McChrystal Refuses To Lower No. Of Additional Troops Sought...Strategy vs. Resources, Mission Impossible?

(Pres. Obama weighs Afghanistan war strategy and policy. The ball is now in his court.)

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(Secretary of Defense Dr. Robert Gates is skeptical of a "light footprint" strategy for Afghanistan.)

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McChrystal Rejects Lower Afghan Aims


The top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, rejected calls for scaling down military objectives there on Thursday and said Washington did not have unlimited time to settle on a new strategy to pursue the eight-year-old war.

In a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a private policy group here, General McChrystal said that the situation in Afghanistan was serious and that “neither success nor failure can be taken for granted.”

He was speaking in Britain — America’s close ally in Afghanistan — a day after he had participated by video link from London in a White House strategy session on the war that included President Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and an array of senior advisers.

General McChrystal was asked by a member of an audience that included retired military commanders and security specialists whether he would support an idea put forward by Mr. Biden to scale back the American military presence in Afghanistan to focus on tracking down the leaders of Al Qaeda, in place of the current broader effort now under way to defeat the Taliban.

“The short answer is: no,” he said. “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.”

He did not mention Mr. Biden by name.

General McChrystal has been reported to be seeking as many as 40,000 additional American troops for the war, a number that has generated concern among other top American commanders. That figure is in addition to the 21,000 reinforcements Mr. Obama has already promised, bringing the number of American troops to 68,000 by this fall. If 40,000 more soldiers were deployed, the total American commitment would be close to the 110,000 troops deployed by the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan in the 1970s. There are also some 35,000 allied troops in Afghanistan.

In a confidential assessment of the war last month now under consideration by the Obama administration, General McChrystal said that he needs additional troops within the next year or else the conflict “will likely result in failure.”

“Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” he wrote.

In his address Thursday, he reiterated that assessment. Asked if a refusal to give him more troops would lead to failure in Afghanistan, he said: “I think if you don’t align the goals and the resources, you will have a significant problem. If we don’t do that, we will.”

United States casualties in Afghanistan have increased sharply this year, bringing the total in eight years of fighting since the toppling of Taliban rule in late 2001 to over 850. More than one quarter of those deaths have been reported in 2009, according to icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks such statistics.

General McChrystal said he believed that Afghanistan was the “key” to stability in south Asia as well as to the security of the United States, Britain and other western allies.

He acknowledged that he was worried that time was running out. “I don’t think we have the luxury of going so fast that we make the wrong decision,” he said. But, at the same time, he said, events were moving on. “People are making decisions, Afghans are making decisions, insurgents are making decisions, supporting nations are making decisions,” he said, referring in part by the prospect of some NATO allies scaling back their commitments in Afghanistan.



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Sources: NY Times, MSNBC, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Google Maps