early as a year from now and insurgent sanctuaries in the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border region will be destroyed. If the strategy is a failure, it could come just as the 2012 election cycle gets underway.
On Tuesday night, Obama defined victory much the same way he did in March, when he announced his first "comprehensive" strategy for Afghanistan: denying al-Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan and Pakistan, defeating the terrorist group and dismantling it. Many of the rhetorical sound bites in the new plan sounded the same as they did in the old one: a reprise of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as the rationale for the war, a warning that there would be no "blank check," a cautionary note that "none of this will be easy."
In broad terms, Obama's plan is reminiscent of President George W. Bush's "surge" strategy in Iraq -- standing up indigenous military forces so that U.S. troops can "stand down." What Bush officials called "breathing space" for local Iraqi governance and infrastructure to develop, Obama officials referred to Tuesday as a "window of opportunity" for the Afghans.
Not surprisingly, administration briefers sharply disputed any comparison. The difference, a senior Obama adviser said, is in the clear benchmarks and deadlines that have been set this time around.
Rather than acceding to McChrystal's request for an escalation of 40,000 troops over a year to 18 months, Obama has demanded a quick jolt of 30,000, with the first Marines scheduled to arrive early this winter and the remainder of still-undesignated Marine Corps and Army units to be in place by the end of the summer.
The strain the rapid deployment will put on the military is considerable, and it will bring the total number of U.S. troops to more than 100,000, more than double those in place at the beginning of the year. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has been given some minor wiggle room around the 30,000 cap, has assured Obama that it is doable.
The schedule will be helped by the ongoing withdrawal from Iraq, where U.S. troop strength is down to about 116,000 from its October 2007 peak of 166,000. McChrystal has been given a list of units that will be available and told to revise his recommendations along the lines of Obama's strategy. He will concentrate forces in population areas in Afghanistan's southern Pashtun belt, where the Taliban controls wide swaths of territory, and continue the withdrawal already begun from lightly populated and hard-to-defend outposts in the north and east.
Beyond training academies and mentoring, Afghan army and police units will find U.S. forces sleeping, eating and fighting with them at every turn. Some U.S. officials, notably Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), have called for the size of the Afghan army to be quadrupled. Obama has rejected such calls as unrealistic, and set a first-year target to expand the force from its current size of 90,000 personnel to about 134,000. The goal, administration officials said, is to improve quality as well as quantity.
Officials said the strategy also includes "aggressive targeting" of insurgents in the border areas, a nod to plans advocated by Vice President Biden to step up attacks by air assets and Special Forces units outside high population areas. Stressing a private warning he has sent to Pakistan, Obama said: "We . . . have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear."
The Afghanistan that Obama envisioned Tuesday evening was not the flourishing, modern democracy of which Bush often spoke. Obama did not talk about advancing "opportunity and justice," as he had described in March. Instead, he spoke of "objectives": "We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and . . . strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government."
The question Obama faced, a senior adviser said, was "how good is good enough . . . and the president came up with an answer for that." Doing more, he said, "is debatable at a think tank. It is not debatable in the real world."
* * *
Do you support the President's strategy for the war in Afghanistan?
What would you like to see happen?
We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and . . . strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government."
If the above is really the goal and it can be achieved then we should try....But I really wish ALL of the troops were on their way home from over there...
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Do you support the President's strategy for the war in Afghanistan?No I don't the terrorist wil grow in size and scatter even more and since Obama publized his plans they know what to expect so they now know what to look for.I think it is time to let them either stand or fall.
What would you like to see happen? I would like to see all troops home by next Christmas.That should be enough time to train there soldiers and police.
Quoting tericared:
We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and . . . strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government."
If the above is really the goal and it can be achieved then we should try....But I really wish ALL of the troops were on their way home from over there...
EXACTLY! However, you cannot measure, before our troops even get there, whether or not we will be able to accomplish this by 2012. Saying that he will begin withdrawals in 2011, with all troops out by 2012 is merely a political ploy and detracts from the credibility of this decision.
I agree with his plan and the reasons given for it. The withdrawal date establishes a deadline to meet a goal- it hopefully won't just become another open ending billions of dollars why-are-we-there-again? war- go do what we can and bring our men and women home to their country and thier families. We can never track down or kill all terrorists, all we can do is attempt to give other nations the training and encouragement to fight them there, disrupt the terrorists as much as possible, and try to retain enough money, resources, military strength, and national morale to protect outselves in the future.
I would be very interested to know how the soldiers themselves feel about this.
Athenax, one young man that I now is at FOB Shank in Afghanistan. He said they are incurring more and more losses of troops because the insurgency is gaining momentum and becoming better skilled. He said they desperately need reinforcements there.
We wouldn't be in this mess if the US wasn't so arrogant, bossy and stuck their noses in the business of other countries. People hate us and there is good reason for it. We think we have all the answers and it's our way or the highway.
Hate leads to violence, war and death. Perhaps if we communicated more, actually sat down at listened to other leaders instead of thinking our way is always the right way and minded our own business when we should, then maybe there could be some peace at some point. We shoot first and ask questions later and then all the bitching and moaning starts 'bring our troops home' blah blah blah... shouldn't have been a need to send them there in the first place.
Well, that's interesting and all, but it doesn't address the situation. We ARE there. I happen to believe that in Afghanistan, we went in for a legitimate reason. You may not agree. Nonetheless, we ARE there. We either need to fully commit to the mission or we have to cut our losses and leave. I don't think that the latter is a true option. I just hate to see this half-assed gesture by our president that seems to be solely based on his political gain and not on accomplsihing true closure to this mess.
I worry because so much of what I read expresses doubts that 30k will be enough troops. We wouldn't be the first country broken by Afghanistan. If we aren't going to send enough over to do the job then they're just being sent to die and should all be brought home. The rules of engagement over there right now are also killing our soldiers. They're being expected to act as police officers. That's not what they do!!
I don't believe for one minute believe the Afghan government is in the least bit capable of curbing the corruption it's held to its bossom for so long. In the end I think this will all be seen as a huge mistake. If this administration can't take off the kid gloves and go kick some ass (which they've shown they don't have the sack for) then we shouldn't waste American lives over there.
Quoting AdkArmyMom:
Well, that's interesting and all, but it doesn't address the situation. We ARE there. I happen to believe that in Afghanistan, we went in for a legitimate reason. You may not agree. Nonetheless, we ARE there. We either need to fully commit to the mission or we have to cut our losses and leave. I don't think that the latter is a true option. I just hate to see this half-assed gesture by our president that seems to be solely based on his political gain and not on accomplsihing true closure to this mess.
All of this administrations gestures are half-assed and geared toward appeasing both sides of the political aisle. This is what happens when you elect and community organizing professor to the highest office in the land.
The fact that you find "community organizing professor" to be a bad thing is rather sad.
Quoting TheMom1994:
All of this administrations gestures are half-assed and geared toward appeasing both sides of the political aisle. This is what happens when you elect and community organizing professor to the highest office in the land.
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