Fish Fear Me

Afghanistan: Decision

So tonight President Obama will deliver his address on the strategy and resources for Afghanistan going forward. Unless there's been some disinformation going around, he will commit 30,000 more troops fairly quickly and announce a July 2011 target to begin withdrawing from there. I wish I could say that months of study could allow me to firmly pronounce whether I thought all of this is right or wrong, but while I'm inclined to say that this decision falls into the right move possibilities, really who knows? Here are a few thoughts though:

• I'm not convinced that the gains the Taliban have made are the result of failure in military strategy. I think they are as much or likely more the result of failure on the civilian side to deliver the diplomatic/reconstruction goals and prod the national government of Afghanistan into enough reforms to deliver services to the provinces and districts.
• At this point though, the security situation is such that more troops will be required to hold and recapture areas so they are safe for the PRTs and other aid workers.
• I feel pretty certain that the vast majority of Afghans would prefer a reasonably functional non-Taliban national government over the Taliban. Much of the territory the Taliban holds has been captured through coercion and murder. Don't try to tell me that the population likes that any more than Iraqis liked the intimidation and terror tactics of al Qaeda or the Special Groups of the Mahdi Army in Iraq. Nobody wants to live that way.
• By dropping the number of troops from the requested 40,000, President Obama assumes a certain amount of political risk if it turns out to be not enough or if company level American forces are decimated or overrun because of a lack of spare quick reaction forces. There will be parts of Afghanistan that American forces will not go to now because the risk of being too far beyond assistance will be too great.
• Setting a withdrawal date is a bad idea. Any benefits now that he accrues domestically will become an albatross if conditions on the ground in just 18 months are such that a drawdown will lead to defeat. He'll be faced with breaking his promise or going down in history as the president(and party) who "lost Afghanistan." President Obama needs to be very careful how he words this tonight to avoid encouraging the Taliban, discouraging Aghan allies, and actually killing any hopes of success in the cradle. I'm skeptical that attaching a date to begin withdrawing will be anything other than a Taliban propaganda win and a disaster in the long run.
• 18 months is a very aggressive timeline to say that Afghan military and civilian capabilities will be good enough to begin withdrawing. It took four years to field Iraqi security forces capable of winning a fight, and that was only with American logistical support and force multpliers. I just don't see it happening in 18 months in Aghanistan. I just don't.
• The only way out of Aghanistan is through victory or a reasonable facsimile. Otherwise, how do we get out intact? You don't just teleport thousands of troops in a blink. If conditions are not sustainable and the president orders a withdrawal anyway there is a good possibility that a tipping point will be reached with a substantial number of brigades still in country. How do you get them out?
• He'll be on soon now. Bumping Charlie Brown? No biggie to me, but I'm thinking that could have been better timed.

Afghanistan: Some Links

Here are some links if you are looking for more info on Afghanistan and, like me, trying to figure out what the next step should be.

Here are two reports by Kenneth Katzman of the Congressional Research Service. Both are in pdf form and are not quick reads, but they have some very good background information on the people, politics, and history of Afghanistan.

• "Afghanistan: Post-War Governance,Security, and U.S. Policy" (July, 2008)
• "Afghanistan: Politics, Elections, and Government Performance" (August, 2009)

Steve Coll has a reasonable column in The New Yorker on the need for heavy lifting on the political side of the war.

• "War and Politics"

Elise Jordan in The Daily Beast on the messaging war.

• "Why Afghans Are Turning on America"

At Stratfor, George Friedman and Reva Bhalla analyze the McChrystal strategy and point out areas where it may fail.

• "The U.S. Challenge in Afghanistan"

I think McChrystal's strategy can succeed, but only with US civilian and political commitments just as deep as the military's. If the US cannot deliver the horsepower to improve the performance of the Afghan government at all levels, not to perfect, but to good enough for the people, it's not going to work. If President Obama and the international community do not make a real commitment that they will stay with it even when we experience setbacks and our own people grow weary, it's not going to work.

I have yet to see the State Department equivalent of McChrystal's assessment and overall strategy. That still makes me a little queasy about this whole thing. I know people want to see Obama commit to the McChrystal plan, but if the civilian side, both Afghan and US, cannot be accomplished we will be wasting the lives of hundreds if not thousands of US troops for nothing. Where is State's plan? If anyone has seen it, for heaven's sake, let me know.

Pondering Aghanistan

Last month I did a post on Afghanistan that put me squarely in the camp that was pushing for President Obama to quickly make a decision on whether he was going to follow the McChrystal strategy or not. After a month of reading various articles and opinions, and after the events of this week, I think I may have been hasty there. That delay for the last month may actually have provided the leverage needed to secure a key component of the McChrystal strategy: a central government that, while likely to be far more corrupt than we would like, is at least broadly perceived as legitimate and constitutional.

Would this good news have happened if Obama had already committed to more troops for Afghanistan?

President Barack Obama on Tuesday applauded Afghan President Hamid Karzai for accepting election fraud findings that invalidated nearly a third of the votes cast for him in August.

Obama said the breakthrough offers new hope that a credible Kabul government will emerge to partner with the U.S. and NATO in battling a resurgent Taliban insurgency and blocking al-Qaida's return.

I don't know for sure of course, but I have my doubts that Karzai would have accepted a runoff without the leverage of US support being withheld, or even withdrawn. My opinion of the counter-terrorism option for Afghanistan, where we stand off and use air strikes and special forces to keep al Qaeda from recreating bases there, is that it is ridiculous. But maybe it was never really intended to be implemented. It just had to be credible enough to make Karzai think that we were really considering it as an option. I'm not inclined to give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here, that he acted out a role in advocating the CT approach, but I can see how it could have been useful in pressuring Karzai.

I know my friends on the right are as anxious to see a decision made as I was, and maybe I'm giving Obama too much credit here. But intentional or not, I think that having that leverage over Karzai was important.

Afghanistan: What About State?

This is complete nonsense:

This bombshell was dropped by NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Wednesday:

The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would need 500,000 troops - boots on the ground - and five years to do the job. No one expects that the Afghan Army could step up to that. Are we gonna put even half that of U.S. troops there, and NATO forces? No way. [Morning Joe, September 23, 2009]

Or more likely it is a case of someone conflating Afghan and US/NATO troop levels. No, we are not going to put even half that number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. We don't have the troops to sustain a deployment for that long a time period. This strikes me as a fairly lame effort by Mitchell's source to try to get a talking point out there that would make the American public recoil and reject any escalation.

While much of the discussion this week has focused on the military strategy debate, a major point that McChrystal made in his report is that much of the problem is around the failure of the Afghan government to provide even the minimal services that most of the country wants and the flagrant corruption and injustice it apparently delivers where it is present. At least part of the Taliban success in parts of the countryside comes from providing some sort of stability, even if most people don't care for it, that is better than what the government is willing or able to deliver.

So what's the deal on the civilian side of the war effort? There is a lot of talk about Iraq diverting resources from Afghanistan as far as the U.S. military is concerned, and I think there is some truth in that. But some major portion of how we got where we are today seems to me to be a failure to develop civilian institutions. What went wrong there the past seven years or more? Did Iraq also divert civilian resources from Afghanistan? Because if so, and notwithstanding the many brave and hard-working civilians who did go to Iraq(especially those serving on the PRTs), it seems to me that our civilian agencies haven't exactly covered themselves in glory there either. So what is the stance of the State Department and other US civilian agencies? I've been wondering, where is their strategy?

Coming, I guess:

Karl W. Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul, is preparing a separate assessment of Afghanistan's political future and the controversy surrounding the recent presidential election there. Although President Hamid Karzai has said he won, based on a tally by the country's electoral commission, international monitors are investigating allegations of widespread fraud.

No timeline for that is listed in that article. I don't see how we can evaluate the military strategy though, without also seeing the civilian strategy and how they both mesh together. Or if they mesh together.

I think the US military has shown how they are ready to step it up and make progress in Afghanistan. Now we need to see what the State Department and other US civilian agencies are going to bring to the table.

Decision Time For Afghanistan

Gen. Stanley McChrystal's Afghanistan assessment and strategy recommendations report has been leaked to the Washington Post and is available in unclassified form at their site. After reading most of it, I think Bob Woodward does a pretty good job of summarizing both the substance and the tone of the report.

It's a pretty grim read and a clear warning of failure in Afghanistan if we do not adjust both strategy and resources.

Gen. McChrystal delivered his assessment three weeks ago. It appears that the White House is hesitating though, and in no hurry to make a decision. Bill Roggio contrasts the speed of change in deciding to surge in Iraq with the waffling that appears to be happening now regarding Aghanistan. Roggio asserts that, "Today, the military is perceiving that the administration is punting the question of a troop increase in Afghanistan, and the military is even questioning the administration's commitment to succeed in Afghanistan." The leak of the report and rumors of McChrystal threatening to resign if the White House doesn't stop dithering are intended to force the president to make a decision. Maybe, it's impossible for me to tell from where I sit.

The report itself seems to make sense to me. My sole skepticism is that based on what happened in Iraq, I think the goal of accelerating the training of more Afghan forces is probably unrealistic and we will carry the burden longer than McChrystal is willing to admit. I could be wrong about that though.

Regardless, it's time for a decision. At this point, I accept McChrystal's assessment that a reasonably stable Afghanistan is still achievable with the right commitment of resources. The price is worth it compared to the alternative of withdrawing and the almost certain return of al Qaeda safe havens. Perhaps the only worse move than that though, would be to half-ass the effort in Afghanistan and lose more troops for nothing.

On a related note, Michael Yon has made available a Frederick and Kimberly Kagan report on Afghanistan Force Requirements. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but at first glance it seems to dovetail with McChrystal's report as far as current assessment and strategy. It also has some very detailed info and maps on the current areas of contention and deployment of forces. Very good info if you are interested.