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Nickdfresh
10-02-2009, 12:17 PM
White House eyeing narrower war effort
Top officials challenge General McChrystal's assessment
By Scott Wilson and Anne E. Kornblut
The Washington Post
updated 1:02 a.m. ET, Fri., Oct . 2, 2009

Senior White House officials have begun to make the case for a policy shift in Afghanistan that would send few, if any, new combat troops to the country and instead focus on faster military training of Afghan forces, continued assassinations of al-Qaeda leaders and support for the government of neighboring Pakistan in its fight against the Taliban.

In a three-hour meeting Wednesday at the White House, senior advisers challenged some of the key assumptions in Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's blunt assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war, which President Obama has said is being fought to destroy al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and the ungoverned border areas of Pakistan.

McChrystal, commander of the 100,000 NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has asked Obama to quickly endorse his call for a change in military strategy and approve the additional resources he needs to retake the initiative from the resurgent Taliban.

But White House officials are resisting McChrystal's call for urgency, which he underscored Thursday during a speech in London, and questioning important elements of his assessment, which calls for a vast expansion of an increasingly unpopular war. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the meeting, said, "A lot of assumptions -- and I don't want to say myths, but a lot of assumptions -- were exposed to the light of day."

Among them, according to three senior administration officials who attended the meeting, is McChrystal's contention that the Taliban and al-Qaeda share the same strategic interests and that the return to power of the Taliban would automatically mean a new sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

Leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Taliban government provided much of al-Qaeda's leadership with a safe haven before being toppled by U.S. forces later that year. Since then, some White House officials say, al-Qaeda has not regained its foothold even as the Taliban insurgency has strengthened.

The deliberations over McChrystal's assessment are expected to last several weeks, and officials who participated in Wednesday's meeting say it is too early to discern what direction Obama intends to take.

Although participants described the discussions as fluid, divisions are becoming clearer between those in the administration who want to broaden the U.S. effort, including sending in additional combat forces, and those who want to adopt a narrower anti-terrorism effort focused primarily on al-Qaeda.

Senior White House officials asked some of the sharpest questions, according to participants and others who have been briefed on the meeting, while the uniformed military, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, did not take issue with McChrystal's assessment.

According to White House officials involved in the meeting, Vice President Biden offered some of the more pointed challenges to McChrystal, who attended the session by video link from Kabul. One official said Biden played the role of "skeptic in chief," while other top officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, were muted in their comments.

Clinton has given no public signals about whether she is inclined to side with Biden or with McChrystal. But Clinton often sees eye to eye with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who also has kept his views private. She met with Gates on Tuesday and has cleared her afternoon schedule for Friday to meet with her Afghanistan team.

Biden has argued against increasing the number of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan, currently scheduled to total 68,000 by the end of the year. He favors preserving the current force levels, stepping up Predator drone strikes on al-Qaeda leaders and increasing training for Afghan forces. Like many congressional Democrats, Biden is concerned that deploying more U.S. troops could be counterproductive, giving the Taliban more fodder to foment public opposition to the foreign occupation.

McChrystal, whom Obama sent to Afghanistan in May after firing his predecessor, is making his case for additional resources publicly. In a speech Thursday at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, McChrystal said that "we must show resolve" and warned that "uncertainty disheartens our allies and emboldens our foes."

Asked whether a more limited counterterrorism effort would succeed in Afghanistan, he said, "The short answer is: no. You have to navigate from where you are, not where you wish to be. A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy."

In the days leading up to the deliberations this week, senior White House officials emphasized what they say have been the administration's achievements against al-Qaeda, underscoring that defeating the terrorist organization, rather than rebuilding Afghanistan, has always been Obama's stated goal.

After pledging in last year's presidential campaign to wind down the war in Iraq and commit more resources to Afghanistan, Obama concluded a policy review in March that, for the first time, considered the instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a single problem that demanded a comprehensive solution, including a large increase in civilian aid to both countries.

Several senior Obama advisers argued this week that two significant events since then have changed the calculus on the ground.

The Pakistani government's decision to reinstate Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry as the Supreme Court chief justice -- his removal had been a major source of domestic tension -- and challenge the Taliban insurgency in the Swat Valley has brought more stability to the U.S.-backed administration of President Asif Ali Zardari, White House officials say.

At the same time, the tainted Aug. 20 presidential election in Afghanistan has cast doubt on the legitimacy of President Hamid Karzai's administration.

"Eight months ago, if you had asked people which was worse, everybody would have said Pakistan is worse and Afghanistan is in good shape," one senior Obama adviser said. "Today we find out they had an election that wasn't clean, the Taliban is doing qualitatively better than we presumed and Pakistan is doing so much better."

McChrystal's high-profile campaign on behalf of his assessment is forcing the White House to make its decision amid a widening debate on Capitol Hill and across the country. In his 66-page report, McChrystal warned that "failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum" within a year "risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible."

Republican leaders in Congress have called on Obama to approve McChrystal's request quickly, but one presidential adviser noted: "In eight months, it is impossible to reverse eight years of neglect."

"A lot of decisions were made out of a sense of urgency in the previous administration, and they turned out to be wrong-headed," said another senior administration official involved in Afghanistan policy. "Examining the options, testing assumptions, reviewing everything -- we're not talking months, just days and weeks, and it is well worth the time spent."

Correspondent Anthony Faiola in London contributed to this report.

© 2009 The Washington Post Company (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33132724/ns/world_news-washington_post/)

Nickdfresh
10-02-2009, 12:20 PM
Related:

Obama, McChrystal meet on Air Force One
President summons Afghan commander for chat while in Denmark
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/components/photo/_new/091002-obama-mcchrystal-hmed-8a.rp350x350.jpg
Obama and McChrystal meet aboard Air Force One
President Barack Obama meets with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Friday.

updated 19 minutes ago

COPENHAGEN - President Barack Obama summoned his top commander in Afghanistan for a 25-minute meeting aboard Air Force One on Friday as part of his review of a war strategy that has divided the president's national security team.
...

The Rest of the Story Here (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33136780/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia)

Nickdfresh
10-04-2009, 09:43 AM
NYT: Obama’s looming Afghanistan decision
President is having second thoughts about sending more troops to war
By James Traub
The New York Times
updated 6:15 a.m. ET, Sun., Oct . 4, 2009

Over the next few weeks, Barack Obama must make the most difficult decision of his presidency to date: whether or not to send up to 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, as his commanding general there, Stanley McChrystal, has reportedly proposed.

This summer, Mr. Obama described the effort in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity.” In such a war, you do whatever you need to do to win. But now, as criticism mounts from those who argue that the war in Afghanistan cannot, in fact, be won with more troops and a better strategy, the President is having second thoughts.

A war of necessity is presumably one that is “fundamental to the defense of our people,” as Mr. Obama has said about Afghanistan. But if such a war is unwinnable, then perhaps you must reconsider your sense of its necessity and choose a more modest policy instead.

The conservative pundit George Will suggested as much in a recent column in which he argued for a reduced, rather than enhanced, American presence in Afghanistan. Mr. Will cited the testimony of George Kennan, the diplomat and scholar, to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Vietnam in 1966: “Our country should not be asked, and should not ask of itself, to shoulder the main burden of determining the political realities in any other country. ... This is not only not our business, but I don’t think we can do it successfully.”

Mr. Kennan’s astringent counsel has become piercingly relevant today, as Americans discover, time and again, their inability to shape the world as they would wish. Indeed, George W. Bush’s tenure looks in retrospect like an inadvertent proof of the wisdom of restraint, for his ambitious policy to transform the Middle East through regime change and democracy promotion largely ended in failure. The irony is that Mr. Obama, who as a candidate reassured conservative critics that he had read and absorbed the wisdom of Reinhold Niebuhr, Mr. Kennan and other “realists,” is now himself accused of ignoring the limits of American power, like Mr. Bush or Lyndon Johnson, in his pursuit of victory in an unwinnable war.

The idea that American foreign policy must be founded upon a prudent recognition of the country’s capacities and limits, rather than its hopes and wishes, gained currency after World War II, possibly the last unequivocally necessary war in American history. At the war’s end, of course, the global pre-eminence of the United States was beyond question. But Mr. Kennan, Mr. Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau and others tried to imbue their sometimes-grandiose fellow-citizens with a rueful awareness of the intransigence of things.

“The problems of this world are deeper, more involved, and more stubborn than many of us realize,” Mr. Kennan said in a 1949 speech to the Academy of Political Science. “It is imperative, therefore, that we economize with our limited resources and that we apply them where we feel that we will do the most good.”

The realists won that debate. Mr. Kennan argued that a policy of confrontation with Stalin’s Russia, advocated by the more fervent anti-Communists, would be neither effective nor necessary; the Soviets, rather, could be checked by “intelligent long-range policies” designed to counter — to contain — their ambitions. Of course he lost in Vietnam, where the nation-building dreams of a generation of cold war liberals came to grief. The neoconservatives who came to power with George W. Bush were just as dismissive of the cautionary sprit of realism as the liberals of an earlier generation had been, and thought of themselves as conservative heirs of the idealistic tradition of Woodrow Wilson.

Now, as Americans debate whether or not to double down in Afghanistan, it’s striking how opinion is divided not according to left and right, or hawk and dove, but rather by the difference between the Wilsonian “what we must do” and the Kennanite “what we can do.”

Stephen Holmes, a left-leaning law professor at New York University, recently wrote a critique of General McChrystal’s plan that almost exactly echoed Will/Kennan: “Turning an illegitimate government into a legitimate one is simply beyond the capacities of foreigners, however wealthy or militarily unmatched.”

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a hawkish Democrat, has reportedly urged the president to devote less of the country’s energies to Afghanistan in order to apply them where they will do the most good — Pakistan. On the other hand, advocates of the proposed new strategy, like Peter Bergen, an expert on Islamic terrorism, invoke America’s “obligation” to the Afghan people and the strategic catastrophe that would come of ceding the country to the Taliban. One side reasons from the means, the other from the ends.

In the real world, of course, the distinction between these two very different dispositions is a fluid one. After all, in a true war of necessity, like World War II, a state and a people summon the capacity to do what must be done, no matter how difficult. So the objective question at the heart of the current debate is whether the battle for Afghanistan represents such a war, or whether — like those for Vietnam or Iraq — the problem that it presents can be solved by less bloody and costly means.

Americans broadly agree that their government must at all costs prevent major attacks on American soil by Al Qaeda. But there the consensus ends, and their questions begin: Do we need to sustain the rickety Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai in order to achieve that objective? If so, will a combination of overwhelming military force and an accompanying civilian surge not only repel the Taliban but make Afghanistan self-sustaining over the long term?

The leaked McChrystal plan argues both that we must and that we can, and that a more modest effort “will likely result in failure.” Critics like the military analyst Andrew Bacevich insist, by contrast, that we cannot and that we need not — that Americans can contain the threat of jihad through such measures as enhanced homeland defense. Others have argued for a middle course involving a smaller troop increase and less nation-building.

George Kennan was right about the cold war. But the question now is whether “containment” is also the right metaphor for Afghanistan, and for the threat of Islamic extremism. Containment (Mr. Kennan also used the imagery of chess and the pruning and pinning of trees) is a metaphor of geographical contiguity. Soviet ambitions could be checked here, conceded there. America’s adversary was not, Mr. Kennan insisted, a global force called Communism; it was Russia, an expansionist but conservative power. By that logic, the United States could lose in Vietnam with no lasting harm to itself.

But Al Qaeda, and jihadism generally, is a global force that seeks control of territory chiefly as a means to carry out its global strategy. It has no borders at which to be checked; its success or failure is measured in ideological rather than territorial terms — like Communism without Russia. Mr. Kennan often suggested that America’s own example of democratic prosperity was one of its most powerful weapons during the cold war; and plainly that is so today as well. That is one weapon with which the threat of Islamic extremism must be challenged; but it is only one.

The question boils down to this: How grave a price would Americans pay if Afghanistan were lost to the Taliban? Would this be a disaster, or merely, as with Vietnam, a terrible misfortune for which the United States could compensate through a contemporary version of Mr. Kennan’s “intelligent long-range policies”? If the latter, then how can Americans justify the immense cost in money and manpower, and the inevitable loss of life, attendant upon General McChrystal’s plan? How can they gamble so much on the corrupt, enfeebled and barely legitimate government of President Karzai? Why insist on seeking to do that which in all probability can not be done?

But what if it’s the former? What if the fall of Kabul would constitute not only an American abandonment of the Afghan people, but a major strategic and psychological triumph for Al Qaeda, and a recruiting tool of unparalleled value? Then the Kennanite calculus would no longer apply, and the fact that nobody can be completely confident that General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy will work would not be reason enough to forsake it.

In that case — and perhaps only in that case — Afghanistan really would be a war of necessity.

This article, "The Distance Between ‘We Must’ and ‘We Can’," first appeared in The New York Times.

More on: Afghanistan

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times

NYT: Obama’s looming Afghanistan decision - The New York Times- msnbc.com (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33161460/ns/world_news-the_new_york_times/)

BITEYOASS
10-04-2009, 10:29 AM
Well at first we were trying to find terrorists, but then it became all about country rebuilding, then a war on drugs and now a way to pressure Iran.

It's like a damn super bowl! At first it was just a plain ole' football game like any other, no big deal. But then all of this pagentry bullshit started getting added to it. Now you've got pre-game shows, half-time shows, post-game shows, concerts going on before the game, a big pyrotechnic circus before the team hits the field, a hasbeen lip-syncher & a bunch of fags rubbing each other during the halftime show, and football player sob stories complete with that same fucking piano music!

BOTTOM LINE, make like coitus and PULL OUT!!! :D