Obama’s Speech on Afghanistan to Envision Exit
Senior administration officials said that the timetable will not be tied to particular conditions on the ground in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to lay out a time frame for winding down the American involvement in the war in Afghanistan when he announces his decision this week to send more forces, senior administration officials said Sunday.
Although the speech was still in draft form, the officials said the president wanted to use the address at the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night not only to announce the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops, but also to convey how he intends to turn the fight over to the Kabul government.
“It’s accurate to say that he will be more explicit about both goals and time frame than has been the case before and than has been part of the public discussion,” said a senior official, who requested anonymity to discuss the speech before it is delivered. “He wants to give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.”
The officials would not disclose the time frame. But they said it would not be tied to particular conditions on the ground nor would it be as firm as the current schedule for withdrawing troops in Iraq, where Mr. Obama has committed to withdrawing most combat units by August and all forces by the end of 2011.
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said increase in US troops in Afghanistan might lead to a spill over of militants inside Pakistan and make the situation worse. Hence, western countries should evolve a joint strategy against the Taliban on the Pak-Afghan border, he said.
In an interview with German Press Agency ahead of his first visit to Germany as the prime minister, Gilani stressed the Obama administration would have to formulate the military strategy for Afghanistan in consultation with Pakistan.
Responding to a question, Gilani said we have highlighted our concerns about the possible increase in US forces in Afghanistan. Our fear is that if the troops are increased, the militants might spill over to Pakistan, he added.
The prime minister said Pakistan was taking an all out action against the terrorists, which was being recognised also, however, the international community should enhance co-operation with the country. — DawnNews
Officials of one allied nation who have been extensively briefed on the president’s plan said, however, that Mr. Obama would describe how the American presence would be ratcheted back after the buildup, while making clear that a significant American presence in Afghanistan would remain for a long while. That is designed in part to signal to Pakistan that the United States will not abandon the region and to allay Pakistani fears that India will fill the vacuum created as America pulls back.
Some leading members of Congress talked publicly Sunday about their hope that the president would explain an endgame for American involvement in the eight-year war that includes how Afghans will assume more of their security needs.
But more hawkish Republicans cautioned that setting a deadline for withdrawal could signal a lack of resolve to allies, including Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“Talk of an exit strategy is exactly the wrong way to go,” said Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican. “I certainly hope the president doesn’t do that, because all that does is signal to the enemies and also to our allies, to the folks in Pakistan as well as the Afghanis, that we’re not there to stay until the mission is accomplished.” He spoke on “Fox News Sunday.”
Senior lawmakers also warned the White House on Sunday that its expected troop buildup in Afghanistan would fail unless the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan did more to combat militants attacking American forces, a concern that administration officials concede is a major vulnerability in President Obama’s new war strategy.
“The key here is an Afghan surge, not an American surge,” Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And if the president lays out the case for why our combat forces that are going particularly to the south will increase the speed-up of the Afghan Army, it seems to me that that would be very, very important.”
With the cost of the war rising, some Democrats have even talked of a surtax. And a Republican senator, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, asked: “If we were talking about several years of time, how many more years beyond that? What is the capacity of our country to finance this particular type of situation as opposed to other ways of fighting Al Qaeda and the war against terror?”
At West Point, Mr. Obama was expected to describe commitments from Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and specific benchmarks his government must meet: to crack down on corruption, deploy well-trained Afghan troops and police officers, and focus on development in one of the world’s poorest nations. Mr. Obama was expected to be far less specific about Pakistan, where Taliban leaders are commanding operations across the border against American forces, and where Al Qaeda’s central leadership still lives.
“We agree that no matter how many troops you send, if the safe haven in Pakistan isn’t cracked, the whole mission is compromised,” said one official who has participated in the debate over the strategy. “But if you make too many demands on the Pakistanis in public, it can backfire.”
The problems in Afghanistan have only been compounded by the fragility of Mr. Obama’s partner in Pakistan, President Asif Ali Zardari, who is so weak that his government seems near collapse. On Friday, Mr. Zardari relinquished his position in Pakistan’s nuclear command structure, turning it over to the prime minister, in what appeared to be an effort to avoid impeachment or prosecution, and retain at least a figurehead post.
On Sunday, one of the Obama administration’s staunchest allies, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, joined in the campaign to press Pakistan to step up attacks on Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan’s unruly tribal areas and other militant groups there. “People are going to ask why, eight years after 2001, Osama bin Laden has never been near to being caught,” Mr. Brown told Sky News, “and what can the Pakistan authorities do that is far more effective.”
White House officials have said relatively little about the Pakistan side of the administration’s evolving war strategy, in part because they have so few options and so little leverage. They cannot send troops into Pakistan, and they cannot talk publicly about one of their most effective measures, the Central Intelligence Agency’s Predator drone strikes in the country.
“Everyone understands this is a complex, nuanced, critical relationship,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Mr. Obama’s review had not been announced. “Everyone has their eyes open, and there are genuine concerns. But one focus now is on trying to expand cooperation. The Pakistanis are doing some positive things in the tribal areas. That presents opportunities on which to build.”
Mr. Obama’s advisers previously signaled that the president wanted to outline, as he had before, expectations for the Afghan government. This time, they said, the goals would be more explicit and demanding, aimed at improving governance and curbing corruption.
But the advisers have been debating whether to put deadlines on those benchmarks, like the pace of training Afghan security forces to defend their country.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top NATO and American commander in Afghanistan, is expected to testify about Mr. Obama’s new strategy on Dec. 8 to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees in Washington, the official said. His appearance is expected to follow Congressional testimony later this week by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The administration has sought to build consensus among crucial allies to reach this point. In the last two weeks, Mr. Obama dispatched two top aides to Pakistan to deliver the same message: Keep the pressure on.
In separate visits to Islamabad, the capital, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, and the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, told Pakistani officials that no matter how many more troops the president sent to Afghanistan, the effort would fail unless Pakistan increased strikes against Al Qaeda’s leadership and Mullah Muhammad Omar and the leadership of the Afghan Taliban in the southern Pakistani city of Quetta, and the Haqqani network, militants operating out of North Waziristan who have attacked Afghan and NATO targets in eastern Afghanistan and Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting from Washington, and Sabrina Tavernise from Islamabad, Pakistan.
WASHINGTON: Skeptics reject President Barack Obama’s expected decision to ramp up the Afghanistan war as a misguided bid to fix a muddled mission, arguing it will draw America deeper into a quagmire.
Ahead of Obama’s momentous address to the nation on Tuesday, even fellow Democrats in Congress are voicing growing doubts about the conflict while polls show a divided American public.
With 2009 by far the deadliest year for foreign troops in Afghanistan, critics of reinforcing the 68,000-strong US contingent portray the mission as unnecessary and unwinnable, warning it has begun to resemble Vietnam.
A USA TODAY/Gallup poll released Wednesday showed rising pessimism among the US public, with only 35 per cent approving of Obama’s handling of the conflict, down from 56 per cent four months ago.
America was divided on the president’s expected decision to dispatch some 34,000 more US troops. Half of those surveyed backed the plans, while 39 per cent said it was time to begin withdrawing forces.
With the Al-Qaeda leadership now outside Afghanistan, skeptics have long been saying there is no vital national interest at stake and that maintaining a large military presence there would not prevent another September 11.
‘Averting a recurrence of that awful day does not require the semi-permanent occupation and pacification of distant countries like Afghanistan,’ Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in August.
US leaders were ignoring the lessons of history, as Soviet and British military missions met with fierce resistance from Afghans, he said.
‘Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires,’ he wrote in the journal Commonweal.
A former senior State Department official who resigned his Afghanistan post in September said the United States had become ‘a supporting actor’ in the country’s decades-old civil war between Pashtuns and other ethnic groups.
In his resignation letter, Matthew Hoh also dismissed warnings that Washington must rout out the Taliban and allied insurgents in Afghanistan to prevent attacks on the United States.
That ‘would require us to occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, etc,’ wrote Hoh, the first US official known to have resigned in protest over the war.
The US ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, has himself expressed deep reservations about a major troop build-up, reportedly sending strongly-worded cables to the White House citing rampant corruption in President Hamid Karzai’s government.
Liberal lawmakers in Obama’s Democratic Party have called for a timeline to withdraw US forces and floated levying a new income tax to pay for the war or blocking funding for a troop surge, warning the costly mission threatens to derail ambitious plans for domestic reforms.
‘We are concerned about committing additional US troops and taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan, especially when the US mission is unclear and when methods for measuring mission effectiveness are underdeveloped or nonexistent,’ five Democrats in Congress wrote to Obama earlier this month.
A group of lawmakers, including House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey, warned that ‘regardless of whether one favours the war or not, if it is to be fought, it ought to be paid for.’
Although the proposal is a symbolic move without a realistic chance of passage, it underlines the growing dissatisfaction among some of Obama’s staunchest allies over the course of the war.
Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who heads the Armed Services Committee, has called for focusing efforts on training Afghan security forces before committing any additional combat troops.
Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has questioned any US approach that relies on Karzai’s corruption-plagued government in Kabul.
‘How can we ask the American people to pay a big price in lives and limbs, and also in dollars, if we don’t have a connection to a reliable partner?’ she asked on National Public Radio. — AFP
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Rescueing the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan 
Unite! Erase the Durand Line
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