The president, vice president and an array of cabinet secretaries, intelligence chiefs, generals, diplomats and advisers gathered in a windowless basement room of the White House for three hours on Wednesday to chart a new course in Afghanistan. The one thing everyone could agree on: None of the choices is easy. Just six months after President Obama adopted what he called a "stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy" for Afghanistan and Pakistan, he is back at the same table starting from scratch.
The choices available to him are both disparate and not particularly palatable. He could stick with his March strategy, but his commander wants as many as 40,000 more troops to make it work. He could go radically in the other direction and embrace Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s idea of using fewer troops, focused more on hunting down leaders of Al Qaeda, but risk the collapse of the Afghan government. Or he could search for some middle-ground option that avoids the risks of the other two, but potentially find himself in a quagmire...
More at The New York Times.
On War, Obama Could Turn to GOP - Scott Wilson, Washington Post.
With much of his party largely opposed to expanding military operations in Afghanistan, President Obama could be forced into the awkward political position of turning to congressional Republicans for support if he follows the recommendations of the commanding US general there. Congressional Democrats have begun promoting a compromise package of additional resources for Afghanistan that would emphasize training for Afghan security forces but deny Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal the additional combat troops he has indicated he needs to regain the initiative against the Taliban insurgency.
The emerging Democratic consensus is likely to constrain the president as he considers how best to proceed with an increasingly unpopular war. On Wednesday, Obama chaired a three-hour discussion on Afghanistan with Cabinet members and senior officials at the White House. The meeting was largely a reassessment of the past eight years of American involvement in the region, with the president repeatedly probing his military and civilian advisers to justify their assumptions, according to one participant. This source said there was a recognition that the decision facing Obama is one of the most critical of his presidency...
More at The Washington Post.
Gates Doubts US's Afghan Strategy - Yochi J. Dreazen, Wall Street Journal.
President Barack Obama met with senior counselors for three hours Wednesday to launch his review of Afghan war strategy, amid indications that his defense secretary - the key link between the White House and the military - is among those undecided about the right approach. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the senior US commander in Kabul, is advocating a manpower-intensive counterinsurgency strategy that focuses on protecting the Afghan populace rather than hunting individual militants. He submitted a classified assessment over the weekend calling for up to 40,000 US reinforcements.
Mr. Obama met with senior military officials, diplomats and Cabinet members Wednesday as part of the review, which White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said was designed to "poke and prod" potential new approaches to the conflict. The discussion focused on the political and security situation on the ground, according to an administration official, with military commanders detailing the gains made by the insurgency and top diplomats discussing the Afghan election results that were marred by fraud claims. Mr. Obama focused his questioning on the current threat posed by al Qaeda and whether a resurgent Taliban would give al Qaeda leaders a new haven to regroup, the official said, which could indicate Mr. Obama is more concerned about the status of a threat to the US than overall stability in Afghanistan...
More at The Wall Street Journal.
Obama, War Council Review Afghanistan Strategy - Julian E. Barnes and Christi Parsons, Los Angeles Times.
President Obama, amid political contretemps at home and expanding international turmoil over the disputed Afghan election, summoned his war Cabinet to the White House on Wednesday for a high-stakes review of his Afghanistan strategy. The session, which produced no announcements concerning additional troops or strategy, came on a day in which the highest-ranking American serving in the United Nations mission in Afghanistan was fired. Peter W. Galbraith, who had pushed for more aggressive steps to deal with alleged vote fraud, had clashed with Kai Eide, the senior UN representative in Afghanistan. in what one US official called "an ugly dispute."
The White House billed Obama's war strategy meeting as a major discussion of options, and it offered the first opportunity for Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top US and allied commander in Afghanistan, to address the president directly since submitting a military assessment that called for an expanded counterinsurgency campaign and pointed to the likely need for more troops. With no major decisions reached, another meeting was set for Wednesday. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama remains committed to his goals, to "disrupt, dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda and its extremist allies" and prevent the reemergence of safe havens...
More at The Los Angeles Times.
Comments
It's remarkable to me that we are having this protracted discussion of Afghan strategy. For anyone who has worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, seeing first hand how we learned the lessons of counter-insurency the hard way, the solutions are pretty straight forward. The unfortunate thing about Afghanistan is that it lends itself to romanticism so people rediscover the counter-terrorism strategy (yes, a good idea but incomplete), or the "fewer troops is better" idea because we know the Afghans hate foreigners (do they really? It all depends on how you do it. We did liberate them after all and, most importantly, they see it that way), or the old carnard of withdrawal, as if the problems of Afghanistan won't affect us here or in the region. It seems like every new administration comes in with either the intellectual baggage of the last time they were in power or they want to apply the hard lessons of war they learned in the crucible of Washington, D.C. and not on the battlefields where they mattered.
I am reminded of the old planners adage if you give the commander 2 courses of action he will choose the third. Not to be flippant about such a serious situation as we have with Afghanistan but I wonder if there is a "COA 3" out there that the President can find.
I just wish we could get away from defining the debate as a choice between a pop-centric COIN strategy versus a CT strategy because these are not strategies. We are reduced to arguments like "my COIN strategy is better than your CT strategy" or "my pop-centric COIN strategy is better than your enemy-centric COIN strategy." I wish we could eliminate the terms COIN and CT and get to the real discussions of ends, ways, and means and in particular a detailed description of the ways we are going to use our means to achieve whatever ends we finally decide upon that our Nation must achieve.
COIN and CT are too often used as shorthand to describe the means of our strategy and I think it has prevented many of us from really thinking through the what (and why) must be done and the way we must get "it" (again, whatever we determine "it" is) accomplished. If we stop trying to strictly define our ways as an either/or between COIN and CT ( or pop-centric COIN versus enemy-centric COIN) we might be able to provide the President with a COA 3 that might be able to accomplish the end state. I think we are doing our nation a disservice by trying to argue COIN versus CT rather than laying out the comprehensive ways (with the required means) to achieve the end state our President tells us to achieve.
But I think this is the key quote:
"At the heart of the decision is defining Americas strategic interest in the region. Mr. Obama has called Afghanistan a "war of necessity" to stop it from becoming a haven again for Al Qaeda to attack America. The question is, how much danger is there and how many lives can be lost and dollars spent to minimize it?"
This is the most important thing we need to do - defining the US strategic interest in the region - (and of course there are supplemental and supporting questions to be answered with regards to our responsibility to Afghanistan writ large in terms of supporting its government and people, effects of US actions (continued operations, increase, or withdrawal) on the region, and the like). Once we define our strategic interest then we can then determine if that interest is narrowly defined as preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for AQ and then do the additional cost benefit analysis on achieving that.