Petraeus urges more time for Afghanistan

What happened

General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, this week warned of civil war there if American forces fail to roll back the Taliban, and he hedged on a scheduled July 2011 pullout of U.S. troops, saying any withdrawal would have to be “conditions-based.” In a series of television and newspaper interviews from Kabul, Petraeus said the war effort had only recently acquired the resources and strategy required to succeed, and that results would take time. Petraeus said he would advise President Obama against any drawdown of the 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan if he deemed it would undermine security. “The president didn’t send me here to seek a graceful exit,” Petraeus said. “My marching orders are to do all that is humanly possible to help us achieve our objectives.”

The general’s round of public remarks appeared designed to blunt growing frustration with the nearly nine-year-long war and to lay a predicate for prolonging engagement. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai continues to struggle to maintain control across the country against an emboldened Taliban insurgency. July was the bloodiest month of the war for U.S. troops, with 66 deaths, and in Congress, debate over a $37 billion military appropriation featured a rising chorus of complaints from liberal House members. “What the hell are we doing?” said Rep. James P. McGovern, who voted against the funding, which passed. “How long is this going to go on?”

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What the editorials said

The Obama administration has sent “conflicting signals about the deadline, the strategy, and its commitment to the war,” said The New York Times. No one expects easy answers, but the White House must stop sowing “anxiety and confusion.” We need “regular, straight talk from President Obama about what is happening in Afghanistan, for good and ill.” And we need it now.

True, it’s taken Obama time to find his footing on Afghanistan’s rocky terrain, said The Dallas Morning News. But he’s now standing firm. With Gen. Petraeus and a new strategy in place, “Obama has stated with clarity that the mission in Afghanistan is to ‘disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaida.’” Given al Qaida’s proven ruthlessness, we have no choice but to double down on the fight in Afghanistan.

What the columnists said

From the noises Petraeus is making, it looks like we’ll be in Afghanistan “for a long, long while,” said Bob Herbert in The New York Times. It’s difficult to calculate the “human toll” of this hapless effort. But the price we pay as a nation is clear: As long as we pour billions of dollars into “a treacherous, unforgiving, and hopelessly corrupt sinkhole in Afghanistan,” we will be unable to deal with “deteriorating economic and social conditions here in the United States.”

Whatever happened to the liberals’ “good war”? said Joshua Gross in Politico.com. That’s what they called Afghanistan until, “quite suddenly, it was a quagmire, the mission unwinnable, the land ungovernable.” That dour characterization is no more true today than it was in 2008, when Barack Obama was demanding more resources for the fight. Fortunately, Obama provided those resources, said Philip Smucker in USA Today, and Petraeus is clever enough to deploy them properly. There are “fresh signs” that his counterinsurgency strategy is working, with U.S. “intelligence-gathering, economic development, and other non-lethal” efforts working to “render the Taliban feckless, if not helpless.” The next year will be “bloody,” but it may also be decisive.

But who will decide what? said Andrew J. Bacevich in The New Republic. With his “carefully orchestrated series of interviews,” Petraeus has just “placed down a marker” that he is opposed to a rapid withdrawal in Afghanistan. Obama has already sacked two generals in Afghanistan; he can’t afford to remove a third. For his own political sake, the president must make “progress in shutting down the war.” Yet it seems his general “entertains a different view” of how long that should take. “One, but not both, will have his way.”