About two years ago Senator Barack Obama said the Iraq US Troop Surge would fail. Now he's sending a Troop Surge to Afghanistan. Hmmm. Something to think about.
Senator Barack Obama opposed the Iraq US Troop Surge.
Senator Barack Obama on the Bill O'Reilly show discussing Al-Qaida and the US Troop Surge to Iraq.
Problems with the Afghan strategy. Sen. John Thune explains why he feels setting up a troop withdrawal deadline will undercut U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.
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Similarities to Iraq Surge Plan Mask Risks in Afghanistan
President Obama strongly opposed President George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq during his presidential campaign, and even now he has never publicly acknowledged that it was largely successful.
But in the White House Situation Room a little more than a month ago, he told his aides, “It turned out to be a good thing.” And as many of Mr. Obama’s own advisers have recounted in recent days in interviews, the decision on the surge of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by next summer was at least partly inspired by the success of the effort in Iraq, which Mr. Bush’s aides say is their best hope that historians will give them some credit when the history of a highly problematic war is written.
In fact, Iraq analogies have been flying back and forth so furiously in recent days that Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, the only holdover from the Bush-era cabinet, told Congress, “This is the second surge I’ve been up here defending.”
But probe beneath the surface, and it becomes clear that Mr. Obama is heading into his new strategy with his ears ringing with warnings — from some of his own aides and military commanders — that many of the conditions that made the Iraq surge work do not exist in Afghanistan.
As one of the strategists deeply involved in the White House Situation Room debates put it, “We spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the only thing Iraq and Afghanistan have in common is a lot of sand.”
Still, the similarities in the surges are striking. The absolute number of additional troops is roughly the same: 30,000. The Iraq figure, 28,500 troops, was 7,000 more than Mr. Bush first announced; Mr. Obama’s team says that will not happen in this case.
The deployment time in the case of Iraq was six months; when the Pentagon first came to President Obama two months ago with a plan that stretched over 18 months, he offered up some withering questions. He turned to Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the head of Central Command and the commander in Iraq during the Bush surge, and asked: “What takes so long? What’s so hard about this?”
White House officials say it was Mr. Obama himself who pressed the idea of a surge of his own, openly acknowledging in a meeting that he had criticized it harshly during the campaign.
Both surges aimed to knock back an insurgency that had gained territory and caused high casualties, and to buy time and space to train local forces for combat. “Neither one of these surges,” said one officer involved in both decisions, “was born to exploit success. They were designed to reverse momentum.”
No one in the Obama White House voices much admiration for the inheritance left by Mr. Bush, so it was probably unintentional that when the Afghanistan strategy was announced on Tuesday, the rollout had echoes of the earlier one. Mr. Bush’s fact sheet on the surge carried the headline “The New Way Forward in Iraq.” Mr. Obama’s speech carried the title “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
But the commonalities end there. The Iraq surge worked in large part because there was powerful support in Anbar Province from the so-called Awakening, the movement by local Sunni tribes who rose up against extremists who were killing people, forcibly marrying local women and cutting off the hands of men who smoked in public. In Iraq, American officials believed that most leaders of a vigorous opposition, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, were foreigners.
The United States remains hopeful that it can capitalize on Afghan militias that have taken up arms against the Taliban in local areas, but a series of intelligence reports supplied to Mr. Obama since September found no evidence in Afghanistan of anything on the scale of the Iraqi Awakening movement. What’s more, in Afghanistan the extremists, the Taliban, are natives.
“They are part of the furniture in Afghanistan; they have always been there,” one of Mr. Obama’s counterterrorism experts said, explaining why Mr. Obama’s goal is simply to degrade the Taliban’s power, not to defeat the group. In Iraq, the aim was to defeat the insurgents, a goal that has been largely achieved.
Then there is the question of whether Afghanistan’s military is trainable. Iraq’s forces were in a shambles, but the country had a tradition of military order. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reminded senators this week that in Iraq it took several years to get traction, and that in Afghanistan it could take longer.
“It was really late ’07 before the police in Iraq really started to step out,” he said, adding later, “we have to be careful with comparisons.”
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two surges is this: Mr. Bush never said how long his would last, and Mr. Obama went out of his way to declare that starting in July 2011, the tide would begin to flow out. The administration — mostly Mr. Gates — spent much of the week explaining the twin logic of going in strong and then signaling the beginning of a departure, emphasizing many times that if conditions were poor, the reduction in American forces would be slow.
The theory of the deadline was that it was the only way to show President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan that American patience was limited and that its commitment was not open-ended.
Mr. Gates again drew analogies to Iraq, saying, “I think, as we turn over more districts and more provinces to Afghan security control, much as we did with the provincial Iraqi control, that there will be a thinning of our forces and a gradual drawdown.”
But to Republican critics of that approach — and some architects of the Iraq surge — the announcement sows the seeds of failure before the process begins. “The question is: Is it fatal to the overall strategy?” asked Meghan O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan in the Bush administration, and now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “I think it may be.”
Her argument is that many in Afghanistan, and the leadership in Pakistan, will decide that the date is a slow-motion repeat of 1989, when the United States began to pull back from Afghanistan after the Soviets left in defeat. In the next few weeks, members of the Obama war cabinet are expected to show up in Islamabad and Kabul with one message: We’re not leaving. Really.
Sources: NY Times, CBS News, Fox News, Bill O'Reilly Show, The Daily Beast, MSNBC, Youtube, Google Maps
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