Four Views, Pages 10-13

President Obama's Afghanistan "Surge"

Obama Has Rejected His Own Speech’s Surge Rational

By Gareth Porter

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA presented a case Dec. 1 for sending 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for U.S. national security.

Obama said the escalation was for a “vital national interest” and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks “are now being planned as I speak.”

Despite Obama’s embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops—the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al-Qaeda.

Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al-Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the U.S. counterinsurgency mission was successful.

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al-Qaeda.

In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter’s troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to U.S. anti-al-Qaeda strategy.

The first round of the effort was triggered by the leak of McChrystal’s “initial assessment,” with its warning of “mission failure” if his troop deployment request was rejected. The White House fought back with anonymous comments quoted in The Washington Post Sept. 21 that the military was trying to push Obama into a corner on the troop deployment issue.

One of the anonymous senior officials criticized a statement by Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the war in Afghanistan would “probably need more forces.”

To avoid being outmaneuvered by the military, Obama suggested in a press conference that the legitimacy of the Afghan government might now be so damaged by the blatantly fraudulent Aug. 20 election as to put into question a counterinsurgency strategy such as the one advanced in McChrystal’s assessment.

Obama also raised a red flag about the conventional argument from national security, saying he wasn’t going to “think that by sending more troops, we’re automatically going to make Americans safe.”

Within a week, his national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, began to raise that issue explicitly.

In an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Jones suggested the question of why al-Qaeda would want to move out of its present sanctuary in Pakistan to the uncertainties of Afghanistan would be one that the White House would be raising in response to McChrystal’s troop request.

McChrystal’s rejoinder came in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London Oct. 1, in which he went further than any previous official rationale for the war. “[W]hen the Taliban has success,” said McChrystal, “that provides sanctuary from which al-Qaeda can operate transnationally.”

He was apparently arguing the Taliban wouldn’t even have to seize power nationally to provide a sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

Only three days later, however, The New York Times reported that “senior administration officials” were saying privately that Obama’s national security team was now “arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States.”

That “shift in thinking,” as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.

One of the senior officials interviewed by the Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that “does not express ambitions of attacking the United States.” The Taliban were aligned with al-Qaeda “mainly on the tactical front,” said the official.

A second theme introduced by the official was that the Taliban could not be eliminated because it was too deeply entrenched in the country—quite a different goal from that of the counterinsurgency war proposed by McChrystal.

That was an expression of resistance to what was soon reported to be a McChrystal request for a “low risk” option of 80,000 troops, combined with a suggestion that 20,000 troops would be the “high risk” option.

But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was determined to turn the White House around on the issue of McChrystal’s request. He was well aware of Obama’s political sensitivity about not being seen as on the wrong side of his national security team, and he effectively used that to force the issue.

Gates worked with McChrystal, Mullen, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a plan that would be presented to the White House as their consensus position on Afghanistan strategy.

The plan, as The New York Times reported Oct. 27, was presented by an administration official as a compromise between the plan put forth by Vice President Joseph Biden for concentrating essentially on al-Qaeda, and McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan. It would be ostensibly aimed at protecting about 10 population centers, leaving the rest of the country to be handled by Special Operations Forces with the assistance of drones and air power.

But the catch was that McChrystal was demanding an expansive definition of “population centers,” which would include most of the Taliban heartland of the country.

McChrystal was still going to get his counterinsurgency war under the Gates plan.

Notably absent from the Times report was any suggestion that Obama had given even tentative approval to the proposal. Only Obama’s advisers were said to be “coalescing around” the proposal. But “administration officials” confidently asserted that the only issue remaining was how many more troops would be required to “guard the vital parts of the country.”

That confidence was evidently based on the fact that Obama’s national security team had already agreed on the options that would be presented to the president for decision. Two weeks after that report, Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said he would consider four different options at a meeting with his national security team Nov. 11.

The four options, as the Times reported the day of the meeting, ranged from a low-end option of 20,000 to roughly 40,000 troops. And Gates, Mullen and Clinton had “coalesced around” the middle option of about 30,000 troops.

Gates and his allies had thus defined the options and stacked the deck in favor of the one they were going to support. And the fact that Obama’s national security was lined up in support of that option was already on the public record.

It was a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House.

Although Obama bowed to pressure from his major national security advisers to agree to the 30,000 troops, his conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan.

Obama’s speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to U.S. security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago.

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Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.

 

A Way Out of Afghanistan

By Rachelle Marshall

President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan has committed America more firmly than ever to a country that is rated by Transparency International as the second most corrupt in the world. After eight years of war U.S. forces are no closer to victory over the Taliban. Instead of eliminating them, the invasion drove them into Pakistan, where they have been joined by scores of insurgent groups that are fighting against a weak and unpopular government many Pakistanis regard as a pawn of the United States.

At his inauguration on Nov. 19, Afghan President Hamid Karzai boasted of “a rehabilitated economic structure” and a “budding free-market economy.” Speaking in a palace surrounded by security forces, Karzai pledged to oust any official engaged in corruption or drug trafficking, and “end the culture of impunity and violation of the law.” Whether his pledge to end corruption was any more credible than his claim of economic progress is open to question. He made that pledge while flanked by his two vice presidents, Muhammad Qasim Fahim and Karim Khalili, warlords who are accused by Human Rights Watch of extortion, drug trafficking, and the indiscriminate killing of civilians.

Two other close supporters of Karzai are Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and Karzai’s brother Ahmed. Dostum is suspected of murdering thousands of Taliban prisoners following the U.S. invasion in 2001, and Ahmed has reputedly made a fortune in the opium trade. It is these warlords and their supporters who helped Karzai emerge the winner in last August’s blatantly fraudulent election. If he removes them he could be left without allies.

According to Akbar Bai, a leader of the Turkomans in Afghanistan who was kidnapped by Dostum’s militia last year, “If you don’t remove these people from office you’ll never see peace in Afghanistan.” That unwelcome truth indicates the futility of the new U.S. troop buildup. Many of the additional troops will be used to train Afghan soldiers, but it is impossible to build an effective army when the government lacks legitimacy. Nor will it be easy to convince insurgents to give up their arms while their country is occupied by a foreign army with the approval of the Afghan government.

Obama was offered a way out of this increasingly hopeless situation by two high-ranking officials, National Security Adviser James L. Jones and Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry, both retired generals. Jones said last October that there were “less than 100” al-Qaeda members left in Afghanistan and that those who remained were incapable of launching attacks on the U.S. or its allies. Eikenberry sent a cable to Washington in mid-November arguing that sending more troops to the war would increase the dependency of the Afghan government on the U.S. and delay any hope of forming a reliable Afghan army. He urged instead that the State Department send more civilian experts in fields such as agriculture and education.

Such advice from respected military men could have opened the way for Obama to take the next step and declare that the primary objective of the war—eliminating the threat of al-Qaeda—had been largely achieved and that the continued presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan would be counterproductive. He also could have pointed out that, since the war is gaining the Taliban new recruits and spreading the insurgency, it makes no sense to continue it. The greater danger of terrorism comes from small and scattered groups that can easily find havens in places such as Somalia and Yemen—or, for that matter, Chicago or New York.

Too seldom mentioned in the debate over sending more troops to Afghanistan are the human costs. So far this year at least a thousand American soldiers have suffered severe burns, shattered limbs, or serious head injuries. Since 2007, 70,000 have been diagnosed with traumatic brain damage, 20,000 in the past year, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. The number of dead and wounded Afghans and Pakistanis is not available, but the Pakistan army’s offensive in the tribal areas and U.S. bombing by drone missiles have driven an estimated three million people from their homes. There is nothing to be gained from this war that can justify such costs.

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Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of A Jewish Voice for Peace, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

 

 

Obama’s Exit Strategy

By Patrick J. Buchanan

If actions speak louder than words, President Obama is cutting America free of George Bush’s wars and coming home.

For his bottom line Tuesday night was that all U.S. forces will be out of Iraq by mid-2011 and the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan will, on that date, begin to get smaller and smaller.

Yet the gap between the magnitude of the crisis he described and the action he is taking is the Grand Canyon.

Listing the stakes in Afghanistan, Obama might have been FDR in a fireside chat about America’s war against a Japanese empire that had just smashed the fleet at Pearl Harbor, seized the Philippines, Guam and Wake, and was moving on Midway.

Consider the apocalyptic rhetoric:

“[A]s commander in chief, I have determined that it is in our vital national interest…”

“If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake…”

“For what is at stake is not simply a test of NATO’s credibility, what’s at stake is the security of our allies, and the common security of the world.”

After that preamble, one might expect the announcement of massive U.S. air strikes on some rogue nation. Yet what was the action decided upon? “I…will send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”

To secure America and the world, not 5 percent of the Army and Marine Corps will be surged into Afghanistan for 18 months—then they will start home.

Let us put that in perspective.

During the Korean War, we had a third of a million men fighting. In 1969, we had half a million troops in Vietnam. But in Afghanistan, where the security of the world is at stake, Obama is topping out at 100,000 troops and will start drawing them down in July 2011.

“Of course, this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America’s war,” said Obama. But if the burden is not ours alone to bear, where is everybody else?

Apparently, the Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Indians and Arabs do not believe their security is imperiled, because we are doing all the heavy lifting, economically and militarily.

The contradictions in Obama’s speech are jarring.

He says the new U.S. troops are to “train competent Afghan Security Forces and to partner with them so that more Afghans can get into the fight. And they will help to create the conditions for the United States to transfer responsibility to the Afghans.”

Thus, we are going to train the Afghan army and police so that, in 18 months, they can take over the fighting in a war where the security of the United States and the whole world is in the balance?

Moreover, the commitment is not open-ended, but conditional. “It will be clear to the Afghan government—and…the Afghan people—that they will ultimately be responsible for their own country.…The days of providing a blank check are over.”

Most Americans will agree the time is at hand for Afghans to take responsibility for their own country. But, if the stakes are what the president says, can we entrust a war to preserve our vital national interests and security to an Afghan army no one thinks will be able, in 18 months, to defeat a Taliban that has pushed a U.S.-NATO coalition to the brink of defeat?

At West Point, Obama did not hearken back to Gen. MacArthur’s dictum—“War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision. In war, there is no substitute for victory”—but to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s, that we must maintain a balance between defense and domestic programs.

Obama was not citing the Eisenhower of Normandy but President Eisenhower, who ended Korea by truce, refused to intervene in Indochina, did nothing to halt Nikita Khrushchev’s crushing of the Hungarian revolution, ordered the British, French, and Israelis out of Suez, and presided over eight years of peace and prosperity, while building up America’s might and getting in lots of golf at Burning Tree.

Not a bad president. Not a bad model.

How can we reconcile Obama’s end-times rhetoric about the stakes imperiled with an 18-month surge of just 30,000 troops?

Stanley McChrystal won the argument over troops. But Obama, in his heart, does not want to fight Bush’s “Long War.” He wants to end it. Obama is not LBJ plunging into the big muddy. He is Nixon coming out, while giving an embattled ally a fighting chance to save itself.

In four years, Nixon was out of Vietnam. In 18 months, Obama says we will be out of Iraq with a steadily diminishing presence in Afghanistan.

What we heard Tuesday night was the drum roll of an exit strategy.

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Patrick J. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist. Copyright Creators Syndicate, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Patrick J. Buchanan and Creators Syndicate, Inc.

 

 

Preaching Peace, Flexing Muscle

By Eric S. Margolis

There were no surprises in President Barack Obama’s historic speech at West Point Dec. 1.

Obama faced the choice between guns (Afghanistan) or butter (his national health plan). The Nobel Peace Prize winner chose guns.

As expected, Obama will rush 30,000 new troops into the Afghan quagmire and arm-twist reluctant allies to contribute more token forces. Confusingly, Obama promised some of the 100,000 U.S. garrison will begin withdrawing in 2011.

The president insisted his objective remains destroying al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda barely exists in Afghanistan. Only a handful remain in Pakistan. His real target may be Pakistan.

Obama’s plan mirrors the Bush administration’s Iraq “surge” that candidate Obama sharply criticized. The Soviets also tried the same surge tactic during their Afghan occupation.

Tragically, the “anti-war president” missed another major opportunity to end the Afghan war through negotiations.

Anyone who understands Afghanistan’s deep complexities knows that Obama’s surge won’t win the eight-year war. Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribal majority will continue to resist Western occupation.

The additional U.S. troops will be used to protect the main cities and roads connecting them—again, mirroring Soviet strategy in the 1980s. U.S. Marines will crush rebellious Kandahar the way Iraq’s Fallujah was laid waste.

At best, it will be an exercise in managing failure.

Americans are turning against the war. Congress is fretting over its mounting costs: $300 billion U.S. for 2009 in a $1.4-trillion deficit year. This war is being waged on borrowed money. Democrats are rightly calling for a special war tax on all Americans rather than continuing to hide the war’s huge expenses on the national credit card.

It costs $1 million U.S. to keep each American soldier in Afghanistan. Renting Pakistan’s assistance will cost $3 billion per year. Thousands of U.S. troops will remain stuck in Iraq. Obama vowed to fight al-Qaeda in Africa and Asia. No wonder many angry Democrats are calling him “George Bush’s third term.”

The most positive interpretation of Obama’s “surge” is that it is a face-saving exercise to cover America’s retreat from the Afghan morass. An Afghan army will be cobbled together (the Soviets did the same), the Karzai government will be somehow sanitized and victory will be declared in 2011. This will hopefully allow substantial U.S. troop reductions before the next mid-term and presidential elections—if all goes well.

But things are not going well in Pakistan, without whose cooperation, bases and supply routes the U.S. cannot wage war in Afghanistan. The U.S.-backed Pakistani government of Asif Ali Zardari is awash with corruption charges, condemned as a puppet regime, and may soon be ousted by Pakistan’s military.

Most Pakistanis support the Taliban, see the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan as driven by lust for oil, and increasingly fear the U.S. intends to tear their unstable nation apart in order to seize its nuclear arsenal.

Obama’s advisers have convinced him an early U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will provoke chaos in Pakistan. They don’t understand that it is the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan that is destabilizing Pakistan and creating ever more anti-Western extremism.

What Obama should really have been concerned about was Osama bin Laden’s vow to break America’s domination of the Muslim world by luring it into a final battle in Pakistan, a nation of 175 million.

The longer U.S. forces wage war in Afghanistan, the more the conflict will spread into Pakistan, where 15 percent of its people and 25 percent of its military are Pashtuns who sympathize with their beleaguered fellow Taliban Pashtuns in Afghanistan.

A grimmer view is that Obama has become a captive of the military-industrial complex, Wall Street and Washington’s rabid neocons, who seek permanent war against the Muslim world. Obama’s “surge” may only expand, intensify and prolong the Afghan conflict.

In the end, there will be a negotiated peace that includes the Taliban. But how many Americans, allies and Afghans must die before it comes?

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Eric S. Margolis, an award-winning internationally syndicated columnist, is the author of American Raj: The U.S. and The Muslim World and War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet. Copyright © 2009 Eric S. Margolis.

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