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Obama Aides Make Case for Afghan Plan
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s top cabinet officers went before skeptical members of Congress on Wednesday to argue his case for a rapid build-up of troops in Afghanistan, followed by withdrawals beginning in 2011.
Leading Democratic and Republican senators broadly endorsed the new approach, but coupled their endorsement with specific, pointed criticisms; they questioned the capacity of the Afghan army to grow as quickly as the president hopes, and raised doubts about the wisdom of setting a target date to begin withdrawal.
In a somber opening statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said the plan was for “an extended surge of 18 to 24 months.”
“This approach is not open-ended ‘nation building,’ ” he said. “It is neither necessary nor feasible to create a modern, centralized, Western-style Afghan nation-state — the likes of which has never been seen in that country. Nor does it entail pacifying every village and conducting textbook counterinsurgency from one end of Afghanistan to the other.
“It is, instead, a narrower focus tied more tightly to our core goal of disrupting, dismantling and eventually defeating Al Qaeda by building the capacity of the Afghans — capacity that will be measured by observable progress on clear objectives, and not simply by the passage of time.”
Mr. Gates was joined by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The trio will repeat their presentations on Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as the administration continues its defense of a risky, high-cost expansion of the Afghanistan war that Congress will have to find ways to pay for.
Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat of Michigan who is chairman of the committee, has long urged a more determined effort to rapidly train and expand the Afghan army and security forces; on Wednesday he raised serious doubts that Mr. Obama’s approach would be sufficiently able do so.
“The current shortfall in terms of partnering is not a shortage of American combat troops, it’s a shortage of Afghan troops,” Mr. Levin said.
In the vitally important Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, he said, the current ratio of American to Afghan troops is 5 to 1. “Doubling the number of U.S. troops in the south will only worsen a ratio under which our forces are already matched up with fewer Afghan troops than they can and should partner with,” he said.
The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator John McCain of Arizona, also offered general backing but pointedly challenged the 2011 withdrawal date.
“I support the president’s decision, and I think it deserves the support of all Americans, both Republicans and Democrats,” Mr. McCain said. “What I don’t support, and what concerns me greatly, is the president’s decision to set an arbitrary date for beginning to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan.”
“A withdrawal date only emboldens Al Qaeda and the Taliban while dispiriting our allies,” Mr. McCain said.
President Obama, speaking on Tuesday before cadets and senior military officers at the United States Military Academy at West Point, announced that he would dispatch 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, but he vowed to start bringing American forces home from Afghanistan in the middle of 2011, saying the United States could not afford and should not have to shoulder an open-ended commitment.
Promising that he could “bring this war to a successful conclusion,” Mr. Obama set out a strategy that would seek to reverse Taliban gains in large parts of Afghanistan, better protect the Afghan people, increase the pressure on Afghanistan to build its own military capacity and a more effective government and step up attacks on Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Elaborating on that, Mr. Gates said that “the essence of our civil-military plan is to clear, hold, build, and transfer. Beginning to transfer security responsibility to the Afghans in summer 2011 is critical — and, in my, view achievable.
“This transfer will occur district by district, province by province, depending on conditions on the ground. The process will be similar to what we did in Iraq, where international security forces provided ‘overwatch’ — first at the tactical level, then at the strategic level.”
Mr. Gates added: “We will not repeat the mistakes of 1989, when we abandoned the country only to see it descend into civil war, and then into Taliban hands.”
Secretary of State Clinton, like Mr. Gates, emphasized the intention to develop a “long-term sustainable relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan,” a clear attempt to reassure the leaders of those countries that they will not be abandoned.
Mrs. Clinton also sought to pivot from the sharp criticism by some in the administration of the reliability of the Karzai government in Afghanistan, and its ability to seriously combat widespread corruption. She said Mr. Karazai’s recent re-election, and assurances he had provided, opened “a new window of opportunity.”
Admiral Mullen threw the backing of the nation’s military behind the president’s approach. “I support fully, and without hesitation, the president’s decision,” he said.
Indeed, at the end of a weeks-long strategy debate that at times reportedly grew tense, the admiral was strikingly deferential to the nation’s civilian leadership, saying, “Our military activities must support rather than lead our nation’s foreign policy.”
The admiral predicted progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan that would be “gradual and sometimes halting,” but added, “I believe we can succeed.”
The military escalation Mr. Obama described and defended in his speech on Tuesday, the result of a strategic review that lasted three months, could well prove to be the most consequential decision of Mr. Obama’s presidency.
In his 33-minute address, he sought to convince an increasingly skeptical nation that the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the continued existence of Al Qaeda across the border in Pakistan — what he called a “cancer” on the region — were direct threats to the United States, and that he could achieve the seemingly contradictory goals of expanding American involvement in the war even as he sought to bring it to a close.
The scene in the hall was striking and somber: row after row of cadets, in their blue-gray uniforms, listening intently to a strategy that could put many of them in harm’s way. “If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan, I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow,” Mr. Obama said. “So no, I do not make this decision lightly.” He called on foreign allies to step up their commitment, declaring, “This is not just America’s war.”
He delivered a pointed message to Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, saying, “The days of providing a blank check are over.”
Addressing critics who have likened Afghanistan to Vietnam, Mr. Obama called the comparison “a false reading of history.” And he spoke directly to the American people about the tough road ahead.
“Let me be clear: none of this will be easy,” Mr. Obama said. “The struggle against violent extremism will not be finished quickly, and it extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It will be an enduring test of our free society, and our leadership in the world.”
With the economy weak and the issue of jobs foremost on Americans’ minds, the president conceded that the new strategy would carry an expensive price tag, which he put at an additional $30 billion in the first year.
Yet with some Democrats talking of a war surtax, Mr. Obama offered no details of how he intended to pay for his new policy, saying only that he was “committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly.”
The approach laid out by Mr. Obama — not so much a new strategy as a doubling down on the one he embraced earlier this year — incorporated the basic goals and came close to the force levels proposed in the counterinsurgency plan that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, put forward in September.
In that report, General McChrystal said, in stark language, that unless significantly more troops were sent, the war in Afghanistan was likely to be lost.
But by including an explicit timetable to begin a withdrawal, Mr. Obama highlighted the seemingly conflicting pressures defining the debate over how to proceed: to do what is necessary to ensure that the region is not a launching pad for attacks on the United States and its allies, and to disengage militarily as quickly as possible.
Senior administration officials suggested, however, that any initial withdrawal starting in mid-2011 could be very limited, depending on the military situation at that point.
“The pace, the nature and the duration of that transition are to be determined down the road by the president based on the conditions on the ground,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, under secretary of defense for policy.
Mr. Obama was less clear publicly on how he planned to address the issue of Pakistan, which many administration officials say will prove to be a far more intractable problem in the long term than Afghanistan.
Administration officials said that Mr. Obama had signed off on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency to expand its activities in Pakistan that calls for more strikes against militants by drone aircraft, sending additional spies to Pakistan and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the agency’s budget for operations inside the country.
The expanded operations could include drone strikes in the southern province of Baluchistan, where senior Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, officials said.
The 30,000 troops that Mr. Obama is sending are part of what one administration official characterized as a short-term, high-intensity effort to regain the initiative against the Taliban.
Administration officials said that they were hoping to get a commitment for an additional 5,000 to 8,000 troops from NATO allies — perhaps as early as Friday at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels — which would bring the number of additional troops in Afghanistan to close to the 40,000 that General McChrystal was seeking.
Mr. Obama is sending three of the four brigades requested by General McChrystal. The first Marines will begin arriving as early as Christmas, and all forces will be in place by May, a senior administration official said.
The 30,000 new American troops will focus on securing and protecting the country’s top population centers, including Kabul, Khost and Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual capital. Military officials said that two brigades would go south, with the third going to eastern Afghanistan.
