Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy

What happened

President Obama moved a step closer to setting a new strategy for Afghanistan this week, meeting with his national security advisors amid signs that he is preparing to provide some—but not all—of the new troops requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Obama is evaluating a range of options that begin with McChrystal’s request for 40,000 to 80,000 additional troops to bolster a counterinsurgency campaign against the Taliban. But with the Taliban resurgent and U.S. faith in the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai in tatters, Obama is reported to be narrowing U.S. goals to preventing the Taliban from toppling the central government and to keeping al Qaida on its heels, so that it cannot mount terrorist attacks on the U.S. In the five meetings with advisors thus far, aides said, Obama repeatedly has asked, “What is our mission?”

Obama appears to be leaning toward adopting some of McChrystal’s recommendations, including redeploying existing troops from remote outposts and concentrating instead on providing security and civic order in Kabul, Kandahar, and other major cities. But he’s likely to scale back the request for additional troops, with one senior administration official saying Obama is seeking “a sweet spot” between the 68,000 U.S. troops now there and the 110,000 McChrystal envisions. Obama said this week he’d reach a decision on troops and policy in about two weeks.

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What the editorials said

Obama’s choice “is a momentous one, but it shouldn’t be hard,” said National Review Online. It comes down to whether he’s going to give his commander the troops to succeed or whether he’ll “find some fig leaf for the status quo.” The real danger is that Obama will “cut McChrystal’s troop request in half and declare himself stalwart yet prudent.” As “the surge” in Iraq demonstrated, a successful counterinsurgency requires plenty of boots on the ground.

It’s not all about troops, said the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. McChrystal also called for a new strategy—one requiring troops to “live and work among the Afghan people,” a tactic likely to lead to hundreds of additional casualties. No president wants that, but Obama also knows that whatever happens in Afghanistan will directly affect nuclear-armed Pakistan next door. With so much at stake, Obama is wise to take the time to get this decision right.

What the columnists said

It’s time to “face facts” and stop “dithering,” said Michael Scheuer in ForeignPolicy.com. We’re losing. A general “does not ask for a near doubling of his force to smooth out minor problems.” But Obama and the American public lack the resolve to fight a long and bloody war in Afghanistan, so “the best we can do is give McChrystal the troops he needs to slow defeat.” Eventually, the U.S. will withdraw, and there will be “more al Qaida attacks in North America.”

We’ve heard doomsday talk like that for years, said A.J. Rossmiller in The New Republic Online. But after eight years, it’s clear that “the insurgency does not have the capability to defeat” U.S. forces. It’s equally clear that “U.S. forces do not have the ability to vanquish the insurgency.” Despite recent Taliban advances, said Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post, the Karzai government still controls “all the major population centers,” and our troops and Predator drones have decimated al Qaida, with just 100 hard-core fighters left. The goal in Afghanistan was to neutralize al Qaida by denying them “the means to reconstitute, to train, and to plan major terrorist attacks.” Well, mission accomplished.

Those clamoring for more troops remain stuck in a neoconservative dream, said Frank Rich in The New York Times. The U.S. cannot “build a functioning state in a country where there never has been one,” and according to the principles of the counterinsurgency doctrine established by neocon hero Gen. David Petraeus, we’d need 640,000 troops to bring Afghanistan’s 32 million people under control. Polls show a majority of Americans are sick of this war, “and they will not again be so easily bullied by blustering hawks’ doomsday scenarios.”