Obama poised to increase troops in Afghanistan

What happened

Following a months-long strategic review, President Obama reportedly reached a decision on war policy in Afghanistan this week and is preparing to order as many as 35,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan. In addition, Obama is expected to ask NATO allies to furnish another 10,000 soldiers, bringing the allied troop level in Afghanistan to more than 100,000. The mission has a tentative deadline of five years, after which security duties would be turned over to the Afghan military. “It is my intention to finish the job,” Obama said. “I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we’re doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive.”

Obama is set to announce the strategy in a speech to the nation next week. The president may face resistance among Democrats in Congress, where support for the war has been eroding. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey has called deeper involvement in Afghanistan “a mistake” and says the war should be paid for with a surtax. Doubts persist about the ability of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to reduce widespread corruption or to strengthen his weak government. Meantime, U.S. troops have begun converging on the Taliban’s power base in Kandahar in a move that presages the counterinsurgency strategy favored by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Securing population centers like Kandahar is the key to the strategy, which Obama appears set to endorse.

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What the editorials said

Obama’s decision on Afghanistan “is likely to be the one that will define him,” said Newsday. So he’d better clarify his—and the nation’s—goals. Are we there to build a strong central government in a country dominated by tribal leaders? To rout al Qaida? Is the plan to crush the Taliban, or co-opt it? Given such complex questions, Obama was right not to rush his answer, despite wrong-headed accusations of “dithering.” But now that he’s chosen a path, “he must not get Afghanistan wrong.”

Getting it right takes more than new troops, said Investor’s Business Daily, though we hope Obama won’t be “stingy” in providing them. What really matters is whether the president has the “will to win.” Obama can prove his mettle by strongly backing McChrystal’s counterinsurgency approach. It focuses on winning the Afghan people’s support by securing their cities, and gives our troops the best morale-booster of all—a genuine shot at victory.

What the columnists said

Counterinsurgency, even with more troops, is no cure-all, said Paul Staniland in ForeignPolicy.com. Classical counterinsurgency works by providing security and economic opportunity to the people and building a strong central government that can win their confidence. But in Afghanistan, the very idea of a strong state “is often in direct opposition to the will of the population.” This is how “grandiose visions of state-building” lead to quagmires.

We may not need a strong government in Kabul to succeed, said Fred Kaplan in Slate.com. Afghanistan isn’t run by a government—it’s run by tribes. So Obama had better be ready to go tribal. U.S. special forces are already working with some tribal militias fighting the Taliban, a development that military leaders hope to expand with “tribal engagement teams.” Tribal politics is definitely “back in fashion,” said David Ignatius in The Washington Post. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. has abandoned its efforts to strengthen national and local governments. In this difficult war, McChrystal’s going “in several directions at once, looking for game-changing opportunities to halt the Taliban’s advance.”

That’s why Obama faces a nearly impossible task when he addresses the American people next week, said James Gordon Meek in the New York Daily News. “Short of immediate withdrawal,” there’s nothing he could unveil that would end our involvement in Afghanistan before the 2012 election. It’s hard to imagine how he can convince Americans it’s worth fighting for “many more years” to win a war that most of us no longer have the patience for.