Obama has days not weeks to decide on Afghanistan

Why the generals want to fight the Taliban on two fronts – and why they need to start soon

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 30, 2009

With a week to go to the second round of the presidential elections in Afghanistan, it is time for President Obama to give the go-ahead to General McChrystal's new strategy for international forces there. After all, it is two months since the general, at the president's behest, delivered his list of options and strategies: two months in which the White House has become a hotbed of cold feet.

Vice President Joe Biden has argued against sending 40,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan, which McChrystal wants, and for the US forces to confine themselves to a 'counter-terror' (CT) campaign to root out al-Qaeda bases in the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Such has been foot-dragging that the New York Times has taken to praising the British government in the clarity of its vision and the decision by Gordon Brown to commit 500 more troops to Britain's 9,100 already there.

The compelling reason why President Obama should give the green light to the McChrystal plan, and give it now, is that he has got about the best team of military thinkers and commanders as he could hope to have. If they can't thread their way through this mess, nobody else is likely to.

The team from the US is headed by General Stanley McChrystal, a thoughtful Special Forces veteran, and his boss, David Petraeus, the thinking operational commander of the age.

Britain's new Army chief General Sir David Richards, who commanded international forces in Afghanistan for a year in 2005-06, is credited with a great deal of input to the thinking of both Petraeus and McChrystal.

He is backed by Lt General Sir Nick Parker, the new British Commander Afghanistan, and Lt General Sir Graeme Lamb, who on retirement from the Army this year became McChrystal's chief consultant on reconciliation with tribal chiefs and former Taliban. Lamb caught Petraeus's eye when he played a similar role in winning round Sunni tribal chiefs in Iraq.

McChrystal believes you cannot choose to do either a counter-insurgency operation against the Taliban inside Afghanistan or a counter-terrorist campaign confined to the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan. You have to do both, because al-Qaeda and its allies and the Taliban are so closely interlinked. Hence the need for more troops.

In Afghanistan itself McChrystal believes the accent should be on defending centres of population as much as attacking the Taliban. This means that the international and Afghan forces may not be able to secure the whole country, and some parts with little or no population abandoned to the Taliban. Above all he recognises the terrible damage of 30 years of almost continuous war on a desperately poor and largely illiterate people with little prospect of jobs and wealth beyond drugs and joining the Taliban.

Allied soldiers must now live, work, train and fight with new Afghan army and police units. General Richards wants to establish secure Afghan Development Zones, around main towns and villages. To aid the process, and the army training, he wants to establish a "bridging force" to stabilise development zones - and it is for this that he asked Gordon Brown for more troops.

President Obama's decision or lack of it has become ensnared by the issue of the probity of President Karzai and the government in Kabul. Whatever is likely to happen on or after November 7, the commanders understand that the centre of their effort has to be the Pashtun people, the largest grouping in Afghanistan and the frontier lands of Pakistan; and Karzai is the Pashtuns' main man for the Afghan presidency.

The allies, led by the Americans, need to make their surge now. They need to complement and support in southern Afghanistan the operations by the Pakistan Army against the Mehsud tribal Taliban in southern Waziristan. The US and its allies must put in a powerful blocking force for any Taliban fleeing north into Afghanistan.

For this reason alone Obama must make his decision in a matter of days, despite the White House mantra that a decision on Afghanistan could still take weeks.

The generals, led by Petraeus, McChrystal and Richards, have made their case. Second guessing them is not just wasteful, given the general ignorance of operational skills and sciences among our politicians. Ultimately it is self-defeating.

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 30, 2009

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I do not think the present Afghan government a reliable partner in this protracted conflict and Obama would do well to wait. All the Bush/Blair wars have failed and it is time to withdraw before a Vietnam style retreat becomes inevitable.

Posted by Peter at 10:10am on October 30, 2009

Self-defeating? What is there to win there?

Posted by Kevin Swalwell at 11:04am on October 30, 2009

One of the proposals is the failed Vietnam strategy of 'safe zones', which the British tried in Zuid Afrika (the first concentration camps) and the Russians in Afghanistan garrisoning the half doz cities. A faulty policy/aim is rarely improved by increasing the resources available to be wasted.

Posted by allan kessing at 11:58am on October 30, 2009

Speed is not of the essence. To build up to a million man army suitable assuring the defeat of terrorism in Afghanistan and to protect against the continuous attacks by the insanely aggressive Iranians will take time. Considering the progress over the last eight years a few decades and many trillions will be required to allow Afghan's banks the same control the U.S.'s have, instead of those who manufacture for the world market.

Posted by 124c4u at 4:10am on October 31, 2009

Obama can either quit now and admit this has been a fiasco - or quit later after thousands more people have died, and it will *still* be a fiasco. Gordon Brown, like a spineless scrote, will do whatever Obama does and claim that he thought of it. So look forward to hundreds more pointless British troop deaths in Afghanistan... because these two numpties are too gutless and clueless to make a decision for the first time in their useless lives.

Posted by Neil McGowan at 7:00am on October 31, 2009

All of us not responsible for actually making the decisions and being responsible for the consequences are armchair warriors, but given our right for free expression, let me make a brief statement. No one knows what should or can be done in a practical sense, they can only attempt to do the right thing. People are going to die either way, stay or go. Probably fewer will die if US forces do leave, but then the country will revert to a Taliban-maintained oppression, with all the fearful consequences that has. If US forces stay and even build up troops, more death and destruction and probably not a lot of progress toward an eventual goal of Afghanistan being able to govern itslef with a modicum of civility. The other major, major issue is Iraq. Al-Qaidah and the Taliban are obviously not going to quit, but pursue objectives until Iraq is theirs. We have to recognize this and on that basis decide what to do or not to do. While there are parallels with Vietnam, the eventual consequences of failure, compounded by fascist Muslims taking over in both Afghanistan and Iraq, are well worth factoring in on the decision of persevering and/or modifying out short-term and long-term strategies. The only way to weed termites out of those hills is to go inch by inch and disarm everything and everyone. As to infiltration in the ranks, that's a tough one as well. Planting of false information and other false intelligence can help identify the good guys from the bad. The overall thrust of this 'brief comment' is that in my personal view, we are at a crossroads globally with Muslims who are also at a crossroads with their own inveterate hardline fascists. The ramificatinos of this are frightening and not exactly comforting for diplomats and politicians trying to win elections. Muslims the world over need to confront their violent past, violent present and violent future. Apologists for radical Islam don't help anyone. As well, the American historical record in its servility to Israel and injustices done to the suffering peoples of Palestine and Lebanon at the hands of Zionism is legion. Many a good American politician and activist has been sent to the diplomatic grave by grass-roots anti-American pro-Israel interests in our own motherland.

Posted by Brian Knight at 11:12pm on October 31, 2009

It's a case of you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. But the president and his advisors have to consider very seriously what they can realistically achieve by staying on in Afghanistan. The Afghans and Pakistanis will continue to live as they always have. What America should concentrate on is severely restricting numbers who come into the country from these areas. US consular officials are excellent at keeping people out of the US, they should have no problem operating there. This might be more productive in the end than a protracted war in which young men particularly are being killed in increasingly large numbers.

Posted by Yolande Agble at 5:24am on November 2, 2009