Mr Obama's Afghanistan War: The Cut-Out-and-Keep Essay by Scott Lucas

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I was going to write a specific analysis of this week's development in US foreign policy on Afghanistan, including the confidential (but selectively leaked) report by the US commander, General Stanley McChrystal, the joint briefing by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mike Mullen, and the general march to war by the US media.

But then it occurred to me: Obama history is only repeating itself. Type in "Afghanistan" in the Enduring America search box and look at our coverage from 20 January, when Obama took office, to the end of March. There you will find military reports submitted to the White House, a period of intense debate with US commanders pushing for as big a troop increase as possible, and Obama's advisors spinning back to limit the escalation. There you will find the immediate culmination, with a "compromise" of an additional 30,000 American forces (complementing a rise in private "security" units and contractors). You will find it justified by the rhetoric that we must fight Al Qa'eda and extremists in Afghanistan so they will not terrorise us "here" and supported by the promise that this is a combination of non-military and military steps to bring stability and progress to the Afghan people.

In May, I wrote an essay for an electronic collection on the Obama Administration and its approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Assessing the current events, which will culminate in another "compromise" escalation of the US military presence --- irrespective of what happens with the internal post-election political battle --- I see no reason to alter it. (For easier formatting, I have not included the footnotes to the essay but am happy to provide them for anyone who wants to follow up.)

MR OBAMA'S WARS: PAKISTAN AND AFGHANISTAN

The analysis was so much simpler with the Bush Administration and its ambitions in Iraq. From the first meeting of the first National Security Council, the President and his advisors identified a strategic goal, namely the extension and maintenance of an American predominance, supported by the demonstration case of regime change in Baghdad. While aspects of the plan would be refined between January 2001 and March 2003, moving toward the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by direct military action rather than covert support of an indigenous challenge, the general aspiration remained. The tragedy of 9-11 would be deployed through the move from Al Qa'eda to the Iraqi menace of weapons of mass destruction. Strategic doctrine, such as the proposal of an Unholy Trinity of terrorism, tyranny, and technology, would underpin the plans;2 intelligence and analysis would be framed to justify the removal of a dictator who posed an imminent threat to the US and its allies.

The strategic ambition collapsed quickly amidst Iraqi insurgency and the exposure of the deceptions that led to war, but it had a clarity that could not be asserted in the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Bush Administration, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, achieved its immediate goals within four months with the toppling of the Taliban and the installation of a suitable Government in Kabul, but as early as March 2002, it had turned its sights to the Iraqi campaign. The Karzai regime maintained a limited authority, while the Pakistani leader, General Pervez Musharraf, could rely --- until the rise of domestic opposition finally forced him from power in August 2008 --- on billions of dollars of American aid. Violence continued in both countries, but both in symbolism and in cost, it was dwarfed for Washington by the chaos in Iraq.

As I write this in May 2009, however, Afghanistan and Pakistan are now the central crises for US foreign policy. The Taliban has expanded its area of influence, now operating in 75 percent of the country.3 The Obama Administration has fired the commander of NATO and US forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, with promises of a “new strategy and a new mission “ under his replacement, General Stanley McChrystal.4 Obama's promises of economic aid and civilian involvement, accompanying a doubling of US troops in the country, have already been eclipsed by the military dimension of counter-insurgency; more than 100 civilians died in a single attack by American aircraft in early May. President Karzai, whose removal was being sought by Washington only months ago, has out-manoeuvred Washington: making new domestic political alliances, he appears to have secured his re-election in August.

In Pakistan, the immediate Washington-supported replacement for President Musharraf, Asif Ali Zardari, has been reduced to a figurehead, as Obama's officials press for the abrogation of political agreements with local groups and a military offensive against the “Pakistani Taliban”, who have expanded their operations beyond the Northwest Frontier Provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Missile attacks by American drone aircraft, and the casualties from them, have escalated. Obama's envoy, Richard Holbrooke, travels regularly to Islamabad for meetings without any apparent resolution. Zardari and Karzai visit the US for a summit that is more for the securing of financial aid and of domestic political advantage than for a unifying effort against “insurgents”.

Yet it is far from clear that Washington has a strategy, for Afghanistan, Pakistan, or for an “Af-Pak” combination. The Administration, from the President to General Petraeus, invoke the threat of Al Qa'eda and “extremists”, folding the opposition of local political groups into that formula or setting it aside. Schemes are launched to undermine and possibly even remove national leaders, without any apparent consideration of political alternatives, let alone long-term stability.
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In his Inaugural speech in January 2009, President Obama referred to only two countries outside the United States: “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.” The juxtaposition indicated that the new Administration would not only make the Afghan situation a priority; it would supplant Iraq as the priority for US foreign policy. The next day Obama's National Security Council took up the issue, and the day after that, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a holdover from the Bush Administration, indicated that there would be a significant change in approach: the US Government would now pursue “very concrete things” such as establishing control in parts of the country, pursuing Al Qaeda, and delivering services and security for the Afghan people.

However, the statements did not herald a new, unifying strategy. For the next month, there was a protracted battle within the Executive Branch between Obama's White House staff and US military commanders, with Gates in the middle. The generals pressed for their request for 30,000 extra troops, raising the total American commitment to 68,000, to be met in full “as the foundation on whatever the president decides to develop in terms of a further strategy”. The President played for time, setting aside the military studies that had been prepared for his first day in office for an interagency review led by his envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, and former CIA operative Bruce Riedel.
Meanwhile some Obama advisors were considering a replacement for the Afghanistan President. A White House official told The New York Times, “Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan, the officials said, because corruption has become rampant in his government, contributing to a flourishing drug trade and the resurgence of the Taliban.” Among those supposedly supporting a change were Vice President Joe Biden and Holbrooke.

Beyond these immediate battles, the question remained: what was the Obama Administration strategy to stabilise Afghanistan? The President's unease was evident in his first meeting with Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he asked, “What's the endgame?” According to his staff, he “did not receive a convincing answer”, either from his advisors or from General David McKiernan, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan.11
Confusion was soon evident within the Administration. Obama's decision to appoint a special envoy, while checking the military push for quick decisions, had muddled lines of authority. Gates was still involved as a broker, but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to have an ill-defined, if any, role. While some officials were leaking to the media, “[We will] leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces [can] focus on the fight against insurgents,” other White House staffers were jumping in, “There is no purely military solution to the challenge in Afghanistan so there will be a significant non-military component to anything that we seek to undertake.”

In mid-February, Obama offered a compromise on the military front, approving about 2/3 of the military's demands while holding the line that longer-term decision would await the completion of the Holbrooke-Riedel study.Yet even in this supposed resolutions, methods and specific objectives remained vague. General Petraeus's acolytes grumbled, ““You had people from the Department of Agriculture weighing in. There were too many cooks. The end result was lowest-common-denominator stuff. The usual Petraeus acuity wasn’t there.” Instead, the unifying rationale was in the rhetorical presentation of “Al Qa'eda” and “extremists”. The President's imagery merely reinforced the message put out by his staff within a week of the Inauguration, “What we’re trying to do is to focus on the Al Qaeda problem. That has to be our first priority.”

Instead of bringing strategic clarity, the significance of the invocation of a bin Laden-led threat lay beyond Afghanistan, for in that portrayal lay the expansion of crisis and thus US intervention in Pakistan. Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the link at the start of February, “We cannot accept that [an] Al Qa'eda leadership which continues to plan against us every single day — and I mean us, here in America — to have [a] safe haven in Pakistan nor could resume one in Afghanistan.”

Initially the White House balked at Mullen's extension and tried to keep Afghanistan and Pakistan as separate issues, telling The Washington Post: “Senior administration officials described their approach to Pakistan — as a major U.S. partner under serious threat of internal collapse — as fundamentally different from the Bush administration’s focus on the country as a Taliban and al-Qaeda “platform” for attacks in Afghanistan and beyond.” Less than a week later, however, the President embraced the “Af-Pak” connection: “My bottom line is that we cannot allow al Qaeda to operate. We cannot have those safe havens in that region. And we’re going to have to work both smartly and effectively, but with consistency, in order to make sure that those safe havens don’t exist.”

Obama did not specify why he had suddenly connected the conflict in Afghanistan to “extremism” in Pakistan; one possibility is that he was increasingly influenced by the process led by Holbrooke and Riedel, who was setting out the notion of “an existential threat from within” in the latter country. The review, completed in late March, asserted:
Afghanistan pales in comparison to the problems in Pakistan. Our primary goal has to be to shut down the al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens on the Pakistan side of the border. If that can be accomplished, then the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes manageable.
Secretary of Defense Gates and Obama reiterated the connection throughout March: “At the heart of a new Afghanistan policy is going to be a smarter Pakistan policy. As long as you’ve got safe havens in these border regions that the Pakistani government can’t control or reach, in effective ways, we’re going to continue to see vulnerability on the Afghan side of the border.” Despite public opposition from the Pakistani Government and military, the US expanded missile strikes from its secret base in northwest Pakistan. US special forces advised Pakistan units while Washington pressed for an offensive against local insurgents.

Thus, as he stepped to the podium on 27 March, announcing the Administration's conclusions from the Riedel review, President Obama was committing his Administration to two, linked (at least in the American conception) wars: “This is not simply an American problem: far from it. This is an international security challenge of the highest order. Terrorist attacks in London, in Bali were tied to Al Qa’eda and its allies in Pakistan as were attacks in North Africa and the Middle East and Islamabad and in Kabul. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European, or Africa, it too is likely to have ties to Al Qa’eda leadership in Pakistan.” Even as his Administration was declaring that it was putting away its predecessor's framework of the “War on Terror”, Obama was invoking it: “[This is] the same war that we initiated after 9/11 as a consequence of those attacks on 3,000 Americans, who were just going about their daily round.”

In the two conflicts, Pakistan had overtaken Afghanistan as the Administration's primary concern. Holbrooke told the press, “We have to deal with the western Pakistan problem….Our superiors would all freely admit that of all the dilemmas and challenges we face, that is going to be the most daunting…because it’s a sovereign country and there is a red line.” Yet the identification of crisis did not amount to a strategy. To the contrary, it seemed to undermine Obama's general proclamation of “a comprehensive strategy that doesn’t just rely on bullets or bombs, but also relies on agricultural specialists, on doctors, on engineers, to help create an environment in which people recognize that they have much more at stake...than giving in to some of these extremist ideologies”;50 the non-military promises would soon be overshadowed by the military tactics proposed for the immediate emergency

Moreover, the rhetoric about striking Al Qa'eda/extremist enemies and the shift to hitting the Pakistani safe havens obscured the “hole in the middle” of the US approach. Where was the political complement, and specificially the Afghan or Pakistani political partner, for this initiative?

Far from giving in to Washington's demands or accepting his overthrow, President Karzai fought back, both in the American media and in domestic politics. He publicly criticised US airstrikes, which were killing more and more Afghan civilians, and opened up secret discussions with Taliban representatives. While his effort to schedule Presidential elections in April was challenged by the US and blocked by local electoral officials, who postponed the vote to August, Karzai established new domestic alliances and bolstered old ones. Meanwhile, candidates favoured by the US have fallen far behind, undercut by political in-fighting, their weaknesses, or their too-close relationship with Washington.
US officials have continued to hint not-so-subtly that Afghans should remove their President in August. Both Clinton and Holbrooke said at the start of April, “We do think [corruption] is a cancer. President Karzai says publicly that he agrees with that. And now it’s up to his government to take action. But I would stress...that there is an election coming up on August 20th....And that election will be a chance for the people to vote on these issues.”

Pakistan offers the different dynamic of a weak President. Asif Ali Zardari's primary aim has been to maintain his domestic position, particularly in the face of public demonstrations demanding significant political and judicial and an escalating economic crisis. So he endorsed an agreement with local tribes in northwest Pakistan, accepting a sharia system in exchange for a cease-fire.

That step, in combination with Zardari's political weaknesses and history of corruption, put him beyond the acceptable for American steps in Pakistan. So Washington, on the political front, opened up talks with alternative leaders like the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. More importantly, the US sought a direct channel with the leader of Pakistan's armed forces, Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani. A senior Administration official said in early March: “We have to re-establish close personal relationships with the army. We have to be sure they’re on the same page as we are. Based on what I saw, they aren’t yet.”

Within days, the connection with Kiani set out that same page to limit any violence from public demonstrations in the Long March against Zardari's Government. The Washington Post, using Administration sources, then outlined, “The Administration is putting the finishing touches on a plan to greatly increase economic and development assistance to Pakistan, and to expand a military partnership considered crucial to striking a mortal blow against al-Qaeda’s leadership and breaking the Pakistani-based extremist networks that sustain the war in Afghanistan….But the weakness of Pakistan’s elected government — backed into a corner by weekend demonstrations that left its political opposition strengthened — has called into question one of the basic pillars of that plan.”

Those “holes in the middle” in turn point to the superficial nature, and ultimately the weakness, of the Obama plan. Not trusting Zardari to oversee either the military campaign or the programme of economic development, the US began talks with former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif; while Sharif, deposed by the Musharraf coup of 1999, had been seen as too “Islamist” in his politics by Washington, now he was the alternative to the ineffective President. The promises of economic advance were eclipsed by political worries: “[The situation] had gotten significantly worse than I expected as the Swat deal [with local tribes] unraveled,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Within six weeks, those assurances of the non-military dimension have been eclipsed or fallen by the wayside. Washington pressed Zardari to abrogate the Swat Valley agreements with local tribes, and when the Taliban responded by expanding operations beyond the northwest, the Pakistani military launched an offensive which continues as I write. So far from “growing” the economy and social services, the US-backed drive on the safe havens has generated up to one million refugees, out of a local populaton of 1.3 million, in and beyond the Swat Valley.

Meanwhile, General Petraeus --- having been initially rebuffed by Obama --- is reasserting his conception of a military-first counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Less than a week after Obama said, “What I will not do is to simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation,” Petraeus was putting forth the request for another 10,000 troops.37 In early May, Petraeus pushed for --- and got from the President --- the firing of General McKiernan and his replacement by General McChrystal, a Petraeus ally whose background is in Special Operations. The change came less than a week after US bombs killed more than 100 people in Farah province, the largest civilian death toll in a single incident since 2001. In two major interviews with US broadcasters days later, Petraeus made no reference to non-military activities in Afghanistan.

The irony is not that Obama's promise of a strategy led by politics rather than boots on the ground rings hollow but that the military approach may be eclipsed by Afghan politics. Manoeuvring to strengthen his own position, Karzai has advocated talks with former foes. By May, his persistence was being met by cautious but clear welcome from former Taliban officials, and it may have even led to a cautious American embrace, as US officials were allegedly in discussions with a California-based representative of the former Afghan leader Gulbuddin Hekmatayar.

There were still public warnings to Karzai, as in Secretary of State Clinton's testimony to a Senate hearing at the end of April, “With respect to the Government, its capacity, its problems providing services, its perception of being less than transparent, straightforward, honest: it’s a problem, I’m not going to tell you it’s not”, followed by her omission of Karzai's name when she added, “Several members of the Cabinet are doing an excellent job.” On the day of the Afghan President's visit to Washington, Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran resurrected the line, “Senior members of Obama's national security team say Karzai has not done enough to address the grave challenges facing his nation. They deem him to be a mercurial and vacillating chieftain who has tolerated corruption and failed to project his authority beyond the gates of Kabul.”

However, as Karzai visited President Obama in May, he did so with the assurances that he had struck political deals to lock down voting blocs, notably through the naming of his two Vice Presidential running mates, while potential threats had withdrawn from the electoral campaign. So it was he who could take the high ground, lecturing the US about the civilian casualties of bombing: “It’s the standard of morality that we are seeking which is also one that is being desired and spoken about in America.”
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In an interview with Newsweek magazine, published in mid-May, President Obama was asked, “What's the hardest thing you have had to do?” He replied:

Order 17,000 additional troops into Afghanistan. There is a sobriety that comes with a decision like that because you have to expect that some of those young men and women are going to be harmed in the theater of war. And making sure that you have thought through every angle and have put together the best possible strategy, but still understanding that in a situation like Afghanistan the task is extraordinarily difficult and there are no guarantees, that makes it a very complicated and difficult decision.

Significantly, however, as Obama went through the narrative of the decision to increase military forces in Afghanistan, his lengthy reply did not address strategy. Instead, he offered empathy (“meeting with young men and women who've served, and their families, and the families of soldiers who never came back”) and context (“a recognition that the existing trajectory was not working, that the Taliban had made advances, that our presence in Afghanistan was declining in popularity, that the instability along the border region was destabilizing Pakistan as well”) before ending in a vague description of process and bureaucracy:

Once that strategic review had been completed, then I sat in a room with the principals and argued about it, and listened to various perspectives, saw a range of options in terms of how we could move forward; asked them to go back and rework their numbers and reconsider certain positions based on the fact that some of the questions I asked could not be answered. And when I finally felt that every approach—every possible approach—had been aired, that all the questions had either been answered or were unanswerable, at that point I had to make a decision and I did.

Even at the level of tactics, Obama's “decision” seems muddled. The Administration adopted the position of ostensibly supporting the Pakistani Government, while undermining its President. US officials told favoured journalists, “On some major security and intelligence issues, [Zardari] claimed no knowledge or sought to shift blame to others, and the overall impression was of an accidental president who still has an uncertain grasp on power.” Obama himself blasted the civilian leadership, to the point where he threatened overruling them:

I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan….The civilian government there right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people. We will provide them all of the cooperation that we can. We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognize that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.

In May, President Zardari was on an extended tour outside Pakistan when the long-awaited (from Washington's viewpoint) military offensive against the Taliban was launched. The public face on the campaign was instead Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani.

In Afghanistan, the political machinations of the US Government, far from getting the “right” leadership, had merely strengthened the President it hoped to depose. Outside Kabul, the collateral damage of US air attacks alienated civilians, working to the advantage of insurgents. The replacement of the American commander in Afghanistan, far from promising a re-consideration with “fresh eyes”, offered the assurance that the military tactics --- without any apparent consideration of their political counterpart --- simply needed to be refined and “targeted”. In their rhetoric, Obama officials, for all their invocations of “existential threat”, risking making Pakistan an (expendable) frontline in US homeland security; as one critic cogently assessed, “In short, it’s not the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense to keep Pakistan stable, it is his responsibility to attack extremist safe havens in Pakistan in order to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack against the US, Canada, or the European Union.”

On 19 May Secretary of State Clinton, in the midst of announcing $110 million in emergency aid (part of which, she hoped, would be donated by benevolent viewers), declared, “Our policy toward Pakistan over the last 30 years has been incoherent.” She did not pause to consider the possible irony of coherence in her own statement: having initially promised aid for the “progress” and development of Pakistani communities, Clinton was now offering the money for their sacrifice, with because 2 million of them had been internally displaced by US-backed military operations.

And perhaps she did not need to pause for consideration. The geographic focus of the Obama Administration may differ from that of its predecessor, but its rhetoric of the battle against Al Qa'eda and extremists, transcending the reality of the local situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, holds forth Marilyn Young's notion of the “limited unlimited war”. In such a war, the strategic ends of not only a military “victory” for US forces but political, economic, and social resolution for the populaces in those countries are peripheral; the ongoing battle is an end in itself. “War” and “national security” take over, rationalised by a permanent fear.

Which is why, when asked in the Newsweek interview, “Can anything get you ready to be a war president?”, Obama could reduce “strategic issues” to an 18-word question:

I think that it certainly helps to know the broader strategic issues involved. I think that's more important than understanding the tactics involved....The president has to make a decision: will the application of military force in this circumstance meet the broader national-security goals of the United States?

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Video and Transcript: Gates-Mullen Briefing on Afghanistan (4 September)

On Thursday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, held a press briefing to discuss developments in Afghanistan. The appearance came days after the submission of a review by General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama recommending American strategy.

We'll have a full analysis tomorrow on this, but here's the key point, beyond the spin and bluster about a "new" approach to "protect the Afghan people". While Gates and Mullen would not comment on the troop increase in McChrystal's review, there will now be a process of several weeks in which the Administration will strike a serious pose about the build-up, possibly even spinning against the military to assert its authority and maintain some limits, before a "compromise" of another 20,000 to 25,000 US troops is authorised. That will bring the total of American forces, when you add in the "private" contractors and security units to about 150,000, more than the Soviets had in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Meanwhile this morning, the US-NATO strategy of protection killed up to 90 Afghans when jet bombers struck two hijacked fuel tankers.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

SEC. GATES: Good afternoon. I want to start today with an update on where we stand with General McChrystal's assessment on Afghanistan, and then turn things over to Admiral Mullen for his perspective.

First, some context. Soon after taking office, President Obama approved the deployment of some 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan to help cope with the anticipated Taliban spring offensive and to provide additional security for the Afghan elections last month. Our allies and partners also sent significant additional troops to provide for election security.

In late March, the president announced a comprehensive new civil, military and diplomatic strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, with the goal of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda in order to prevent them from launching another major attack against our country.

A new military commander, General McChrystal, was appointed to implement the military component of the new strategy. When General McChrystal took command in June, I asked him to report back to me in about 60 days with his assessment of the security situation and his thinking on the implementation of the president's new strategy.

I received that report two days ago and informally forwarded a copy to the president for an initial read.

I've asked General Petraeus, the commander of Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chairman to provide me with their evaluation of the assessment and the situation in Afghanistan, and will send their views plus my own thoughts to the president early next week. I expect that any request for additional resources would follow after this process and be similarly discussed by the president's national-security team.

All of this is being done as part of a systematic, deliberative process designed to make sure the president receives the best military information and advice on the way ahead in Afghanistan. As I said earlier, what prompted my request for this assessment was the arrival of a new commander in Afghanistan, not any new information or perceived change in the situation on the ground. My request and General McChrystal's response both are intended to help us effectively implement the president's March strategy, not launch a new one.

Admiral?

ADM. MULLEN: Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I would just add a couple of thoughts. First, on process, as the secretary indicated, he's asked the chiefs and myself to review General McChrystal's initial assessment and provide our thoughts, our advice. The chiefs and I have already met twice in the tank this week to discuss it, and we're planning at least one more session later on. My intention is to wrap up our review by Friday.

Our job -- and it's one we take very seriously -- is to provide the secretary and the president our best military advice. And we're going to do that with a clear eye not only on the needs in Afghanistan but also the needs of the force in general and on our other security commitments around the globe.

Second, it's clear to me that General McChrystal has done his job as well, laying out for his chain of command the situation on the ground, as he sees it, and offering in frank and candid terms how he believes his forces can best accomplish the mission the president has assigned to him.

And that is what this whole thing is about: the mission assigned, the strategy we've been tasked to implement. There has been enormous focus on troop numbers and timelines lately, lots of conjecture, lots of speculation.

I understand the interest in those things, and it's legitimate. Those numbers represent real units, real people and real families. But the troop piece of this is just that. It's a piece, critical, but it's not total.

What's more important than the numbers of troops he may or may not ask for is how he intends to use them. It should come as no surprise to anyone that he intends to use those forces under his command to protect the Afghan people, to give them the security they need to reject the influence the Taliban seeks.

Now, you've heard me talk for much of the last two years about Afghanistan. You know how much I remain concerned about the situation there. There is a sense of urgency. Time is not on our side.

I believe we understand that. And I believe we're going to regain the initiative, because we have a strategy. We have a new approach in implementing that strategy. And we have leaders on the ground who know the nature of the fight they are in, leaders who know that the other people and the other families who matter just as much, in this fight, are the Afghans themselves.

Our mission is to defeat al Qaeda and to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven again. We cannot accomplish that alone. We'll need help from other agencies and other countries. But we will also need the support of the local population.

So in my view, the numbers that count most are the number of Afghans we protect. As one villager told a visiting U.S. lawmaker recently, security is the mother of all progress.

SEC. GATES: Lara.

Q Thanks. A question for both of you. New polls show that public support for the war in Afghanistan is eroding. They're coming just as you prepare to go to Congress to ask for funding to fulfill General McChrystal's anticipated resource request. How concerned are you that the fading support will make it harder for those requests to be fulfilled, and how concerned are you both about this idea, that the war is slipping through the administration's fingers, is taking hold with Americans?

SEC. GATES: Well, first of all, I don't believe that the war is slipping through the administration's fingers. And I think it's important -- first of all, the nation has been at war for eight years. The fact that Americans would be tired of having their sons and daughters at risk and in battle is not surprising.

I think what is important is for us to be able to show, over the months to come, that the president's strategy is succeeding. And that is what General McChrystal is putting in front of us, is how best we can, at least from the military's standpoint, ensure that we can show signs of progress along those lines.

But I think it is also -- there is always a difference between the perspective in terms of timing in this country, and certainly in this city, and what's going on in the country. And I think what's important to remember is, the president's decisions were only made at the -- on this strategy were only made at the very end of March.

Our new commander appeared on the scene in June. We still do not have all of the forces the president has authorized in Afghanistan yet, and we still do not have all the civilian surge that the president has authorized and insisted upon in Afghanistan yet.

So we are only now beginning to be in a position to have the assets in place that -- and the strategy or the military approach in place to begin to implement the strategy. And this is going to take some time.

By the same time (sic), no one is more aware than General McChrystal and certainly the two of us that there is a limited time for us to show that this approach is working, and certainly for the secretary of State and the president as well, because there is this broader element of the strategy that goes beyond the military.

But I would just say we are mindful of that. We understand the concerns on the part of many Americans in this area, and -- but we think that we now have the resources and the right approach to begin making some headway in turning around a situation that, as many have indicated, has been deteriorating.

Q And the Chairman doesn't --

SEC. GATES: I'm sorry. Go --

ADM. MULLEN: The only thing I'd add to that is, this has been a mission that has not been well-resourced. It's been under-resourced almost since its inception, certainly in recent years. And it has -- and part of why it has gotten more serious and has deteriorated has been directly tied to that. President Obama has approved the troops, approved the civilians that, as the secretary indicated, are literally in many cases just arriving on scene.

I talked about a sense of urgency, and I do believe we have to start to turn this thing around from a security standpoint over the next 12 to 18 months.

I think the strategy's right. I -- we know how to do this. We've got a combat-hardened force that is terrific in counterinsurgency. And to listen to General McChrystal, he believes it's achievable, and I think we can succeed.

That said, it's complex. It's tough. We're losing people, as everybody knows. And yet that's the mission that the president has given us in the military, and it's the one that we are very fixed on carrying out.

Read rest of transcript...

Mr Obama's War in Afghanistan: How Many Troops Will Be Enough?

Afghanistan: Beyond the Politics and Propaganda, The War of Logistics

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Afghanistan's descent into the far-from-democratic realities of power politics and US military escalation continues. Today's stories of "Tribal Leaders Say Karzai’s Team Forged 23,900 Votes" --- instead of, by the way, delivering them en masse to challenger Abdullah Abdullah --- and "U.N. Agency Finds Evidence of Drug Cartels Forming in Afghanistan" are set next to the set-up articles for the entry of more American troops: "General [McChrystal]: Afghan Situation 'Serious'". In The Wall Street Journal, Bruce Reidel (who led President Obama's initial review group on Afghanistan that produced the March 2009 escalation) and Michael O'Hanlon (who will cherry-pick the 1 of 10 numbers that somehow proves victory is imminent) offer a cheerleading masterpiece for the build-up, "What's Right with Afghanistan".

There is still a chance of White House resistance to a large escalation of boots on the ground --- the sub-headline on the "General: It's Serious" story is "McChrystal Expected To Seek More Resources, But White House Is Wary" --- but likely prospect, as in March, is a "compromise" that ramps up the US presence in Afghanistan to close to 90,000 troops.

But here's the rub. Apart from the annoying political considerations that we've mentioned when it comes to an Afghanistan "solution", the declared American military strategy can't live with only 90,000 troops. Or 190,000 for that matter. Beyond McChrystal's public-relations guff that his approach is "new" because "we're going to protect Afghan civilians" (wasn't the US military supposedly protecting them since the Taliban's overthrow in Decemberw 2001?), the numbers of a "clear and hold" counter-insurgency approach are far beyond his reach. The following is from foreign policy analyst Donald Snow:

....The new emphasis of strategy in Afghanistan apparently is to place greater emphasis on securing and providing ongoing security for Afghan villages and villagers in areas of contention, which presumably means particularly in the rural parts of the country where the Pashtun are in the majority. This emphasis follows from the so-called COIN (conterinsurgency) doctrine found in the joint Army-Marine Counterinsurgency manual, Army FM 3-24 and Marine Corps Warfighting Publication 3-33.5. This shifts the center of activity away from hunting down and killing Taliban faster than they can be replaced (the way much of Vietnam was fought), because, in McChrystal’s own words, the supply of replacement fighters is “essentially endless.” This admission in itself is telling and sobering: if the recruitment pool of new Taliban is so great, how can we ever expect to prevail, since the endlessness of that reservoir suggests either that the Taliban is very popular or that our presence is greatly opposed (or a combination of the two).

Accepting this reformulation, however, turns one strictly into the teeth of the numbers. As noted earlier (at at the risk of being a “nag” on the subject), the Counterinsurgency Manual embraces the idea of pacification but also points out that it is very manpower intensive. To reiterate, an effective COIN force, in the manual’s own estimate, requires 20 counterinsurgents for every 1,000 in the population being protected. As previously noted, that literally means a force of 660,000 counterinsurgents, given the size of the Afghan population. Even fudging on the numbers, that adds up to over one half million forces confronting the Taliban, whose numbers of full-time fighters has been estimated at as little as 20,000, not including part-timers.

How do the numbers match up to fill this bill? Here we need some new math. Currently, there are 62,000 American forces in the country, scheduled to expand to about 68,000 by year’s end. With other NATO contributions, the number swells to about 100,000, although the NATO numbers are likely to shrivel. Current projections call for an Afghan National Army (ANA) force of around 134,000 by the end of 2011. Given the progress in recruiting and training those forces (and especially in making them ethnically representative enough for the Afghans themselves to think of them as “national”), we are talking about a total force of less than 250,000 by the end of next year. That does not even come close.

It is clear, as been suggested here, that McChrystal will return to Washington later this year hat-in-hand and doing his best William Westmoreland imitation to ask for more troops. Clearly, he cannot ask for the roughly 350,000 new forces necessary to meet the COIN doctrine’s requisites, so he will almost certainly ask for a more modest number of “trainers” to help expand the ANA. If my numbers are correct, however, it will require an Afghan force that is THREE TIMES the force already planned to come even close to a half million total counterinsurgents, which is on the low side (a total force of slightly less than a half million).

Where are all these extra forces going to come from? Thanks partly to Taliban harassment (as well as antipathy toward the government), it is proving difficult to meet current goals. How in the world can these be trebled? Moreover, who is going to pay for them if they can be found (we all know the answer to that one–us)? Further, all this will take time, and in the interim, it is difficult to imagine the Taliban will sit idly by and allow this expansion to occur: may they have won before this new force can be fielded?

Maybe I’m crazy, and maybe I am a victim of some old math that does not add up. At the same time, maybe those who think this is all going to work out well are privy to some new math that makes what seems impossible possible? If so, I’d like the tutorial.....