| Home > Central Asia >> Afghanistan | |
Obama faces pressure on Afghan strategy
Melbourne Age - October 6, 2009
Anne Davies, Washington – Over the next few weeks President Barack Obama faces one of the toughest decisions of his young presidency: whether to increase the military effort of the United States in Afghanistan in an attempt to bring some measure of stability to the war-torn nation, or step back and effectively acknowledge that he is better to fight terrorism through greater efforts in Pakistan.
This week he will hold two more sessions with his top military and security advisers in the wake of the most deadly day of fighting this year.
Eight US soldiers and two Afghan police were killed and many injured after 300 insurgents swarmed out of a village and mosque and attacked a pair of isolated American outposts in a remote mountainous area of Nuristan in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday.
As well as the casualties, the insurgents seized at least 20 Afghan policemen whose fate is unclear. Two other US soldiers were killed in a separate clash. The incident comes amid growing signs of tension between the White House and the top military over the future resourcing and direction of the eight-year war. Over the weekend, the national security adviser, retired general Jim Jones, appeared to push back against the top military man in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who has given the President a report saying more troops are needed if the US is to avoid failure in Afghanistan.
General McChrystal has not put a number on it, but numerous sources in the military are suggesting he wants 40,000 soldiers on top of the 68,000 already deployed by the US.
General McChrystal reinforced his view in a speech in London last week in which he argued that any effort to scale down the war in Afghanistan would be misguided.
In an interview on Sunday, however, General Jones said that the solution to problems in Afghanistan was "much more complex than just about 'X' more troops".
"Ideally, it's best for military advice to come up through the chain of command," he said. The President should be presented with options, not just one "fait accompli", General Jones told the CBS network.
The President is known for his deliberative style and General Jones stressed that it would be a hard-nosed assessment of the options, not politics, that would guide the President's decision "within weeks".
But the US is facing some tough decisions in Afghanistan. Most importantly, it has to define for the American people what the mission is. On some occasions it has been defined as decapitating al-Qaeda; at others as bringing stability and a workable government to Afghanistan; and at other times the US has trumpeted the human rights advances in the region.
General McChrystal was appointed by President Obama early in his term with a brief to move from a more traditional strategy to a counter-insurgency strategy, in which all arms of the US presence – civilian and military – are deployed to win over the local population, rather than using force alone.
But the legitimacy of the Afghan election, a key pillar in the US strategy, is now increasingly under a cloud.
Sacked UN diplomat Peter Galbraith, an American, went public in The Washington Post at the weekend to claim that one in three votes for Hamid Karzai was fraudulent. He said the election was a "foreseeable train wreck".
As well as the drumbeats from the liberal end of the Democratic Party over further commitment of troops, there are also doubters on the right.
Conservative columnist George Will argued for a reduced, rather than enhanced, American presence in Afghanistan, citing the testimony of scholar George Kennan in 1996 to a Senate committee examining the Vietnam War. "Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country... This is not only not our business, but I don't think we can do it successfully."
See also:
 |