Enjoy! Ty

Petraeus doesn’t seek ‘graceful exit’ from Afghanistan war. What’s the timeline?

Gen. David Petraeus last Sunday said he may recommend against any drawdown of troops next summer. Here’s what to expect in the coming year.

By Ben Arnoldy, Staff writer
posted August 16, 2010 at 9:30 am EDT

New Delhi — With the number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan surpassing 2,000 this weekend, what does the road ahead in Afghanistan look like?
The tally – now at 2,002 – comes from the independent iCasualties.org website. It includes 1,227 Americans, 331 Britons, 151 Canadians, and 45 French.

The mounting numbers have put pressure on coalition countries to wrap up their involvement in Afghanistan; the Netherlands ended its military mission Aug. 1, after four years. At the very least, such grim milestones offer a moment for taking stock and seeing what lies ahead.

September: Another Afghan election

Afghanistan is planning to hold parliamentary elections Sept. 18. More than 2,000 candidates are running for 240 seats in the lower house.

A top election official expressed serious concerns Saturday about the security preparations for the more than 6,000 polling stations. So far, two candidates have been killed, three kidnapped, and 10 threatened with death. Both candidates and voters have shifted their registration to Kabul due to insecurity in the provinces.

The election will still include suspected war criminals, even though the Electoral Complaint Commission (ECC) said it would try to disqualify candidates with ties to militias.

Early warning signs like voter registration problems and cynicism among candidates themselves suggest this election – like last year’s presidential contest – could be dogged by fraud.

October: Winter slowdown?

Traditionally, the intensity of the Afghan conflict has decreased over the winter months as some mountain passes fill with snow. That slowdown tends to start sometime in October or November.

If the trend continues this year, it could take some of the political pressure off President Obama as he enters a couple of crucial reviews. The first will be rendered by the American people, as they head to the polls in November; the second will be a strategic reassessment of the Afghan “surge.”

November: US Congressional elections

Whether the Afghan war factors much in the upcoming Congressional elections remains to be seen. On the one hand, voters tell pollsters that it’s far from top of mind. In a Gallup poll released Friday, two-thirds of Americans rate economic concerns as the nation’s top problem. Only 4 percent mentioned war.

That said, Afghanistan has dealt Obama almost nonstop negative news since he came into office on a pledge to fully resource the war. The conflict has eroded some confidence in Obama among his base, which is increasingly restive over a range of issues.

Political analysts are expecting losses for the Democrats at the polls, putting pressure on Obama for mid-term course changes. But those changes are likely to come in the domestic arena given voter concerns. Even the criticisms about the growing deficit have largely remained domestic, with the Tea Party remaining mute on the $325 billion Afghan price tag so far.

December: Obama’s policy review

Obama will reassess this December the strategic course he announced last December, namely the temporary build up of US soldiers to break the Taliban’s momentum and strengthen Afghanistan’s military and government.

In some ways, this reassessment was foreshadowed this summer when Obama chose a successor for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan. In tapping Gen. David Petraeus, Obama chose both the architect of the current strategy and the general with the most political capital in Washington. That decision makes significant changes in strategy unlikely.

Indeed, in interviews given to the press over the weekend, Petraeus said he did not come to Afghanistan to engineer a “graceful exit” and may recommend against any drawdown of troops next summer.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai today set a December deadline for closure of all private security companies in the country. US military officials have said they support the goal but would not comment on whether it would be possible in four months. There are currently about 26,000 private security contractors working for the US government in Afghanistan; replacing them would constitute a major force reconfiguration.

July 2011: Drawdown?

Lost in some of the initial reporting on Obama’s July “deadline” was that he only promised to begin drawing down force levels. That could mean bringing home tens of thousands of the current 140,000 foreign forces – or just a few thousand.

With reports of Taliban expansion on the battlefield, poor performance of independent Afghan operations, and Petraeus pushing for more time, any drawdown will likely be small.

//////////////////

Five myths about the Iraq troop withdrawal

By Kenneth M. Pollack
Sunday, August 22, 2010; B03, Washington Post

Early Thursday, less than two weeks before the president’s Aug. 31 deadline for ending American combat operations in Iraq, the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait. With the departure of this last combat brigade, the U.S. military presence in Iraq is now down to 50,000 troops, fewer than at any time since the 2003 invasion. The shift offers a useful moment to take stock of both how much has been accomplished and how much is left to be done in what is fast becoming our forgotten war.

As of this month, the United States no longer has combat troops in Iraq.
1.Not even close. Of the roughly 50,000 American military personnel who remain in Iraq, the majority are still combat troops — they’re just named something else. The major units still in Iraq will no longer be called “brigade combat teams” and instead will be called “advisory and assistance brigades.” But a rose by any other name is still a rose, and the differences in brigade structure and personnel are minimal.

American troops in Iraq will still go into harm’s way. They will still accompany Iraqi units on combat missions — even if only as “advisers.” American pilots will still fly combat missions in support of Iraqi ground forces. And American special forces will still face off against Iraqi terrorist groups in high-intensity operations. For that reason, when American troops leave their bases in Iraq, they will still, almost invariably, be in full “battle rattle” and ready for a fight.

What has changed over the past 12 to 18 months is the level of violence in Iraq. There is much less of it: The civil war and the insurgency have been suppressed and the terrorists have been marginalized, so American troops have been able to pass the majority of their remaining combat responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces. Most U.S. troops now have little expectation of seeing combat in Iraq. Instead, they are spending more time acting as peacekeepers, protecting personnel and facilities, and advising Iraqi formations. But that didn’t start this month: It’s more or less what they have been doing since the “clear and hold” operations to take back the country from militias and insurgents ended in 2008.

Thanks to the troop “surge,” Iraq is secure enough that it will not fall back into civil war as U.S. forces pull out.
2.Security in Iraq has improved enormously since the darkest days of 2005-2006, but the jury is still out on what will happen in the months and years ahead.

Extensive research on intercommunal civil wars — wars like Iraq’s, in which a breakdown in governance prompts different communities to fight one another for power — finds a dangerous propensity toward recidivism. Moreover, the fear, anger, greed and desire for revenge that helped propel Iraq into civil war in the first place remain just beneath the surface.

Academic studies of scores of civil wars from the past century show that roughly 50 percent of the time, war will recur within five years of a cease-fire. If the country has major “lootable” resources such as gold, diamonds or oil, the odds climb higher still. The important bright spot, however, is that if a great power is willing to make a long-term commitment to serving as peacekeeper and mediator (the role the United States is playing in Iraq today), the recidivism rate drops to less than one in three. This is why an ongoing American commitment to Iraq is so important.

It’s also worth pointing out that a civil war doesn’t recur because the public desires one. Most people recognize that civil war is a disaster. Instead, such wars flare up again because leaders still believe they can achieve their objectives by force. Until they are convinced otherwise — ideally, by a great power’s military forces — they will revert to fighting.

The United States is leaving behind a broken political system.
3.If some on the right want to claim (incorrectly) that the surge stabilized Iraq to the point that civil war is impossible, their counterparts on the left try to insist (equally incorrectly) that the change in U.S. tactics and strategy in 2007-2008 had no impact on Iraq’s politics whatsoever.

Partisans will debate the impact of the surge for years to come, and historians will take up the fight thereafter. However, Iraqi politics are fundamentally different today than they were in 2006. The nation’s political leaders have been forced to embrace democracy — in many cases very grudgingly, but embrace it they have. Party leaders no longer scheme to kill their rivals, but to outvote them. They can no longer intimidate voters; they have to persuade them. And the smart ones have figured out that they must deliver what their constituents want, namely, effective governance, jobs, and services such as electricity and clean water.

Yes, Iraqi politics remain deadlocked and deeply dysfunctional, and yes, long-term stability and short-term economic needs depend on further political progress. But it is now possible to imagine Iraq muddling on toward real peace, pluralism and even prosperity — if it gets the right breaks and a fair amount of continuing help from the United States, the United Nations and its neighbors.

Iraqis want U.S. troops to stay. Or they want them leave.
4. Be very, very careful with Iraqi public opinion. Polls are rarely subtle enough to capture the complexity of Iraqi views. Typically, they show a small number of Iraqis who want the Americans out immediately at any cost, a small number who want them to stay forever and a vast majority in the middle — determined that U.S. troops should leave, but only after a certain period of time. When Iraqis are asked how long they believe our troops are needed, their answers range from a few months to a few years, but are strongly linked to however long the respondent believes it will take Iraq’s forces to be able to handle security on their own.

One typically hears the same from people across Iraq and throughout its social and political strata. Iraqis are nationalistic, and they resent the American military presence. Many are also bitter over the mess that the United States made by invading and then failing to secure the country or to begin a comprehensive rebuilding process, failures that led to civil war in 2005-2006. Most Iraqis are relieved to have been rescued from that descent and are frightened that it will resume when the Americans leave. This is because their security forces are still untested and their political process has yet to show the kind of maturity that would provide Iraqis confidence that they are safe from the threat of more civil war. Consequently, a great many people are both determined to see all American troops leave — and terrified that they actually will.

The war will end “on schedule.”
5. Much as we should want the Obama administration to succeed in Iraq, this statement by the president in a speech to veterans this month should make us wary. If uttered in the first act of a Greek tragedy, it is exactly the kind of claim that would end in a Sophoclean fall.

As George W. Bush learned to his dismay, once you start a war, a lot of bad, unpredictable things can happen. No war has ever gone precisely according to schedule, not even those that have ended in the most dramatic victories, such as Israel’s Six-Day War or the Persian Gulf War. What’s more, war’s aftereffects linger for many years.

Going forward, America’s involvement in Iraq can (and hopefully will ) be much reduced, but the need for a U.S. presence will endure for many years. Iraq has demonstrated great potential, but at this point it is only potential. The country still holds great peril as well — not just for Iraqis, but for our interests in one of the world’s most strategically important regions.

For these reasons, Obama was right to also warn that the United States will need to remain deeply involved in Iraq and will probably face casualties there in the years to come, regardless of how we label our mission.

Kenneth M. Pollack is the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is “A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East.”

Several of you have chided me for not critically looking at ”Option 2” for Afghanistan, the so-called “Counter-Terrorism” alternative that VP Biden apparently favored. That approach has been expanded to include more reliance on UAVs (Predators), Special Forces units, night operations, and heavy CIA para-military involvement.

I agree. On the surface the CT option seems attractive, especially when compared to the current approach, “Counter-Insurgency” (COIN), which involves extensive US/allied force levels for a prolonged period, nation-building, training of the Afghan police and army, and persuading dissident elements to cross over.

While CT seems attractive on the surface—it would require minimal troops, relies on application of firepower and stealth equipment, and pushes democracy creation to the back-burner—in reality it is hard to see how it would work. Where will the Predators and Special Forces units be stationed? Isn’t it likely that abandoning COIN would mean a Taliban takeover of Afstan, with AQ gaining a sanctuary again? Wouldn’t this destabilize Pakistan? As the article below notes, reliance on the application of military power and Intel together is seductive, but how well CT can accomplish our objectives is uncertain at best.

Incidentally, GEN Dave Petraeus is making the rounds of the talk shows, emphasizing these key points: (1) The war was not properly fought or resourced under Bush 43; (2) COIN is the right strategy; (3) The July 2011 date for beginning a draw-down is “conditions-based”, but he still believes that it is realistic.; (4) More efforts will be made to attract insurgents who are less than committed to the Taliban to cross over. Significantly, no mention of shifting to a CT strategy (and certainly no indication of considering Option 3—just pull out and let ‘em go at it).

The article below takes a hard look at our increasing reliance and belief in the efficacy of “counter-terrorism” globally, especially the use of UAVs, Special Forces, and CIA paramilitary operations. While it focuses on current ops in Yemen, the piece (highlighted and abridged here) has a broader application. Long but well worth perusing.

Finally, as I read these accounts of our shifting strategies, I continue to be surprised and struck by the Obama administration’s aggressive approach to the war on terrorism (or whatever it is called now)–Three troop surges in Afghanistan, increased use of Predator drones and Special Operations Forces globally, reliance on “targeted assassinations”, etc. And haven’t heard a word of complaint from his liberal base on this, or on the other hand, much praise from the conservatives. Interesting!

-      Ty

NYT, August 14, 2010

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents

By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

WASHINGTON — At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accepted responsibility for the death and paid blood money to the offended tribes.

The strike, though, was not the work of Mr. Saleh’s decrepit Soviet-era air force. It was a secret mission by the United States military, according to American officials, at least the fourth such assault on Al Qaeda in the arid mountains and deserts of Yemen since December.

The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.

While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed.

Obama administration officials point to the benefits of bringing the fight against Al Qaeda and other militants into the shadows. Afghanistan and Iraq, they said, have sobered American politicians and voters about the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world.

Instead of “the hammer,” in the words of John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, America will rely on the “scalpel.” In a speech in May, Mr. Brennan, an architect of the White House strategy, used this analogy while pledging a “multigenerational” campaign against Al Qaeda and its extremist affiliates.

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties.

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

A Proving Ground

Yemen is a testing ground for the “scalpel” approach Mr. Brennan endorses. Administration officials warn of the growing strength of Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, citing as evidence its attempt on Dec. 25 to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner using a young Nigerian operative. Some American officials believe that militants in Yemen could now pose an even greater threat than Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

The officials said that they have benefited from the Yemeni government’s new resolve to fight Al Qaeda and that the American strikes — carried out with cruise missiles and Harrier fighter jets — had been approved by Yemen’s leaders. The strikes, administration officials say, have killed dozens of militants suspected of plotting future attacks. The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have quietly bulked up the number of their operatives at the embassy in Sana, the Yemeni capital, over the past year.

“Where we want to get is to much more small scale, preferably locally driven operations,” said Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, who serves on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. “For the first time in our history, an entity has declared a covert war against us,” Mr. Smith said, referring to Al Qaeda. “And we are using similar elements of American power to respond to that covert war.”

Some security experts draw parallels to the cold war, when the United States drew heavily on covert operations as it fought a series of proxy battles with the Soviet Union.

And some of the central players of those days have returned to take on supporting roles in the shadow war. Michael G. Vickers, who helped run the C.I.A.’s campaign to funnel guns and money to the Afghanistan mujahedeen in the 1980s and was featured in the book and movie “Charlie Wilson’s War,” is now the top Pentagon official overseeing Special Operations troops around the globe. Duane R. Clarridge, a profane former C.I.A. officer who ran operations in Central America and was indicted in the Iran-contra scandal, turned up this year helping run a Pentagon-financed private spying operation in Pakistan.

In pursuing this strategy, the White House is benefiting from a unique political landscape. Republican lawmakers have been unwilling to take Mr. Obama to task for aggressively hunting terrorists, and many Democrats seem eager to embrace any move away from the long, costly wars begun by the Bush administration.

Still, it has astonished some old hands of the military and intelligence establishment. Jack Devine, a former top C.I.A. clandestine officer who helped run the covert war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said his record showed that he was “not exactly a cream puff” when it came to advocating secret operations.

But he warned that the safeguards introduced after Congressional investigations into clandestine wars of the past — from C.I.A. assassination attempts to the Iran-contra affair, in which money from secret arms dealings with Iran was funneled to right-wing rebels in Nicaragua known as the contras — were beginning to be weakened. “We got the covert action programs under well-defined rules after we had made mistakes and learned from them,” he said. “Now, we’re coming up with a new model, and I’m concerned there are not clear rules.”

Cooperation and Control

The initial American strike in Yemen came on Dec. 17, hitting what was believed to be a Qaeda training camp in Abyan Province, in the southern part of the country. The first report from the Yemeni government said that its air force had killed “around 34” Qaeda fighters there, and that others had been captured elsewhere in coordinated ground operations.

The next day, Mr. Obama called President Saleh to thank him for his cooperation and pledge continuing American support. Mr. Saleh’s approval for the strike — rushed because of intelligence reports that Qaeda suicide bombers might be headed to Sana — was the culmination of administration efforts to win him over, including visits by Mr. Brennan and Gen. David H. Petraeus, then the commander of military operations in the Middle East.

As word of the Dec. 17 attack filtered out, a very mixed picture emerged. The Yemeni press quickly identified the United States as responsible for the strike. Qaeda members seized on video of dead children and joined a protest rally a few days later, broadcast by Al Jazeera, in which a speaker shouldering an AK-47 rifle appealed to Yemeni counterterrorism troops.

“Soldiers, you should know we do not want to fight you,” the Qaeda operative, standing amid angry Yemenis, declared. “There is no problem between you and us. The problem is between us and America and its agents. Beware taking the side of America!”

A Navy ship offshore had fired the weapon in the attack, a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs, according to a report by Amnesty International. Unlike conventional bombs, cluster bombs disperse small munitions, some of which do not immediately explode, increasing the likelihood of civilian causalities. The use of cluster munitions, later documented by Amnesty, was condemned by human rights groups.

American officials cited strained resources for decisions about some of the Yemen strikes. With the C.I.A.’s armed drones tied up with the bombing campaign in Pakistan, the officials said, cruise missiles were all that was available at the time. Drones are favored by the White House for clandestine strikes because they can linger over targets for hours or days before unleashing Hellfire missiles, reducing the risk that women, children or other noncombatants will fall victim.

The Yemen operation has raised a broader question: who should be running the shadow war? White House officials are debating whether the C.I.A. should take over the Yemen campaign as a “covert action,” which would allow the United States to carry out operations even without the approval of Yemen’s government. By law, covert action programs require presidential authorization and formal notification to the Congressional intelligence committees. No such requirements apply to the military’s so-called Special Access Programs, like the Yemen strikes.

Obama administration officials defend their efforts in Yemen. The strikes have been “conducted very methodically,” and claims of innocent civilians being killed are “very much exaggerated,” said a senior counterterrorism official. He added that comparing the nascent Yemen campaign with American drone strikes in Pakistan was unfair, since the United States has had a decade to build an intelligence network in Pakistan that feeds the drone program.

In part, the spotty record of the Yemen airstrikes may derive from another unavoidable risk of the new shadow war: the need to depend on local proxies who may be unreliable or corrupt, or whose agendas differ from that of the United States.

American officials have a troubled history with Mr. Saleh, a wily political survivor who cultivates radical clerics at election time and has a history of making deals with jihadists. Until recently, taking on Al Qaeda had not been a priority for his government, which has been fighting an intermittent armed rebellion since 2004.

And for all Mr. Saleh’s power — his portraits hang everywhere in the Yemeni capital — his government is deeply unpopular in the remote provinces where the militants have sought sanctuary. The tribes there tend to regularly switch sides, making it difficult to depend on them for information about Al Qaeda. “My state is anyone who fills my pocket with money,” goes one old tribal motto.

The Yemeni security services are similarly unreliable and have collaborated with jihadists at times. The United States has trained elite counterterrorism teams there in recent years, but the military still suffers from corruption and poor discipline.

American officials said President Saleh was angry about the strike in May, but not so angry as to call for a halt to the clandestine American operations. “At the end of the day, it’s not like he said, ‘No more,’ ” said one Obama administration official. “He didn’t kick us out of the country.”

Weighing Success

Despite the airstrike campaign, the leadership of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula survives, and there is little sign the group is much weaker.

Attacks by Qaeda militants in Yemen have picked up again, with several deadly assaults on Yemeni army convoys in recent weeks. Al Qaeda’s Yemen branch has managed to put out its first English-language online magazine, Inspire, complete with bomb-making instructions. Intelligence officials believe that Samir Khan, a 24-year-old American who arrived from North Carolina last year, played a major role in producing the slick publication.

As a test case, the strikes have raised the classic trade-off of the post-Sept. 11 era: Do the selective hits make the United States safer by eliminating terrorists? Or do they help the terrorist network frame its violence as a heroic religious struggle against American aggression, recruiting new operatives for the enemy?

Most Yemenis have little sympathy for Al Qaeda and have observed the American strikes with “passive indignation,” Mr. Eryani said. But, he added, “I think the strikes over all have been counterproductive.”

Obama administration officials say what they are doing — is sharply increasing the foreign aid budget for Yemen and offering both money and advice to address the country’s crippling problems. They emphasized that the core of the American effort was not the strikes but training for elite Yemeni units, providing equipment and sharing intelligence to support Yemeni sweeps against Al Qaeda.

Still, the historical track record of limited military efforts like the Yemen strikes is not encouraging. Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, examines in a forthcoming book what he has labeled “discrete military operations” from the Balkans to Pakistan since the end of the cold war in 1991. He found that these operations seldom achieve either their military or political objectives.

But he said that over the years, military force had proved to be a seductive tool that tended to dominate “all the discussions and planning” and push more subtle solutions to the side.

When terrorists threaten Americans, Mr. Zenko said, “there is tremendous pressure from the National Security Council and the Congressional committees to, quote, ‘do something.’ ”

That is apparent to visitors at the American Embassy in Sana, who have noticed that it is increasingly crowded with military personnel and intelligence operatives. For now, the shadow warriors are taking the lead.

Muhammad al-Ahmadi contributed reporting from Yemen

Just a couple months back it seemed like our small sub-group of the NSF here in Reno focusing on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was operating on the margins of the mainstream of strategic thought when we began discussing “Option B”–what does the U.S. do when it becomes clear the struggle is not worth the cost, the price too high to bear?

Suddenly this has become the common denominator!

While this seems to be a conclusion many of us have reached, and most national experts, the question came up–Have the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the JCS, GEN Petraeus, etc., come to the same conclusion? And, if so, what course of action do they propose?

First, below, a statement by the National Security Advisor, GEN James Jones, commenting on leaks that appeared in the media regarding pessimistic assessments by U.S. officials on the war, and, particularly, on the double game that Pakistan (especially the ISI) is playing in actively assisting the Taliban and the insurgents. I include this statement not so much on the condemnation of the leaks, but that Jones strongly reemphasizes what would happen should the U.S. falter in its commitment and that we will be staying the course.

The 2nd piece summarizes the shift in strategic thinking against the war, with even the most enthusiastic advocates of COIN now apparently hoisting the white flag. Both pieces highlighted and abridged. –  Ty

THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

______________________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release                                                                                            July 25, 2010

Statement of National Security Advisor GEN James Jones on Wikileaks

The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.

On December 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years. This shift in strategy addressed challenges in Afghanistan that were the subject of an exhaustive policy review last fall. We know that serious challenges lie ahead, but if Afghanistan is permitted to slide backwards, we will again face a threat from violent extremist groups like al Qaeda who will have more space to plot and train. That is why we are now focused on breaking the Taliban’s momentum and building Afghan capacity so that the Afghan government can begin to assume responsibility for its future. The United States remains committed to a strong, stable, and prosperous Afghanistan.

Since 2009, the United States and Pakistan have deepened our important bilateral partnership. Counter-terrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against al Qaeda’s leadership. The Pakistani military has gone on the offensive in Swat and South Waziristan, at great cost to the Pakistani military and people. The United States and Pakistan have also commenced a Strategic Dialogue, which has expanded cooperation on issues ranging from security to economic development. Pakistan and Afghanistan have also improved their bilateral ties, most recently through the completion of a Transit-Trade Agreement. Yet the Pakistani government – and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services – must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift decisively against al Qaeda and its extremist allies. U.S. support for Pakistan will continue to be focused on building Pakistani capacity to root out violent extremist groups, while supporting the aspirations of the Pakistani people.

////////////////

July 22, 2010

Afghanistan Exit Strategy Watch
Posted by Michael Cohen

So I’m about to do something decidedly unwise; I’m going to go a bit out on a limb in predicting where things are headed with the US mission in Afghanistan. As you can see from the title above; I have a sneaking suspicion that something has dramatically changed about the national discourse regarding our policy in Afghanistan.

The first and most obvious sign – and perhaps the catalyst for change – was the replacement of Stanley McChrsytal with David Petraeus. As I wrote at the time, President Obama was getting rid of a general who seemed to be operating under the premise that the US could win in Afghanistan (and was in it for the long haul) versus one who has shown a history of more pragmatic behavior and a better understanding of political realities.

But really since then it feels like the whole narrative on Afghanistan has changed. Once upon a time US options in Afghanistan were reduced, in popular debates, to staying the course or cutting and running. But in recent weeks you’ve had Robert Blackwill call for de jure partition of Afghanistan; Richard Haass is now arguing that Afghanistan is not worth it and we need to drawdown; Fareed Zakaria is expressing incredulity at the level of US commitment to Afghanistan to combat a minimal threat. Hell even Newt Gingrich said things “won’t end well” there.

And today in the New York Times, David Sanger makes the following observation, “Mr. Obama has begun losing critical political figures and strategists who are increasingly vocal in arguing that the benefits of continuing on the current course for at least another year, and probably longer, are greatly outweighed by the escalating price.”

Aside from John Nagl, it’s getting harder and harder to find anyone who thinks things are going well, we’re going to “win” in Afghanistan or that a course correction is unneeded. (Well of course, the Obama Administration would be the other exception).

So with that backdrop, on Monday I went to hear David Kilcullen at an event hosted by the World Policy Institute here in New York. As you can likely imagine I was loaded for bear, ready to take on Kilcullen’s pro-COIN arguments.

Well he started off by going through all the reasons why you don’t want to do counter-insurgency. And this wasn’t an Accidental Guerrilla argument; it was a litany of the challenges in trying to capture “hearts and minds” or fighting your way out of a COIN fight or trying to marshall political will or relying on a host country government for support or trying to “out-service provide” your enemy etc. In short, Kilcullen was basically making the basic anti-COIN argument.

So I then asked what seemed like an obvious follow-up observation: knowing all the inherent challenges in fighting a counter-insurgency – and considering the US-imposed timeline for beginning withdrawals from Afghanistan – isn’t it pretty much a terrible idea to try and wage a COIN campaign in Afghanistan today.

And Kilcullen basically said yes, arguing instead that the US should move away from COIN and focus more on stability operations. He talked about the need for a bottom-up rather than top-down strategy and the importance of devoting more resources to stable areas of Afghanistan, rather than the red zones in the south and east.

By the time he was done, I leaned over to a friend and noted that Kilcullen answered my question pretty much the exact same way I would have.

Now the fact that David Kilcullen and I agree on the hopelessness of doing COIN in Afghanistan is, in of itself, not terribly interesting. After all, if you go back to the fall Kilcullen was sounding some discordant notes about the Obama Administration trying to find some middle way to find a counter-insurgency. He seemed to be arguing that it was an all or nothing. I don’t really agree with that, because it sort of assumed COIN or nothing; but to Kilcullen’s credit he was willing to push back on the conventional wisdom.

But what is interesting, I think, is that now (in July 2010) Kilcullen seems to have basically concluded that the current mission can’t work – and that the hopes for a successful counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan have come and gone. And this is someone who just got done writing a book on counter-insurgency. (Note: The Australian COIN expert Kilkullen has been instrumental in advising the U.S. on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, and was a major influence in writing the COIN manual, FM 3-24. Ty)

Now I’m not arguing that as Kilcullen goes . . . so goes the US military or even the Obama Administration. But it seems increasingly clear that elite opinion on Afghanistan is beginning to shift against the current mission and toward a more limited set of goals. Unless Barack Obama is LBJ re-incarnated I think that has to, at some point, make a difference.

It will be interesting to see how things play out on the ground over the next few months, but I think we’ve hit a genuine inflection point on Afghan policy – and it leans toward de-escalation, not escalation.
//////////////

Well, this has been a most interesting week to be in Washington, hanging around the Pentagon, Capital Hill, and the Think Tanks. Obviously, the President’s decision and speech on Afghanistan has been thoroughly analyzed, dissected, criticized, and–in some instances–praised.

Observers were struck by how well and how fast the Administration moved to repair the damage done by the inclusion of the July 2011 date for the beginning of the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan. First, the President insisted this was a non-negotiable, drop dead, set in cement date. That didn’t sit well in the politico-military community here, and especially not in Kabul and Islamabad, so faster than you can say Predator, the Administration deployed everyone from Gates to Hillary to Jim Jones on the TV talk shows to insist that July 2011 was more of a, well, sort of, timeline for, maybe thinking about–if conditions permitted–some reductions in force. Impressive back pedal!

The Administration also laid the groundwork for a series of highly positive articles on the process by which the President made this decision–how we was on top of the material, how he sped up the deployments, how he peppered the field commanders with piercing questions. Voila–the next day every major news outlet had an “exclusive” behind the scenes portrayal of this highly sophisticated, deliberative process–no dithering, you understand.

Finally, addressing the concern many have, that is, what would the deployments mean for an Army under stress, close to being “broken” according to some experts? The Secretary of the Army and the Chief stated firmly that the troop surge could be handled without any changes to previous commitments to the soldiers. That is–no renewal of the “Stop Loss” policy, no return to 15-month tours, no reductions in “dwell time” between deployments. That’s great news, but will be hard to do and will obviously depend, for one, on serious reductions of our forces in Iraq following the (we hope) January elections.

Three articles today on these topics. First, the announcement by the Army on the deployment implications:

Click here: Deployment length, dwell time, and end of stop loss not affected by Afghanistan troop increase

Second, an abridged and highlighted article on the “we really didn’t mean it” about the July 2011 withdrawal date:

December 7, 2009
No Firm Plans for a U.S. Exit in Afghanistan
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.

In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be startng to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.

The television appearances by the senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council seemed to be part of a focused and determined effort to ease concerns about the president’s emphasis on setting a date for reducing America’s presence in Afghanistan after more than eight years of war.

“There isn’t a deadline,” Mr. Gates said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “What we have is a specific date on which we will begin transferring responsibility for security district by district, province by province in Afghanistan, to the Afghans.”

The president’s speech set off alarms inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, as some officials worried about an American pullout before Afghan troops were ready to fight the Taliban on their own. It also set off a barrage of criticism from Republicans that the president was setting an arbitrary withdrawal date that would embolden Taliban insurgents to wait the Americans out

During weeks of wrenching internal debate, administration officials decided on the July 2011 benchmark in part to send a signal to Afghanistan’s government that the clock was ticking for Afghan troops to take a greater role against the Taliban. The message was intended equally for domestic consumption: assuring skeptical Democratic lawmakers and many Americans that the United States military presence in Afghanistan was not open-ended.

But the White House has also faced sharp criticism from Republicans, who said it made little military sense to set a withdrawal date 18 months in the future because it handed the American strategy to the enemy.

The announcement of the July 2011 benchmark was also greeted with concern during private conversations among American officials and their counterparts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and administration officials in recent days have acknowledged that they were surprised by the intensity of the anxiety among Afghan and Pakistani officials that the United States would beat a hasty retreat from the region.

///////////////
Third, and I thought I would not abridge or shorten this long but incisive piece for those of you who would like to get a good sense of the lengthy process that led up to the President’s decision and announcement.

http://www.nytimes.com/

December 6, 2009
How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan
On Veterans Day, President Obama visited a section of Arlington National Cemetery reserved for service members killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — On the afternoon he held the eighth meeting of his Afghanistan review, President Obama arrived in the White House Situation Room ruminating about war. He had come from Arlington National Cemetery, where he had wandered among the chalky white tombstones of those who had fallen in the rugged mountains of Central Asia.

How much their sacrifice weighed on him that Veterans Day last month, he did not say. But his advisers say he was haunted by the human toll as he wrestled with what to do about the eight-year-old war. Just a month earlier, he had mentioned to them his visits to wounded soldiers at the Army hospital in Washington. “I don’t want to be going to Walter Reed for another eight years,” he said then.

The economic cost was troubling him as well after he received a private budget memo estimating that an expanded presence would cost $1 trillion over 10 years, roughly the same as his health care plan.

Now as his top military adviser ran through a slide show of options, Mr. Obama expressed frustration. He held up a chart showing how reinforcements would flow into Afghanistan over 18 months and eventually begin to pull out, a bell curve that meant American forces would be there for years to come.

“I want this pushed to the left,” he told advisers, pointing to the bell curve. In other words, the troops should be in sooner, then out sooner.

When the history of the Obama presidency is written, that day with the chart may prove to be a turning point, the moment a young commander in chief set in motion a high-stakes gamble to turn around a losing war. By moving the bell curve to the left, Mr. Obama decided to send 30,000 troops mostly in the next six months and then begin pulling them out a year after that, betting that a quick jolt of extra forces could knock the enemy back on its heels enough for the Afghans to take over the fight.

The three-month review that led to the escalate-then-exit strategy is a case study in decision making in the Obama White House — intense, methodical, rigorous, earnest and at times deeply frustrating for nearly all involved. It was a virtual seminar in Afghanistan and Pakistan, led by a president described by one participant as something “between a college professor and a gentle cross-examiner.”

Mr. Obama peppered advisers with questions and showed an insatiable demand for information, taxing analysts who prepared three dozen intelligence reports for him and Pentagon staff members who churned out thousands of pages of documents.

This account of how the president reached his decision is based on dozens of interviews with participants as well as a review of notes some of them took during Mr. Obama’s 10 meetings with his national security team. Most of those interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, but their accounts have been matched against those of other participants wherever possible.

Mr. Obama devoted so much time to the Afghan issue — nearly 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving alone — that he joked, “I’ve got more deeply in the weeds than a president should, and now you guys need to solve this.” He invited competing voices to debate in front of him, while guarding his own thoughts. Even David Axelrod, arguably his closest adviser, did not know where Mr. Obama would come out until just before Thanksgiving.

With the result uncertain, the outsize personalities on his team vied for his favor, sometimes sharply disagreeing as they made their arguments. The White House suspected the military of leaking details of the review to put pressure on the president. The military and the State Department suspected the White House of leaking to undercut the case for more troops. The president erupted at the leaks with an anger advisers had rarely seen, but he did little to shut down the public clash within his own government.

“The president welcomed a full range of opinions and invited contrary points of view,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said in an interview last month. “And I thought it was a very healthy experience because people took him up on it. And one thing we didn’t want — to have a decision made and then have somebody say, ‘Oh, by the way.’ No, come forward now or forever hold your peace.”

The decision represents a complicated evolution in Mr. Obama’s thinking. He began the process clearly skeptical of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, but the more he learned about the consequences of failure, and the more he narrowed the mission, the more he gravitated toward a robust if temporary buildup, guided in particular by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

Yet even now, he appears ambivalent about what some call “Obama’s war.” Just two weeks before General McChrystal warned of failure at the end of August, Mr. Obama described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity.” When he announced his new strategy last week, those words were nowhere to be found. Instead, while recommitting to the war on Al Qaeda, he made clear that the larger struggle for Afghanistan had to be balanced against the cost in blood and treasure and brought to an end.

Aides, though, said the arduous review gave Mr. Obama comfort that he had found the best course he could. “The process was exhaustive, but any time you get the president of the United States to devote 25 hours, anytime you get that kind of commitment, you know it was serious business,” said Gen. James L. Jones, the president’s national security adviser. “From the very first meeting, everyone started with set opinions. And no opinion was the same by the end of the process.”

Taking Control of a War

Mr. Obama ran for president supportive of the so-called good war in Afghanistan and vowing to send more troops, but he talked about it primarily as a way of attacking Republicans for diverting resources to Iraq, which he described as a war of choice. Only after taking office, as casualties mounted and the Taliban gained momentum, did Mr. Obama really begin to confront what to do.

Even before completing a review of the war, he ordered the military to send 21,000 more troops there, bringing the force to 68,000. But tension between the White House and the military soon emerged when General Jones, a retired Marine four-star general, traveled to Afghanistan in the summer and was surprised to hear officers already talking about more troops. He made it clear that no more troops were in the offing.

With the approach of Afghanistan’s presidential election in August, Mr. Obama’s two new envoys — Richard C. Holbrooke, the president’s special representative to the region, and Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired commander of troops in Afghanistan now serving as ambassador — warned of trouble, including the possibility of angry Afghans marching on the American Embassy or outright civil war.

“There are 10 ways this can turn out,” one administration official said, summing up the envoys’ presentation, “and 9 of them are messy.”

The worst did not happen, but widespread fraud tainted the election and shocked some in the White House as they realized that their partner in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, was hopelessly compromised in terms of public credibility.

At the same time, the Taliban kept making gains. The Central Intelligence Agency drew up detailed maps in August charting the steady progression of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, maps that would later be used extensively during the president’s review. General McChrystal submitted his own dire assessment of the situation, warning of “mission failure” without a fresh infusion of troops.

While General McChrystal did not submit a specific troop request at that point, the White House knew it was coming and set out to figure out what to do. General Jones organized a series of meetings that he envisioned lasting a few weeks. Before each one, he convened a rehearsal session to impose discipline — “get rid of the chaff,” one official put it — that included Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and other cabinet-level officials. Mr. Biden made a practice of writing a separate private memo to Mr. Obama before each meeting, outlining his thoughts.

The first meeting with the president took place on Sept. 13, a Sunday, and was not disclosed to the public that day. For hours, Mr. Obama and his top advisers pored through intelligence reports.

Unsatisfied, the president posed a series of questions: Does America need to defeat the Taliban to defeat Al Qaeda? Can a counterinsurgency strategy work in Afghanistan given the problems with its government? If the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, would nuclear-armed Pakistan be next?

The deep skepticism he expressed at that opening session was reinforced by Mr. Biden, who rushed back overnight from a California trip to participate. Just as he had done in the spring, Mr. Biden expressed opposition to an expansive strategy requiring a big troop influx. Instead, he put an alternative on the table — rather than focus on nation building and population protection, do more to disrupt the Taliban, improve the quality of the training of Afghan forces and expand reconciliation efforts to peel off some Taliban fighters.

Mr. Biden quickly became the most outspoken critic of the expected McChrystal troop request, arguing that Pakistan was the bigger priority, since that is where Al Qaeda is mainly based. “He was the bull in the china shop,” said one admiring administration official.

But others were nodding their heads at some of what he was saying, too, including General Jones and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

A Review Becomes News

The quiet review burst into public view when General McChrystal’s secret report was leaked to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post a week after the first meeting. The general’s grim assessment jolted Washington and lent urgency to the question of what to do to avoid defeat in Afghanistan.

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the regional commander, secretly flew to an American air base in Germany for a four-hour meeting with General McChrystal on Sept. 25. He handed them his troop request on paper — there were no electronic versions and barely 20 copies in all.

The request outlined three options for different missions: sending 80,000 more troops to conduct a robust counterinsurgency campaign throughout the country; 40,000 troops to reinforce the southern and eastern areas where the Taliban are strongest; or 10,000 to 15,000 troops mainly to train Afghan forces.

General Petraeus took one copy, while Admiral Mullen took two back to Washington and dropped one off at Mr. Gates’s home next to his in a small military compound in Washington. But no one sent the document to the White House, intending to process it through the Pentagon review first.

Mr. Obama was focused on another report. At 10 p.m. on Sept. 29, he called over from the White House residence to the West Wing to ask for a copy of the first Afghanistan strategy he approved in March to ramp up the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban while increasing civilian assistance. A deputy national security adviser, Denis McDonough, brought him a copy to reread overnight. When his national security team met the next day, Mr. Obama complained that elements of that plan had never been enacted.

The group went over the McChrystal assessment and drilled in on what the core goal should be. Some thought that General McChrystal interpreted the March strategy more ambitiously than it was intended to be. Mr. Biden asked tough questions about whether there was any intelligence showing that the Taliban posed a threat to American territory. But Mr. Obama also firmly closed the door on any withdrawal. “I just want to say right now, I want to take off the table that we’re leaving Afghanistan,” he told his advisers.

Tension with the military had been simmering since the leak of the McChrystal report, which some in the White House took as an attempt to box in the president. The friction intensified on Oct. 1 when the general was asked after a speech in London whether a narrower mission, like the one Mr. Biden proposed, would succeed. “The short answer is no,” he said.

White House officials were furious, and Mr. Gates publicly scolded advisers who did not keep their advice to the president private. The furor rattled General McChrystal, who, unlike General Petraeus, was not a savvy Washington operator. And it stunned others in the military, who were at first “bewildered by how over the top the reaction was from the White House,” as one military official put it.

It also proved to be what one review participant called a “head-snapping” moment of revelation for the military. The president, they suddenly realized, was not simply updating his previous strategy but essentially starting over from scratch.

The episode underscored the uneasy relationship between the military and a new president who, aides said, was determined not to be as deferential as he believed his predecessor, George W. Bush, was for years in Iraq. And the military needed to adjust to a less experienced but more skeptical commander in chief. “We’d been chugging along for eight years under an administration that had become very adept at managing war in a certain way,” said another military official.

Moreover, Mr. Obama had read “Lessons in Disaster,” Gordon M. Goldstein’s book on the Vietnam War. The book had become a must read in the West Wing after Mr. Emanuel had dinner over the summer at the house of another deputy national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, and wandered into his library to ask what he should be reading.

Among the conclusions that Mr. Donilon and the White House team drew from the book was that both President John F. Kennedy and President Lyndon B. Johnson failed to question the underlying assumption about monolithic Communism and the domino theory — clearly driving the Obama advisers to rethink the nature of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The Pakistan Question

While public attention focused on Afghanistan, some of the most intensive discussion focused on the country where Mr. Obama could send no troops — Pakistan. Pushed in particular by Mrs. Clinton, the president’s team explored the links between the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda, and Mr. Obama told aides that it did not matter how many troops were sent to Afghanistan if Pakistan remained a haven.

Many of the intelligence reports ordered by the White House during the review dealt with Pakistan’s stability and whether its military and intelligence services were now committed to the fight or secretly still supporting Taliban factions. According to two officials, there was a study of the potential vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, posing questions about potential insider threats and control of the warheads if the Pakistani government fell.

Mr. Obama and his advisers also considered options for stepping up the pursuit of extremists in Pakistan’s border areas. He eventually approved a C.I.A. request to expand the areas where remotely piloted aircraft could strike, and other covert action. The trick would be getting Pakistani consent, which still has not been granted.

On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.

“Why wasn’t there a 25 number?” one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: “It would have been too tempting.”

Mr. Gates and others talked about the limits of the American ability to actually defeat the Taliban; they were an indigenous force in Afghan society, part of the political fabric. This was a view shared by others around the table, including Leon E. Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., who argued that the Taliban could not be defeated as such and so the goal should be to drive wedges between those who could be reconciled with the Afghan government and those who could not be.

With Mr. Biden leading the skeptics, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Gates and Admiral Mullen increasingly aligned behind a more robust force. Mrs. Clinton wanted to make sure she was a formidable player in the process. “She was determined that her briefing books would be just as thick and just as meticulous as those of the Pentagon,” said one senior adviser. She asked hard questions about Afghan troop training, unafraid of wading into Pentagon territory.

After a meeting where the Pentagon made a presentation with impressive color-coded maps, Mrs. Clinton returned to the State Department and told her aides, “We need maps,” as one recalled. She was overseas during the next meeting on Oct. 14, when aides used her new maps to show civilian efforts but she participated with headphones on from her government plane flying back from Russia.

Mr. Gates was a seasoned hand at such reviews, having served eight presidents and cycled in and out of the Situation Room since the days when it was served by a battery of fax machines. Like Mrs. Clinton, he was sympathetic to General McChrystal’s request, having resolved his initial concern that a buildup would fuel resentment the way the disastrous Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did in the 1980s.

But Mr. Gates’s low-wattage exterior masks a wily inside player, and he knew enough to keep his counsel early in the process to let it play out more first. “When to speak is important to him; when to signal is important to him,” said a senior Defense Department official.

On Oct. 22, the National Security Council produced what one official called a “consensus memo,” much of which originated out of the defense secretary’s office, concluding that the United States should focus on diminishing the Taliban insurgency but not destroying it; building up certain critical ministries; and transferring authority to Afghan security forces.

There was no consensus yet on troop numbers, however, so Mr. Obama called a smaller group of advisers together on Oct. 26 to finally press Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Gates. Mrs. Clinton made it clear that she was comfortable with General McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops or something close to it; Mr. Gates also favored a big force.

Mr. Obama was leery. He had received a memo the day before from the Office of Management and Budget projecting that General McChrystal’s full 40,000-troop request on top of the existing deployment and reconstruction efforts would cost $1 trillion from 2010 to 2020, an adviser said. The president seemed in sticker shock, watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him. “This is a 10-year, trillion-dollar effort and does not match up with our interests,” he said.

Still, for the first time, he made it clear that he was ready to send more troops if a strategy could be found to ensure that it was not an endless war. He indicated that the Taliban had to be beaten back. “What do we need to break their momentum?” he asked.

Four days later, at a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 30, he emphasized the need for speed. “Why can’t I get the troops in faster?” he asked. If they were going to do this, he concluded, it only made sense to do this quickly, to have impact and keep the war from dragging on forever. “This is America’s war,” he said. “But I don’t want to make an open-ended commitment.”

Bridging the Differences

Now that he had a sense of where Mr. Obama was heading, Mr. Gates began shaping a plan that would bridge the differences. He developed a 30,000-troop option that would give General McChrystal the bulk of his request, reasoning that NATO could make up most of the difference.

“If people are having trouble swallowing 40, let’s see if we can make this smaller and easier to swallow and still give the commander what he needs,” a senior Defense official said, summarizing the secretary’s thinking.

The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.

He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.

“What I’m looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”

That represented a contrast from when Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, staunchly opposed President Bush’s buildup in Iraq. But unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama wanted from the start to speed up a withdrawal as well. The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly.

And in another twist, Mr. Obama, who campaigned as an apostle of transparency and had been announcing each Situation Room meeting publicly and even releasing pictures, was livid that details of the discussions were leaking out.

“What I’m not going to tolerate is you talking to the press outside of this room,” he scolded his advisers. “It’s a disservice to the process, to the country and to the men and women of the military.”

His advisers sat in uncomfortable silence. That very afternoon, someone leaked word of a cable sent by Ambassador Eikenberry from Kabul expressing reservations about a large buildup of forces as long as the Karzai government remained unreformed. At one of their meetings, General Petraeus had told Mr. Obama to think of elements of the Karzai government like “a crime syndicate.” Ambassador Eikenberry was suggesting, in effect, that America could not get in bed with the mob.

The leak of Ambassador Eikenberry’s Nov. 6 cable stirred another storm within the administration because the cable had been requested by the White House. The National Security Council had told the ambassador to put his views in writing. But someone else then passed word of the cable to reporters in what some in the process took to be a calculated attempt to head off a big troop buildup.

The cable stunned some in the military. The reaction at the Pentagon, said one official, was “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” — military slang for an expression of shock. Among the officers caught off guard were General McChrystal and his staff, for whom the cable was “a complete surprise,” said another official, even though the commander and the ambassador meet three times a week.

A Presidential Order

By this point, the idea of some sort of time frame was taking on momentum. Mrs. Clinton talked to Mr. Karzai before the Afghan leader’s inauguration to a second term. She suggested that he use his speech to outline a schedule for taking over security of the country.

Mr. Karzai did just that, declaring that Afghan forces directed by Kabul would take charge of securing population centers in three years and the whole country in five. His pronouncement, orchestrated partly by Mrs. Clinton and diplomats in Kabul, provided a predicate for Mr. Obama to set out his own time frame.

The president gathered his team in the Situation Room at 8:15 p.m. on Nov. 23, the unusual nighttime hour adding to what one participant called a momentous wartime feeling. The room was strewn with coffee cups and soda cans.

Mr. Obama presented a revised version of Option 2A, this one titled “Max Leverage,” pushing 30,000 troops into Afghanistan by mid-2010 and beginning to pull them out by July 2011. Admiral Mullen came up with the date at the direction of Mr. Obama, despite some misgivings from the Pentagon about setting a time frame for a withdrawal. The date was two years from the arrival of the first reinforcements Mr. Obama sent shortly after taking office. Mr. Biden had written a memo before the meeting talking about the need for “proof of concept” — in other words, two years ought to be enough for extra troops to demonstrate whether a buildup would work.

The president went around the room asking for opinions. Mr. Biden again expressed skepticism, even at this late hour when the tide had turned against him in terms of the troop number. But he had succeeded in narrowing the scope of the mission to protect population centers and setting the date to begin withdrawal. Others around the table concurred with the plan. Mr. Obama spoke last, but still somewhat elliptically. Some advisers said they walked out into the night after 10 p.m., uncertain whether the president had actually endorsed the Max Leverage option or was just testing for reaction.

Two days later, Mr. Obama met with Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker and a critic of the Afghan war. The president outlined his plans for the buildup without disclosing specific numbers. Ms. Pelosi was unenthusiastic and pointedly told the president that he could not rely on Democrats alone to pass financing for the war.

The White House had spent little time courting Congress to this point. Even though it would need Republican support, the White House had made no overtures to the party leaders.

But there was back-channel contact. Mr. Emanuel was talking with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who urged him to settle on a troop number “that began with 3” to win Republican support. “I said as long as the generals are O.K. and there is a meaningful number, you will be O.K.,” Mr. Graham recalled.

The day after Thanksgiving, Mr. Obama huddled with aides from 10:30 a.m. to 9:15 p.m. refining parameters for the plan and mapping out his announcement. He told his speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, that he wanted to directly rebut the comparison with Vietnam.

On the following Sunday, Nov. 29, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office. He had made his decision. He would send 30,000 troops as quickly as possible, then begin the withdrawal in July 2011. In deference to Mr. Gates’s concerns, the pace and endpoint of the withdrawal would be determined by conditions at the time.

“I’m not asking you to change what you believe,” the president told his advisers. “But if you do not agree with me, say so now.” There was a pause and no one said anything.

“Tell me now,” he repeated.

Mr. Biden asked only if this constituted a presidential order. Mr. Gates and others signaled agreement.

“Fully support, sir,” Admiral Mullen said.

“Ditto,” General Petraeus said.

Mr. Obama then went to the Situation Room to call General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry. The president made it clear that in the next assessment in December 2010 he would not contemplate more troops. “It will only be about the flexibility in how we draw down, not if we draw down,” he said.

Two days later, Mr. Obama flew to West Point to give his speech. After three months of agonizing review, he seemed surprisingly serene. “He was,” said one adviser, “totally at peace.”

Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, Helene Cooper, Carlotta Gall, Carl Hulse, Mark Landler, Mark Mazzetti, David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Scott Shane and Thom Shanker.

President Obama is facing one of the most critical decisions in his Presidency—what to do in Afghanistan following the pessimistic assessment by his senior field commander in the war zone, GEN Stan McChrystal. The General in his report to the Obama national security team emphasized that the strategic situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated substantially, that there is little time left to counter Taliban success with a new approach, and that he needs at least 40,000 new troops.

McChrystal has said that NATO needs to shift away from a “counter-terrorism” strategy that focuses on killing insurgents to a “counter-insurgency” approach that emphasizes protection of the Afghan people. To accomplish this General has asked for 40,000 new troops, in addition to the 21,000 reinforcements Obama has already promised. That would bring the American commitment close to the 110,000 troops deployed by the Soviet Union.

The decision comes at a time of growing fatigue with the war on the part of Congress and the American people, as well as our European allies. Whatever course of action the President chooses, he cannot count on NATO countries sending any more forces. In fact, most of the allies will be substantially reducing or withdrawing their forces. Like Iraq, this will be a “coalition of one” doing the fighting, advising and spending.

Obama has three choices in Afghanistan. One, he can follow GEN McChrystal’s advice and provide the additional troops—and money. . Two, he could withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Three, he could settle on a compromise strategy that slightly increases force levels while shifting the American role to striking Al Qaeda and Taliban strongholds by air/drone attacks augmented by Special Forces incursions.

None of the options, as well as “staying the course” currently being followed, holds much promise of success.

What are thr pros and cons of the three major options?

Option 1 is to provide GEN McChrystal with the additional 40,000 troops within the next year.

The argument in favor of this escalation option is that failing to commit to it virtually guarantees that the NATO commitment to Afghanistan will fail.

The downsides are significant. There is no assurance that even that level of commitment will stand a chance of achieving meaningful results quickly enough before the forces of Washington’s NATO allies begin to withdraw and U.S. domestic resolve erodes further. Doing more will not necessarily bring more success. There is also the question of where the additional troops will come from. Already the Army is stretched, and some would say, almost broken. Chief of Staff George Casey has promised deployed troops at least two years back home before sending them back to the war zones. Meeting McChrystal’s request would throw that promise out the window. Finally, with America’s commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan already costing more than Obama’s ambitious health care reform would require, American citizens might balk at such a prolonged, expensive effort.

Option 2 would be a quick withdrawal from Afghanistan—bring the troops home now. Advocates of this approach would favor focusing our effort on UAV strikes on AQ and Taliban camps, augmented by occasional insertions by Special Forces troops.

The advantage of this option is that it would be in concert with growing American public opinion that increasingly considers the Afghan conflict as unwinnable and not worth the sacrifices.

The obvious downside is that such a withdrawl would embolden AQ and the Taliban—the latter would most likely retake control of much of Afghanistan and threaten Pakistan’s stability. AQ would have unfettered access to more significant base areas. The “cut and run” option would permanently damage American prestige, convince allies such as Pakistan that we are an unreliable ally, and give hope to adversaries such as Iran.

Option 3, apparently favored by VP Biden and other senior nationals security officials, would send few, if any, new combat troops to Afghanistan and instead would focus on faster military training of the Afghan police and army. It would also call for continued assassinations of AQ leaders, UAV/air strikes, and enhanced support of Pakistan.

The advantages of this option are not clear, except that it represents at least a response to what is becoming an increasingly unpopular war. It would limit the exposure of our troops by focusing on a narrower anti-Al Qaeda effort.
////////////

Everyone should approach this difficult decision point with a certain degree of caution. There are no easy answers and one ought to be wary of those who advocate that there is a clear course of action we should follow—every option has its downsides, and none guarantee success.

However, President Obama is in a situation in which he will find it very hard to adopt any approach other than that provided by his chief commander in the field, and one that has apparently been endorsed by McChrystal’s boss, CENTCOM Commander GEN Dave Petraeus, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen.

While there is a good chance than no option will lead to success, and maybe all will in the end fail, for Obama—a Commander in Chief with no military experience—I doubt that there is any real alternative for him except to heed McChrystal’s request. Certainly the General has not made that situation any easier with his very public and clear warnings that not to follow his advice will “likely result in failure”, and “risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible”. GEN McChrystal has also repeated his view that what happens in Afghanistan will influence greatly what happens through Southeast Asia. In what the Washington Post has described as McChrystal’s “high profile campaign on behalf of his assessment”, the White House will be making its decision amid a widening debate on Capitol Hill and, indeed, across the country. Some observers, myself included, have been taken aback by the General’s strong advocacy of a policy position before the President has made his decision, an unusual breech of traditional civil-military protocol.

The debate will heat up in the coming days. I’d appreciate any thoughts our participants in this Forum might have regarding the options as the national security team wrestles with this impossible challenge.