Sunday, 04 July 2010 20:16

Written by ISN Security Watch

When President Barack Obama accepted the resignation of his top general in Afghanistan for publicly disparaging senior administration officials, he pledged that the US’ Afghan policy would not change. But what if it’s not working? Shaun Waterman writes for ISN Security Watch.

By Shaun Waterman

Beyond the headline-grabbing antics and loose-mouthed profanity of “Team America” - as General Stanley McChrystal and his aides apparently called themselves - an article in Rolling Stone magazine highlighted serious tensions within the US administration about its Afghan strategy.

On the one hand, the White House is concerned that an open-ended commitment to war will merely drag out their involvement in what many see as an unwinnable quagmire.

That is why Obama, when he unveiled his new Afghan strategy last December, was careful both to narrow US objectives in Afghanistan - effectively abandoning the aim of re-making the country in favor of simply dismantling al-Qaida - and to put an end date on US commitments there, pledging to begin a conditions-based withdrawal process by July next year.

Military nerves on edge

On the other hand, although the president and many of his aides are careful to stress that the pace of withdrawal will be dictated by conditions on the ground, the insistence on a deadline - and the insistence of some senior officials, including the vice president, that July 2011 will mark the start of a rapid US drawdown - is provoking nervousness in some military circles.

“The military simply is unsure what the president means it when he says he will do whatever it takes to succeed in Afghanistan,” said CBS’ national security correspondent David Martin on Sunday.

Many senior officers worry that any successes they are able to achieve this year will be wiped out by a too-rapid withdrawal; and they also fret that setting a deadline will merely encourage America’s enemies to wait her out.

“They know the Taliban aren’t going anywhere; they know we probably are,” one military official told ISN Security Watch about the Afghans.

The timelines involved in counter-insurgency (the fight against the Taliban) and force development and transformation (the just-as-hard struggle to build an effective Afghan army) are typically much longer than the 18-24 months envisaged in Obama’s plan, the officer said, especially since more than six months have already passed since they were set.

To make matters worse, the next planned major US offensive in Afghanistan, in the Taliban’s spiritual birthplace Kandahar, has been repeatedly postponed and the smaller operation in Marjah, which was supposed to be a model for it, appears not to have yielded the hoped-for fruits.

Speaking to Martin on CBS’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin called for any major operations in Kandahar to be delayed until more Afghan troops were available to take part.

“I hope that we do not have greater operations in Kandahar until we bring up or the Afghan army brings up more of their troops. There are not enough Afghan troops. There's only 8,000 to 9,000 in Kandahar. There should be more,” Levin said.

Indeed, if the Americans cannot win the counter insurgency war themselves, perhaps they will at least leave behind an Afghan military that can - this is part of the approach advocated by supporters of the small footprint approach advocated by, among others, Vice President Joseph Biden.

“The size and the strength of the Afghan army is critical,” Levin said. “The Afghan army is popular in Afghanistan. Our presence is not popular in Afghanistan. And our number one mission, it seems to me [...] is to get the Afghan army to the points in terms of numbers, equipment, capability, that they can be the primary source of security for Afghanistan.”

Hostage to fortune

Of course, a similar set of problems, albeit in a very different context, faced General David Petraeus - the man tapped by Obama to succeed McChrystal - during his stint running the war in Iraq.

Petraeus has a deserved reputation as a masterful diplomat and a consummate political operator. In Iraq, he won over many lawmakers skeptical about the US surge.

It is almost certainly, in the immortal words of Zhou Enlai (when asked about the impact of the French revolution of 1789) “too early to say” whether the surge has been successful in Iraq. But it was surely successful in America.

Petraeus’ reputation as the man who turned round Iraq will give him a great deal of leverage with the White House. So will the fact that he effectively accepted a demotion to take McChrystal’s job.

Indeed, some insiders are already fretting that the president may have given a hostage to fortune by choosing Petraeus.

“I think this comes with a potential longer- term political cost,” the Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran said Sunday. “Next spring as they start to debate what will the pace of that drawdown [of US forces from Afghanistan] should be […] having Petraeus there is a much more formidable advocate for delaying this drawdown or really attenuating it compared to what McChrystal would have been.”

“The phrase ‘conditions-based withdrawal’ is making the deadline all loophole and no deadline,” added conservative commentator George Will. “That is to say [to the military], you can stay as long as you need. We just hope the conditions will be good then, and that hope is not a policy.”

Exactly how General Petraeus does see the deadline issue - and other questions like whether McChrystal’s new rules of engagement designed to prevent civilian casualties are too restrictive - may become clearer at his confirmation hearing Tuesday.

But even with additional time and troops, there is no guarantee that the US can do what no other army in human history has ever achieved - inflicting a military defeat on the Pashtuns in their own homeland.

Petraeus is the master of counterinsurgency. As the author of the US army’s counterinsurgency manual, he quite literally wrote the book on it.

But as Rory Stewart, the author, diplomat and soldier who has extensive experience of both Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote last year, “The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns […] control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government - are lacking in Afghanistan."

Shaun Waterman is a senior writer and analyst for ISN Security Watch. He is a UK journalist based in Washington, DC, covering homeland and national security.