/ 3 October 2009

Obama dithers over Afghanistan

General Stanley McChrystal seemed to be operating his personal form of deception tactics when he unveiled his new plan — or at least some of it — in a major speech in London this week. While things were getting serious in Afghanistan, violence on the upswing and the Taliban insurgency deepening, it would take ”patience, discipline, resolve and time” to turn things round …”

Answering questions, the general admitted that some crucial decisions had to be taken soon, or the allies in the coalition and the Afghans themselves would lose confidence that anything could be done soon to defeat the Taliban.

The essence of the McChrystal plan for a radical overhaul of allied operations in Afghanistan is to have enough troops to take and hold the vital centres of population. ”We can’t dominate the whole country,” he said. This must be matched by a surge in building up and training Afghan army and police forces — at twice the rate and for twice the number originally planned. He said that about 400 000 troops and police need to be fully trained and equipped to defend their country and defeat the Taliban in the next four years.

This would be a tall order under any circumstances. The key change now proposed is that the allied troops should live, train, plan and fight with the Afghan army units. This will mean a lot more troops from the Nato allies to help in the job. The British and the Danes have already flagged that they are prepared to put in an extra 2 000 to 3 000 more between them.

For once, the Americans, particularly the Republicans, cannot slip into default mode and blame the European allies for the delays and being the traditional hotbed of cold feet about important new initiatives. This time round, the problem is the dithering man in the Oval Office.

There is every sign that Obama is now taking too much advice and that it is make up your mind time on Afghanistan. Nato’s new secretary general, the former Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, has openly voiced his worries about the rising scepticism being voiced by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic about the viability and value of the Afghan mission.

The immediate cause for Obama’s indecision is whether to agree to McChrystal’s request for extra troops, somewhere in the region of 40 000 according to most reports, for Afghanistan.

However, there appears to be a far deeper worry now playing on the presidential mind.

If he agrees to put more than 100 000 pairs of US boots on the ground in Afghanistan, say the critics, Obama could be going the same way as president Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam. It will mean that the president now ”owns” the war as Johnson did after he boosted numbers in Vietnam in the first years of his presidency. And Vietnam came to dominate, then wreck, the Johnson presidency.

Some of the Obama advisers, such as his lead envoy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, started their careers in the Vietnam era and fear a repeat of the Vietnam mistakes.

Moreover, a large proportion of Democrats in Congress, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are against widening the mission — so much so that the president may have to rely on the Republicans to get backing for substantial reinforcements.

The presidential dilemma is worsened by the rows in the UN in Kabul over the recent elections there. This has led to the sacking of the deputy UN representative Peter Galbraith, an Obama appointee and old Clinton hand, who has voiced serious doubts about allowing President Hamid Karzai’s re-election to stand, given the widespread reports of fraud and corruption.

The alternative to reinforcement is just to fight a counter-terrorist campaign against Taliban and al-Qaeda training camps, and with targeted attacks by drones and special forces against leadership cells. Afghanistan, in the main, would be left to its own devices, a ploy now known as ”Chaos-istan”.

McChrystal stated firmly in his London address that ”Counter-terrorism is not an alternative to counter-insurgency — it just wouldn’t work.” Most military experts agree with him.

Not reinforcing the international force Isaf, and muddling along as in the past eight years of the Afghan war, invites notions of retreat and defeat, a psychological, if not physical, victory to the Taliban and their al-Qaeda shadow. It is for this reason that Gordon Brown has indicated he will entertain a reasonable request for a further British reinforcement for a limited period. But it depends on a full endorsement and lead by President Obama.

British military plans are already laid for sending 1 000 to 2 000 more troops to make up a ”bridging force” to hold the key centre of population in the Helmand valley from Sangin in the north to Garmsir in the south with Lashkar Gah and Gereshk as the key centres for commercial development. Army commanders warn privately that they want a decision on the British surge within a fortnight from now.

The Danes have already agreed to reinforce their battalion by several hundred troops. Unusually for a Nato power, the Danes agree to work under the direct command of the British brigade for operational purposes. By contrast, the Germans will not even recognise that their 4 000 troops are involved in a war — but merely a peace support mission. A further complication is that the Dutch and Canadians want to withdraw their troops from combat operations in 2010 and 2011.

One of the most trenchant criticisms of the allied effort in Afghanistan was made earlier this week to London University students by General Rupert Smith, one of Britain’s foremost military thinkers as well as accomplished operational commanders of recent times. Having been a UN commander in Bosnia and deputy supreme allied commander in Nato, Smith told students in the annual King’s College War Studies Lecture earlier this week that Nato was never designed to devise the strategy and execute it for such a complex mission as the war in Afghanistan. He said: ”Nato itself is the product of a strategy (the Cold War strategy of containing the Soviet Bloc), and therefore was never designed to generate strategy itself.”

The alliance exists by partnership between the member nations. But this is often a partnership of dissent as much as consent, as individual capitals lay out the caveats and rules by which their troops operate. Rarely does a country agree for its soldiers to come under the command of another’s generals — the exceptions being the Danes with the British, and the British occasionally with the Americans and Canadians, and vice versa.

”When it comes to effective fighting partnerships between factions and forces in the field, the enemy — the Taliban — seem to be doing it rather better than we do,” said Smith.

So it is not for nothing that McChrystal has called for a radical overhaul of the thinking and force structure behind the allied effort in Afghanistan. And however much he tried to camouflage his words, time is not on his side to turn things round. – guardian.co.uk