Gates Beats Out Petraeus in Fight Over Afghanistan Withdrawal

Yochi Dreazen/Marc Ambinder, 06/23/11

Senior White House officials wanted all of the 33,000 U.S. "surge" troops to withdraw from Afghanistan by next spring. Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Kabul, was adamant they stay until the end of 2012. The deadlock was broken by outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who sold Obama and his top civilian aides on a compromise plan that will leave most of the reinforcements in Afghanistan through next September but ensure they're back well before the November elections.

Obama's prime-time address Wednesday night offered little indication of the heated behind-the-scenes battle over Afghanistan that consumed the president and his war cabinet for much of this past month. The debates pitted White House aides wary of the war's high costs and uncertain progress against a high-profile general who brought Iraq back from the brink of defeat several years ago and was confident he could do the same in Afghanistan if given enough time. This account is based on interviews with multiple officials with direct knowledge of the internal deliberations.

Petraeus had sold then-President George W. Bush on the Iraq surge and helped persuade Obama to overrule some of his closest advisers--including Vice President Joe Biden--and deploy 33,000 new troops to Afghanistan in December 2009. When it came time to decide when those troops would come home, however, Petraeus suffered a rare defeat. Obama rejected the general's proposal to shift large numbers of troops to eastern Afghanistan in order to mount an expansive counterinsurgency campaign there. And the president was ultimately unwilling to budge from his belief that the surge troops needed to fully withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of next year.

Gates, meanwhile, will retire from public service next week with another big bureaucratic win under his belt. During the initial Afghan surge debates in the fall of 2009, Gates was similarly successful in mediating between the White House and the uniformed military. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. war commander, had joined Petraeus in arguing for deploying as many as 80,000 new troops to Afghanistan to reverse the Taliban's battlefield momentum. Biden, backed by other civilian aides, wanted to deploy 20,000 new troops and adopt a far narrower mission than McChrystal and Petraeus wanted. Gates ultimately crafted the winning compromise: a surge of 30,000 troops paired with a commitment to begin withdrawing the forces 18 months later. Gates's compromise is the reason the first surge troops will begin leaving Afghanistan in July.

As word of the Obama's decision reached Petraeus's allies, word of the commander's disapproval reached the White House. Two military officers with close ties to Petraeus said in separate interviews Wednesday night that the general disagreed with Gates's compromise proposal and had not endorsed the drawdown plan. A third military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to avoid publicly criticizing the president, said of the White House: "No one is talking about succeeding or winning... the phrase [Wednesday night] was bringing this war to a 'responsible' conclusion. I'm not really sure what that means."

The initial set of Afghan discussions had been marred by a series of leaks that infuriated Obama and led the president to accuse his military advisers of trying to box him in politically. Earlier this year, as the administration began to gear up for the withdrawal debate, Gates and National Security Adviser Tom Donilon sent out word informally that any leaks would be interpreted by the president as insubordination and as an attempt to improperly influence public opinion. The approach paid off: The withdrawal debate occurred almost completely out of public sight, with few details leaking and neither side making their case in the press. The second debate was also far shorter than the first had been. The president and his war cabinet held three meetings in the White House situation room over the past two weeks, with Petraeus laying out his troop withdrawal recommendations early last week, according to officials familiar with the matter.

The debate effectively boiled down to a matter of months. Petraeus agreed that 10,000 troops could be safely withdrawn this year, but he wanted to keep some of the remaining 23,000 troops in Afghanistan until the end of 2012 and to have the flexibility to extend some of their tours into early 2013 if conditions deteriorated, according to officials with knowledge of the deliberations. Obama's civilian advisers, pointing to intelligence assessments showing that the U.S. had killed 20 of al-Qaida's top 30 leaders in the region, wanted the final 23,000 surge troops to leave Afghanistan next spring, with the last of the forces returning home roughly around March.

For nearly two weeks, neither side budged. Petraeus made it clear he opposed beginning the drawdown during the summer, traditionally the time of Afghanistan's most intense fighting, according to an official familiar with his thinking. The general wanted his successor, Marine Lt. Gen. John Allen, to be able to move troops from southern Afghanistan, where coalition forces have pushed the Taliban out of many of their former strongholds, to eastern Afghanistan, where conditions have been deteriorating for months. Such a move would take time, and Petraeus argued that the surge troops should be kept in Afghanistan through the end of the year to ensure they had enough time to mount a full counterinsurgency campaign in eastern Afghanistan.

Obama's civilian aides pushed back hard, arguing that all of the troops could safely leave Afghanistan by next spring because of the successes of the stepped-up counterterror push inside both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gates, who felt the spring 2012 timetable was far too aggressive, proposed keeping the remaining surge troops in Afghanistan through next spring as a compromise. Obama ultimately chose--as he did during the surge debate--to side with the veteran Defense chief.

John Nagl, a retired Army officer with close ties to Petraeus who wrote the military's counterinsurgency field manual, said in a written statement that Obama's way forward gives "commanders impressive flexibility this year by linking the withdrawal of the first 10,000 troops of the surge to the year's end. But he inexplicably removed all such flexibility next year by requiring the remaining 23,000 surge troops to be withdrawn by the summer of 2012--necessitating their removal from combat at the height of the fighting season."

Nagl, who is now the president of the Center for a New American Security, said he believes "this problem of untimely diminished capabilities can be overcome by the commanders on the ground, yet opens questions about the nature of the calculus."

Petraeus, for his part, will almost certainly be asked about his views of the withdrawal plan when he testifies Thursday before the Senate panel considering his nomination to be the next director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The commander is known for his diplomatic skills, and it's not clear if he will be willing to publicly discuss any of his recent disagreements with the White House. Petraeus, who will retire from the military to assume his new post at the CIA, will need to decide whether to once again play the part of the good soldier.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/06/gates-beats-out-petraeus-in-fight-over-afghanistan-withdrawal/240919/

Obama slides toward Afghan exit

The Daily Caller, 06/22/11

President Barack Obama is gambling that his gradual military withdrawal from Afghanistan won’t prompt the tribal country to spin out of control in the next 12 months, but will help him run as a jobs-and-growth candidate in the 2012 election.

“America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home,” Obama declared in his prime-time announcement from the White House.

“Let us responsibly end these wars, and reclaim the American Dream that is at the center of our story,” he said in a speech that segued into a campaign-style pitch for the 2012 election.

There were 32,000 troops in Afghanistan when Obama was inaugurated in January 2008. He sent 20,000 troops there in early 2009, and announced an extra surge of 33,000 troops in December 2009. Those extra troops have allowed the U.S. to counter-attack Taliban force in the south, and to persuade wavering tribes to abandon the Taliban’s coalition and rally to the central government, led by Hamid Karzai.

In his speech, Obama said he would withdraw 10,000 by the end of the year, and another 33,000 by September 2012. Most of the remaining 66,000 U.S. troops will then be withdrawn by the end of 2014, he said.

[ For complete coverage of politics and policy, go to Yahoo! Politics ]

“We set clear objectives: to refocus on al Qaeda; reverse the Taliban’s momentum; and train Afghan Security Forces to defend their own country,” Obama said of the 2009 troop surge plan. “I also made it clear that our commitment would not be open-ended, and that we would begin to drawdown our forces this July.”

In his speech, Obama lowered the goals for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and invited the Afghan government to negotiate a deal with the Taliban, the ultra-orthodox Islamic group that hosted al Qaeda organizers of the 9/11 mass-murder.

“Our position on these talks is clear: they must be led by the Afghan government, and those who want to be a part of a peaceful Afghanistan must break from al Qaeda, abandon violence, and abide by the Afghan Constitution,” he said.

“The goal that we seek is achievable, and can be expressed simply: no safe-haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland, or our allies,” he declared in his speech.”

He did not call for democracy in Afghanistan, nor legal rights for women, nor did he call for military victory, nor did he mention the military sacrifice of U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Holland. He did discuss Iraq, but largely as a painful war from which he has withdrawn 100,000 soldiers. He did not repeat his earlier description of Iraq as an emerging democracy and an potential ally.

Obama’s retreat from Afghanistan before the Islamic Taliban is defeated is militarily risky, because it may embolden Taliban attackers and fracture the central’s government shaky coalition. If additional U.S. troops are killed, or the country is split by war in the fall before the 2012 election, Republicans will likely pin the blame on the president.

Already, many Afghans have begun maneuvering for advantage in a post-American Afghanistan. An alliance of groups from Northern Afghanistan — “the Coalition for Change and Hope” — has openly split with Karzai’s government and begun to seek alliances with Southern anti-Taliban tribal leaders.

“This spits and realignments are unsurprising, said Ahmad Majidyar, a senior research at the American Enterprise Institute, “Because many leaders and communities were killed or wrecked in the civil-war that followed the retreat of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. A civil-war can be avoided only if the U.S acts as a honest broker and strong backer in the politically diverse country.”

Even as Obama downgraded U.S. goals in Afghanistan, he took time to justify his limited intervention in Libya’s spasmodic civil war as a reasonable balance between two foreign-policy extremes.

“When innocents are being slaughtered and global security endangered, we don’t have to choose between standing idly by or acting on our own,” he said, adding that the U.S. is “supporting allies in protecting the Libyan people and giving them the chance to determine their destiny.”

Obama ended his speech by pivoting to a campaign-style list of his domestic priorities intended to unite his activist base, allied business and advocacy coalitions, voter blocs and swing-voting independents.

“We must unleash innovation that creates new jobs and industry, while living within our means. We must rebuild our infrastructure and find new and clean sources of energy … we must recapture the common purpose that we shared at the beginning of this time of war [because] our nation draws strength from our differences, and when our union is strong no hill is too steep and no horizon is beyond our reach,” he said, before reiterating the speech’s theme, that “America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”

His much-anticipated announcement was planned for the same day that two bad-news reports were expected to hit the media. In the morning, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that the national debt would outgrow the nation’s annual income in 2021, and double again in another 15 years. The growth of health care spending contributes 80 percent of the problem, and the heavy debt will shrink the economy’s growth by 6 percent in 2025, and 18 percent by 2035, said the report.

That afternoon, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke delivered a bad-news economic message to the assembled TV cameras. “I believe slowdown is partly temporary and we’ll see greater growth going forward … [but because] we can’t explain the entire slowdown, growth in the near-term might be less than we anticipate.”

The Dow index fell by 80 points on Wednesday, further reducing hope of significantly reducing the nation’s unemployment rate of at least 9.1 percent before next year.

Left-leaning Democratic legislators and a widening slice of the Democratic base are urging withdrawal from Afghanistan, which is divided by steep mountains and a pre-modern tribal culture, exemplified by its many warring tribes.

For example, the left-of-center Center for American Progress has called for withdrawal of 60,000 troops by the end of 2012. But such groups aren’t likely to cause significant political difficulties for Obama. The CAP declared after the speech that “the president’s announcement to move 33,000 troops out by September 2012 is wholly justified by America’s national security interests.”

The successful killing in May of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden helps advocates who urge a troop-reduction make their case to the public. These advocates, who include Vice-President Joe Biden, say U.S. forces should be sharply reduced, and redirected away from counter-insurgency and nation-building, and towards a counter-terrorism strategy that would raid Al Qaeda hideouts whenever they are detected.

Republicans leaders are splitting over the Afghan campaign. National security hawks urged continued attacks on the Taliban in expectation that the Afghan government will gradually build an army that is cohesive enough enough to rule Afghanistan without much American help.

But other Republicans, including several candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, say they support a faster pullout. Yet some of the candidates, such as Gov. Mitt Romney or Gov. Tim Pawlenty, say they would seek military advice, or not establish a withdrawal time-line that could spur Taliban attacks.

Read more stories from The Daily Caller

http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/20110622/pl_dailycaller/obamaslidestowardafghanexit

歐巴馬：明夏前 阿富汗撤軍3.3萬人 

中天新聞, 06/23/11

美國在阿富汗發動反恐戰爭已10年，美國總統歐巴馬23日宣布，美軍將在年底前從阿富汗撤軍1萬人，另外2.3萬軍力將在2012年夏天前全面撤出，剩下7萬名軍力，預計在則2014年撤出，但這場戰爭也造成1500名美軍戰死沙場。

http://video.chinatimes.com/video-cate-cnt.aspx?cid=1&nid=57563

The White House Debates Afghanistan -- Again

Should Obama withdraw a lot of troops or just a few; change the war strategy or stay the course?

Fred Kaplan, 06/08/11

The White House debate over how many troops to withdraw from Afghanistan next month is really a surrogate for a larger, more fractious debate over the wisdom and strategy of the war itself.

It marks a reopening of a crucial debate that occupied President Barack Obama's national-security advisers for most of his first year in office. At the end of that year, after a series of 10 meetings with those advisers, Obama settled the argument by deciding to send 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan (in addition to the 70,000 already there). But he also announced that he'd start withdrawing some of those troops in July 2011. That deadline is next month (time flies!), and so the president must soon decide how many to pull out.

The New York Times reported this week that senior military officers, as well as top officials in the Pentagon and State Department, are arguing that the drawdown should be minimal -- around 3,000 to 5,000 troops -- while some advisers in the White House, including Vice President Joe Biden, are pushing for much steeper cuts.

But this dispute is about more than numbers. The initial debate, in the first few months of 2009, was whether to emphasize a strategy of counterinsurgency (COIN) or a strategy of counterterrorism (CT).

Under COIN theory, the most effective way to defeat insurgents is to focus less on chasing bad guys than on protecting the population -- first clearing an area of insurgents (which does involve killing a lot of them), then holding the area with security forces, and finally building support for the host-nation government by bringing in basic services. The idea is to isolate the insurgents, undermine the basis of their popular support, and thus switch the people's allegiance from supporting (or at least tolerating) the insurgency to supporting the government.

The CT advocates, on the other hand, argued that the COIN strategy takes too long, costs too much money, turns the United States into an occupation force, and, after all the time and trouble, may not work anyway. They proposed, instead, using drones and a relatively small number of special-operations commandos to kill the insurgents and thus keep the Taliban and other militant groups from retaking political power.

Many COIN advocates conceded, and still do concede, that their strategy is expensive and risky. But they also argue that the CT strategy alone won't work; that troops on the ground -- and lots of them -- are needed to build trust among the local people, who, once the trust is established, will be more likely to tell the troops where the insurgents are. The hardest part of an insurgency war is not killing the bad guys but finding them -- and while high-tech sensors do that to a considerable degree, human intelligence is crucial.

At the end of 2009, Obama sided with the COIN advocates. His decision to send another 30,000 troops was for the explicit purpose of carrying out a COIN strategy. (Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, had recommended between 40,000 and 80,000; but he and the Joint Chiefs of Staff assured Obama that they could do the job, at only slightly greater risk, with 30,000.)

The White House officials calling for a steep troop withdrawal are reportedly arguing that they're not calling for a change in strategy. Rather, they say, recent developments allow us to pursue the same strategy with far fewer troops.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has publicly said that it's premature to make major withdrawals at this point, warning that doing so would threaten to reverse the gains we've made in the last year. Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. commander in Afghanistan, is thought to be on the same page as Gates, but he has not yet sent the president his recommendations, or list of options, on the subject. When he does (any day now), the debate inside the National Security Council will begin in full force.

Meanwhile, President Obama seems to be leaning toward the position of the White House aides, telling a TV interviewer on June 7, "By us killing Osama Bin Laden, getting al-Qaida back on its heels, stabilizing much of the country in Afghanistan so that the Taliban can't take it over … it's now time for us to recognize that we've accomplished a big chunk of our mission and that it's time for Afghans to take more responsibility."

This argument is a bit of an evasion. Killing Bin Laden, while immensely important, has not yet affected the insurgent groups that had scant affiliation with al-Qaida in the first place. Though Afghanistan is more stable than it was a year ago, most military and intelligence officials say it would likely not remain so for very long after a major U.S. withdrawal. And the question of whether we've accomplished "a big chunk of our mission" depends on what you think our mission is.

If the mission is strictly to erode al-Qaida's position in Afghanistan, then Obama shouldn't have sent the extra 30,000 troops to begin with; al-Qaida hasn't had more than a few hundred fighters in Afghanistan for several years. If the mission is to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists in the future, and if part of that goal involves leaving behind an Afghan army that can defend the country and an Afghan government that its people view as legitimate and worthy of active support, then, no, we're not there yet.

A more honest reason for pulling out large numbers of troops (10,000 or more) would be that the strategy isn't working and doesn't seem likely to work ever, at least not in President Hamid Karzai's Afghanistan. This argument is open to debate, but that is the debate worth having.

Two facts are widely acknowledged by all sides in this debate. First, Petraeus has made substantial progress in the fight against the insurgents. He and his team have killed a lot of mid- to upper-level Taliban fighters and commanders, disrupted their command and control network, and loosened -- in some cases, knocked away -- the Taliban's grip on swaths of territory, especially in the southern, heavily Pashtun provinces, where the militants once held unchallenged sway. (In reaction, some Taliban have taken the fight back to a few cities, including Kandahar City, where they're assassinating local officials; whether this marks a last gasp or a reshaping of the battlefield is as yet unclear.)

But second, this tactical progress on the strictly military level has not translated into much strategic progress on the much more vital political level. All wars are fought for political objectives, and this is doubly so for insurgency wars, in which the whole point is to create a "zone of security" so that the government can provide basic services and win the support of the population, undermining the base of support for the insurgents in the process. President Karzai has not taken advantage of the zone of security that U.S. and NATO (and, increasingly, Afghan) forces have fought so hard to create, at so much cost in lives and other resources.

It's a fair question to ask whether these strategic objectives will ever be met, regardless of how skillfully the U.S. and NATO forces plan and fight their counterinsurgency campaign. And if it's thought that the objectives can't be met, it's fair to demand at the very least that we scale back our objectives to something more feasible -- which would certainly require far fewer troops.

In most successful COIN campaigns throughout history, the host-nation government and the foreign government helping to defend it from an insurgency have shared a set of basic interests. In Afghanistan, this isn't the case. The United States needs the Afghan government to adopt reforms, so that some power can be shared with district leaders, and to fill its ministries with more competent officials, so that services can be provided to the people. But Karzai's power depends in large part on maintaining -- and buying off -- a network of cronies. Corruption and tight central control are part of the system; without it, he'd lose grip on the reins. Petraeus has built up some local self-defense units, independent of the Afghan National Army, to protect their own towns and villages. One of his aides, Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, has launched an anti-corruption effort. Both have had some results -- but they've been limited, perhaps inherently so.

Some officials also fear that the West is pouring so much money into Afghanistan (many times more than the country's total gross national product) that Karzai and his cronies -- who are getting rich from their slices of development contracts and economic aid -- would actually prefer that the war never end.

To say the least, this is a morbid situation.

If for whatever reason President Obama wants to draw down more troops than his military commanders recommend, that is his right as commander-in-chief. But it would be dishonest to justify such a move by claiming that the strategy is working, and therefore we can afford to make deeper troop cuts than expected. The thing is, we're not doing that fine. The insurgents are not so weak, and the Afghan army is not so strong, that the Taliban couldn't reoccupy large areas of land if the United States suddenly pulled out in large numbers.

It would be more honest to claim that, under the circumstances, the strategy itself needs a course correction.

The alternative course would be to follow what is likely to be the military's advice and withdraw only a few thousand troops -- but, at the same time, to issue stern warnings to Karzai (quietly, behind the scenes) that this really is his last chance to do what he needs to do to build an effective government that can keep insurgencies at bay over the long haul.

Two new factors improve the chances that a good cop/bad cop plan might actually work this time around. First, the Senate is about to confirm Ryan Crocker as the new U.S. ambassador to Kabul. Crocker is a shrewd, experienced diplomat (he was ambassador to Baghdad during Petraeus' time as commander in Iraq), and he has had experience in Afghanistan, as well. Karzai is likely to view him as a welcome replacement to Karl Eikenberry, who did little to disguise his distaste for Karzai. (Perhaps Eikenberry was right, but it may not be the best approach for an ambassador.)

Second, before the 2010 elections, a Democratic president would have faced no problem getting war funding from Congress: Nearly all Republicans would support him because they were hawks; enough Democrats would go along out of party loyalty. This is no longer true. Enough Democrats are tiring of the war, and enough Republicans are Tea Party libertarians that continued funding really is in jeopardy.

There is an opportunity here, perhaps the last opportunity, for the Obama administration to use the combination of tactical military gains, fresh diplomatic leadership, and serious fiscal threats from Congress -- an array of "sticks and carrots" more plentiful than any available in this war up until now -- as leverage to squeeze some major concessions from Karzai, to get him to adopt the reforms without which this war is a lost cause.

http://www.slate.com/id/2296538/