Obama seeks study on local leaders for troop decision

AFGHAN PROVINCES TO BE ANALYZED

Details should help president determine need

By Scott Wilson and Greg JaffeWashington

Post Staff Writers

Thursday, October 29, 2009

President Obama has asked senior officials for a province-by-province analysis of Afghanistan to determine which regions are being managed effectively by local leaders and which require international help, information that his advisers say will guide his decision on how many additional U.S. troops to send to the battle.
Obama made the request in a meeting Monday with Vice President Biden and a small group of senior advisers helping him decide whether to expand the war. The detail he is now seeking also reflects the administration's turn toward Afghanistan's provincial governors, tribal leaders and local militias as potentially more effective partners in the effort than a historically weak central government that is confronting questions of legitimacy after the flawed Aug. 20 presidential election.
"This is obviously a complicated security environment in Afghanistan, and the president wants the clearest possible understanding of what the challenges are to our forces and what is required to meet that challenge," said a senior administration official who has participated in the Afghanistan policy review and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. "Any successful and sustainable strategy must clearly align the resources we provide with the goals we are trying to achieve."
As U.S. forces in Afghanistan endure the deadliest month of the eight-year-old conflict, Obama is weighing a request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, for a quick jump in forces to blunt the Taliban's momentum against concerns that too many new troops could help the insurgency's recruiting efforts.
Administration officials say that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and national security adviser James L. Jones, a retired four-star general, support Obama's request for a more detailed status report on each province that could identify potential U.S. allies among Afghanistan's local leaders, some with less-than-sterling human rights records.
Gates and Jones have pushed McChrystal to justify as specifically as possible his request for 44,000 additional troops, the figure now at the center of White House deliberations. The review group once included intelligence officials, generals and ambassadors, but it has recently narrowed to a far smaller number of senior civilian advisers, including Biden, Gates, Jones, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Administration officials said the province-by-province analysis will be ready for Obama before his scheduled Friday meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House.
"There are a lot of questions about why McChrystal has identified the areas that he has identified as needing more forces," said a senior military official familiar with the review, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the deliberations candidly. "Some see it as an attempt by the White House to do due diligence on the commander's troop request. A less charitable view is that it is a 5,000-mile screwdriver tinkering from Washington." A range of options
The weeks-long White House review has been shaped by a central tension between the broad counterinsurgency strategy endorsed by the military and a narrower counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda that some senior administration officials favor.
McChrystal, who took command of the 100,000 U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan in May, is promoting a plan that calls for concentrating forces around urban areas to better protect the Afghan population and pulling back from remote regions. His idea calls for speeding the training of Afghan forces, expanding civilian efforts to improve Afghan governance and starting other long-term programs to win the support of the population that the insurgency draws from.
About half the 44,000 troops McChrystal requested would be sent to take back Taliban sanctuaries in southern Afghanistan. The others would push into western Afghanistan, where the U.S. military has only a slight presence, and reinforce operations in the mountainous east. One brigade would train Afghan army and police forces.
Even after weeks of review, administration officials say a range of options is still under consideration, including whether additional U.S. forces could be deployed in phases. Although Obama had been expected to announce his decision before leaving Nov. 11 on a 10-day trip to Asia, administration officials say he may wait until he returns.
"I think it's important to hear and to get this right," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday.
In reviewing McChrystal's bracing assessment of the war, the president and his senior advisers have concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, regardless of how many more troops are deployed.
The acknowledgment is behind Obama's request for an analysis of which of Afghanistan's 34 provinces can be left to local leaders, perhaps including elements of the Taliban unaligned with al-Qaeda. Administration officials have said that under any strategy, the Taliban would not be allowed to threaten the Kabul government or provide sanctuary for al-Qaeda, whose leaders operate largely from the tribal areas across the border in Pakistan.
"How much of the country can we just leave to be run by the locals?" said one U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy, who discussed the White House request on the condition of anonymity. "How do you separate those who have taken up arms because they oppose the presence of foreigners in their area, because they're getting paid to fight us because we're there, from those who want to restore a Taliban government? How many of the people who we're fighting actually share al-Qaeda's ideology?"
Obama's interest in provincial allies also reflects the administration's growing disenchantment with President Hamid Karzai and his inability to extend his government's authority beyond Kabul during his nearly eight years in office. Provincial governments and tribal structures have long exerted more power than the central government, which many Afghans view as remote, corrupt and ineffective. Another U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said, "Most of Afghanistan that's stable is under local control."
"The question is: Can you get benign local control in more places?" the official said. "And will that be easier to achieve, and more effective, than trying to establish more central government control?" Refining a strategy
Critics of ceding authority to local power brokers point to Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, where Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai has been given wide latitude to run the municipality and the surrounding province. Security in the area has deteriorated over the past year, while the cultivation of opium-producing poppies has soared.
Some U.S. and Afghan officials contend that Ahmed Wali, who heads the Kandahar provincial council, has been reluctant to crack down on drug traffickers -- and the Taliban fighters who protect them -- because he is involved in narcotics smuggling, an accusation he has repeatedly denied. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Ahmed Wali has been on the CIA's payroll for much of the past eight years.
"Ahmed Wali illustrates the challenge we face across the country," a senior U.S. official involved in Afghanistan policy said Wednesday. "Do we pay him off to help us -- whatever help that may be -- or is our goal of improving the government more important than doing these kinds of deals?"
Obama is refining his strategy from several options outlined during more than 15 hours of meetings in the White House, administration officials say.
Some White House officials, including Biden, have advocated a strategy that would focus primarily on counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda. The vice president has argued for preserving the current U.S. troop level of 68,000, expediting the training of Afghan forces, intensifying Predator drone strikes against al-Qaeda operatives and supporting the Pakistani government against the Taliban within its borders.
But the deepening conflict is complicating those plans. For example, administration officials say that sending additional U.S. training brigades to accelerate preparation of the Afghan security forces may not accomplish as much as hoped because recruitment -- and retention -- has gone poorly as the war intensifies.
"It's all part of the endemic problems of illiteracy and security that plague many countries, but particularly this one," said a senior administration official familiar with the review process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it. "You want to increase the number of people engaged in training, but at some point bringing in more and more Americans won't produce quicker results. There's a ceiling."
McChrystal has advocated something far closer to a nation-building project. Some Republican supporters of the general's plan in Congress have compared his strategy to the 2007 "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq, a shorter-term effort that helped pull the country back from sectarian civil war.
But administration officials reject the comparison, pointing out that McChrystal's troop request would require a far longer deployment of U.S. forces and that Afghanistan is in a less dire position than Iraq was at the time of the surge.
Most important, administration officials say, the violence in Afghanistan is directed against U.S. forces rather than among Afghans. In Iraq, much of the pre-surge violence involved Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites fighting for control of the state, which gave the U.S. military a clearer role in protecting Iraqi civilians.
"There are some areas of the country that will fight us and fight the Taliban just because we are there," Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters Wednesday.

McChrystal Rejects Scaling Down Afghan Military Aims

New York Times

October 2, 2009
By JOHN F. BURNS

LONDON — The top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, used a speech here on Thursday to reject calls for the war effort to be scaled down from defeating the Taliban insurgency to a narrower focus on hunting down Al Qaeda, an option suggested by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. as part of the current White House strategy review.
After his first 100 days in command in Kabul, General McChrystal chose an audience of military specialists at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies as a platform for a public airing of the confidential assessment of the war he delivered to the Pentagon in late August, parts of which were leaked to news organizations. General McChrystal, 55, did not mention Mr. Biden or his advocacy of a scaled-down war effort during his London speech, and referred only obliquely to the debate within the Obama administration on whether to escalate the American commitment in Afghanistan by accepting his request for up to 40,000 more American troops on top of the 68,000 already deployed there or en route.
But he used the London session for a rebuttal of the idea of a more narrowly focused war. When a questioner asked him whether he would support scaling back the American military presence over the next 18 months by relinquishing the battle with the Taliban and focusing on tracking down Al Qaeda, sparing ground troops by hunting Qaeda extremists and their leaders with missiles from remotely piloted aircraft, he replied: “The short answer is: no.”
“You have to navigate from where you are, not from where you wish to be,” he said. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.”
In Washington on Thursday, Gen. David H. Petraeus told an audience that he had “not yet endorsed” General McChrystal’s specific request for additional troops, even though he has said he supports General McChrystal’s grim assessment of the war.
General Petraeus, the American commander who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and works closely with General McChrystal, was sounding a careful note in public after participating in a three-hour strategy meeting with Mr. Obama and the administration’s national security team at the White House on Wednesday. For now, his aides say he does not want to get ahead of the president and the continuing deliberations.
Speaking with Brian Williams of NBC as part of a two-day conference with newsmakers at the Newseum in Washington, General Petraeus said that Wednesday’s meeting at the White House was “a very good and quite long discussion going back and looking at the goals and objectives and assumptions” underlying Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy that the president announced in March.
At the Institute for Strategic Studies, General McChrystal noted that the former Taliban rulers of Afghanistan had provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda, from which it planned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, and he said political stability there was vital to regional security, as well as to the security of Britain, the United States and elsewhere.
Advocating a “counterterrorist focus” in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, instead of a “counterinsurgency focus” against the Taliban and Al Qaeda, he said, was a formula for what he called “Chaos-istan.” Proponents of that approach, he said, would accept an Afghanistan in which there was “a level of chaos, and just manage it from outside.”
The general’s troop request was at the heart of the White House strategy session on Wednesday led by Mr. Obama, which included Mr. Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, other cabinet secretaries, top generals, and General McChrystal, participating by videolink from London. The request has come as the worsening conflict in Afghanistan has prompted increased unease in the United States and Europe.
In an oblique acknowledgment of the tricky political terrain, General McChrystal said there had been no pressure on him from military superiors to scale down his troop request — a pattern that developed at points during the Iraq war, when American generals hesitated to call for more troops after the defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, ruled them out.
“All of the interaction I’ve had with my senior leadership, they’ve not only encouraged me” to be blunt in stating his case, the general said, “they’ve insisted on it.”
As if in an afterthought, he added, laughing, that there was no certainty he would always be so free to speak so plainly. “They may change their minds and crush me some day,” he said.
General McChrystal was named the new American and allied commander in Afghanistan this summer in succession to Gen. David D. McKiernan, who was removed after barely a year in the job, and retired, when Mr. Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates decided they needed a fresh approach.
But direct contact between Mr. Obama and the Afghanistan commander has been rare. Aides in London said that Wednesday’s teleconference was only the second time since General McChrystal assumed his command in June that the two men had talked by videolink, a form of contact with field commanders that President George W. Bush, at the height of the Iraq war, used as often as once a week. Although he was out of Afghanistan on Wednesday, the aides said, General McChrystal was not invited to attend the White House strategy session in person.
But judging from General McChrystal’s relaxed demeanor at the session in London, any suggestion he might be headed for a showdown with the White House over war strategy — for the kind of clash that Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur had with President Truman during the Korean War — seemed far-fetched. He went out of his way to say that the White House strategy review was an essential part of developing a successful approach to the war. “I think the more deliberation and the more debate we have, the healthier that’s going to be,” he said.
In the war assessment he delivered to the Pentagon, he struck a note of urgency, saying that if the troop increases he had recommended were not in place within 12 months, the allied effort risked failure. But he told the London audience that the time being taken by current policy review in Washington was worth it. “I don’t think we have the luxury of going so fast that we make the wrong decision,” he said.
The general has used his London trip to make a renewed bid for an increase in Britain’s troop commitment in Afghanistan. With 9,000 soldiers, Britain currently has the second largest coalition contingent after the Americans. Officials at Britain’s Defense Ministry have said discussions with the Americans have included the possibility of about 2,500 additional troops in the British contingent.

On General Krulak's E-mail to George Will

Posted by Paul Yingling on September 11, 2009 4:43 AM
From Small Wars Journal

Ten years ago, the ideas about warfare expressed in General Krulak's email to George Will would have been merely disappointing. However, after eight years of war have we have learned many hard lessons at a very high price, and the ideas attributed to General Krulak are now incomprehensible.

General Krulak appears unsure as to whether al-Qaeda and the Taliban are our enemies, and whether the United States has an interest in preventing Taliban control of Afghanistan. Exactly eight years ago today, al-Qaeda operatives supported by the Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan murdered 3,000 Americans on American soil. The answer to the general's question is yes - al-Qaeda and the Taliban are America's enemies.

General Krulak advocates the use of 'hunter-killer teams' backed by airpower governed by minimal rules of engagement to 'take out the bad guys.' This light footprint tactic has failed for the last eight years. Aircraft operating with few or no ground forces cannot distinguish between insurgents and innocent civilians. Minimal rules of engagement result in maximum civilian casualties, tacitly assisting our enemies as they seek sanctuary and support from civilian populations.

General Krulak misrepresents the manpower requirements necessary for success in Afghanistan. Most of the troops required to provide security for the Afghan people can and will come from the Afghans themselves. Indeed, the most important task for American military forces is to strengthen the capabilities of Afghan security forces to accomplish this task.

General Krulak speculates that the American people would not provide the resources necessary to prevail in Afghanistan. While every citizen is entitled to his or her opinion, it's not clear that General Krulak has any particular expertise in the area of domestic American political opinion.

What's more certain is that the American people and their elected representatives have provided virtually everything asked of them by our military leaders. If there are insufficient resources to prevail in Afghanistan, it is the responsibility of senior military officers and other leaders within the executive branch to ask for more. It is dismaying that a retired general officer would advocate abandoning the war in Afghanistan out of concern for its impact on military personnel or equipment. We must tailor our forces to meet the demands of our wars, rather than vice versa.

After eight years of war, we have learned some hard lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan, including:

* Al-Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates pose a serious threat to the security of the United States, our people and our allies
* Airpower and special operations forces are a necessary part of any counter-terrorism operation, but in and of themselves are insufficient to deny sanctuary to terrorist organizations.
* Developing host-nation security forces is an essential component of counterinsurgency operations. These forces are more credible, more enduring and more cost-effective than relying exclusively or primarily on U.S. forces.
* It is the responsibility of general officers to ask for the resources necessary to win our wars.

I respect General Krulak for his decades of service to our country. However, I was dismayed that any officer, active or retired, could still hold the views attributed to him on September 11, 2009.

Posted by Paul Yingling on September 11, 2009 4:43 AM

More information on SWJ at: http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2009/09/on-general-krulaks-email-to-ge/#c004330