Strategists’ views diverge on Afghanistan approach

— Two days before announcing the deployment of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama i n fo r m e d G e n . Sta n l ey McChrystal that he was not granting McChrystal’s request to double the size of the Afghan army and police.

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The Afghan War

Cost was a factor, as were questions about whether the capacity exists to train 400,000 personnel. The president told McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to focus for now on fielding a little more than half that number by next October.

Ten days after Obama’s speech, the U.S. command responsible for training the Afghans circulated a chart detailing the combined personnel targets for the army and police. McChrystal’s goal of 400,000 remained unchanged.

“It’s an open issue,” a senior Pentagon official said recently.

Nearly a month after Obama unveiled his revised Afghan strategy, military and civilian leaders have come away with differing views of several fundamental aspects of the president’s new approach, according to more than a dozen senior administration and military officials involved in Afghanistan policy, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Members of Obama’s war Cabinet disagree over the meaning of his pledge to begin drawing down forces in July 2011 and whether the mission has been narrowed from a proposal advanced by McChrystal in his August assessment of the war. At the White House, a senior administration official said, the National Security Council is discussing ways to increase monitoring of military and State Department activities in Afghanistan to prevent “overreaching.”

The National Security Council’s strategic guidance, a classified document that outlines the president’s new approach, was described by the senior administration official as limiting military operations “in scale and scope to the minimum required to achieve two goals - to prevent al-Qaida safe havens and to prevent the Taliban from toppling the government.”

The use of resource-intensive counterinsurgency tactics - employing U.S. forces to protect Afghan civilians from the Taliban - is supposed to be restricted to key cities and towns in southern and eastern parts of the country, the official said.

“The strategy has fundamentally changed. This is not a COIN strategy,” Vice President Joe Biden said on MSNBC, using the military’s shorthand for counterinsurgency. “This is not ‘go out and occupy the whole country.’”

White House officials said the president opposes using the forces he has authorized to duplicate an expansive, Iraq-style counterinsurgency operation - in part because he questions whether it will be possible to achieve a similar outcome in Afghanistan, which is less developed, and because he wants to start reducing troops in 18 months. The White House’s desired end state in Afghanistan, officials said, envisions more informal local security arrangements than in Iraq, a less-capable national government and a greater tolerance of insurgent violence.

But senior military officials still think they can achieve a better outcome than envisaged by civilian skeptics in the administration by using the new forces to mount more comprehensive counterinsurgency operations.

Military officials contend that McChrystal does not harbor expansionist aims. They note that he has begun removing troops from remote mountain valleys and concentrating resources on a modest number of key population centers. But the approach in those areas will involve counterinsurgency tactics: Troops will focus on restoring normal patterns of life by trying to keep the Taliban at bay, helping the Afghan government provide basic services to the population and training local security forces.

McChrystal’s plan, the senior Pentagon official said, “is still counterinsurgency, regardless of the various agendas people are trying to spin.”

During strategy discussions, differences between the White House and the military came into sharp relief over Obama’s decision to announce his intention to begin drawing down troops in July 2011.

M c C h r y s t a l a r g u e d against it, according to three officials familiar with the process. The commander of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. David Petraeus, also expressed concerns. Defense Secretary Robert Gates urged Obama to make the draw down “conditions based.”

“There was a lot of pushback” from the Defense Department, one of the officials said.

The president received cover from one uniformed general at the table, James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Cartwright effectively endorsed the July 2011 date, arguing that increasing forces and engaging in limited counterinsurgency made sense, the senior administration official said, “but given the risk factors - Pakistan, the Karzai government, the whole notion of subnational governance, and our track record with the [Afghan security forces], which is not prestigious - that it made sense to demonstrate that we could actually do this.”

It also helped Obama that the principal troop-increase proposal being discussed at the time - 30,000 troops for 18 to 24 months - had been developed by Gates. In the Defense Department paperwork detailing the proposal, it identified the increase as starting in the summer of 2009, but it did not specify an end date.

Obama eventually told his war Cabinet that he would announce the July 2011 deadline but that the pace of withdrawals would be determined, as Gates had sought, by conditions on the ground.

The president avoided details in his Dec. 1 address, leaving it up to members of his Cabinet and to his advisers to explain the specifics.The result has been a wide divergence of expectations. Gates, appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press the Sunday after the speech, said perhaps only “some handful or some small number” would be withdrawn. Biden, during his MSNBC appearance, said a chart showing an increase in U.S. deployments this year would be “coming down as rapidly over the next two years.”

Although senior-level civilians in the administration emerged from the review process thinking the mission had been circumscribed, senior military officials continue to have a different view. The result, as they see it, is that the White House has embraced McChrystal’s original plan.

“We had already been pretty focused that we wouldn’t try to clear and hold things more than we needed to,” a senior commander involved in the war said. “It wasn’t a dramatic change by any means.”

White House officials have cited a meeting among National Security Council staff members and McChrystal in which the general displayed a slide stating that his mission was to “Defeat the Taliban,” which some civilians deemed overly ambitious because it suggested that every last member of the Taliban would have to be killed or captured. The officials said the mission was redefined to avoid the term.

But to military officers, defeat “doesn’t mean wipe everyone out,” the commander said. “It means after Waterloo, Napoleon still had an army but he wasn’t going to threaten Europe.”

White House advisers maintain that the review process did refine the mission beyond what McChrystal had proposed over the summer.

“There was a real narrowing here,” the senior administration official said. “Stan has a big leadership task to adapt his original concept to the new strategic guidance.”

The challenge, said that official and another senior administration official, is to recalibrate military operations over the next 18 months in accordance with the new goal.

“The guidance they have is that we’re not doing everything, and we’re not doing it forever,” the second official said. “The hardest intellectual exercise will be settling on how much is enough.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/27/2009

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