There are increasing signs the administration is wrapping up its Afghanistan strategy review and planning a rollout toward the end of the week beginning November 16, immediately after President Obama and other top officials return from Asia.
Reliable sources tell The Cable that the review has entered its final stages, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and National Security Advisor Jim Jones now taking the lead and putting on the final touches.
Today, Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke cancelled a planned speaking event scheduled for Wednesday, November 18, at the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, “due to unforeseen changes in the speaker’s schedule,” a group representative said.
And the rest of the President’s team is back in town on Thursday, November 19.
The administration sent a team to Brussels this week to consult with all 43 member nations of the International Security Assistance Force, including all 28 NATO nations.
“Their trip will serve to both brief allies on where our efforts stand and to hear their comments and questions about the review,” said Michael Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council.
Jon Landay at McClatchy — he of Nobody’s Business, who might have won Journopalooza if Mike Hayden was the judge — has the first leak of Afghanistan escalation numbers: 34,000, which is, Landay reports, inclusive of combat, support, trainer forces and a new division HQ for RC-South in Kandahar. His reporting, which matches something I was told Friday and which Josh Rogin reported earlier that day, indicates that Obama will roll out the new strategy and the troop increase after returning from his Asia trip on November 19. I should say that Taken For Action thinks that the real number here is 55,000.
The thing is, can we actually get 34,000 new troops into Afghanistan before summer of 2010? Remember that in the McChrystal strategy review, completed in late August, the commanding general talks about a window of about 12-18 month wherein he’ll know if he can arrest Taliban momentum. (That’s different, notice, than rolling back Taliban gains.) Check out David Wood’s latest Politics Daily column. Wood crunches the numbers on available Army brigade combat teams and finds that… there really aren’t any uncommitted brigades, at least not if the current year of “dwell time” (the time between deployments) holds.
O’s advisors are working up three options Afghanistan troop options. Glad to hear he’s still working on that. I was a little concerned that, like some other federal agents, his eye was off the al-Qaeda ball. Here’s the status of the last three months of war strategizing, via NYT. Sounds like he’s taking pains to be minimally invasive:
WASHINGTON — Advisers to President Obama are preparing three options for escalating the war effort in Afghanistan, all of them calling for more American troops, as he moves closer to a decision on the way forward in the eight-year-old war, officials said Saturday.
The options include Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Officials hope to present the options to Mr. Obama this week before he leaves on a trip to Asia.
No cruel eenie-meenie-miney-moe jokes, please. I don’t want to be so cynical as to suggest that in neat increments of 5,000 to 10,000, the president’s precision decision-making process smacks of micromanagement, a desire to show he’s no sap for generals, or some effort to please everyone. Clearly they’ve put a lot of thought into whether 5,000 or 10,000 in one direction or the other stresses the Afghan population more or less, stresses the U.S. military more or less. Presumably it reflects a precision response to some precise level of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity that McChrystal,* unable to see trees from his forest perch, was unable to discern, and a more advanced level of thinking on exactly how much harder or easier it needs to be for each soldier on the ground in Afghanistan to do whatever it is they are supposed to do with every last bullet and bean the American people send over there.
Something like that. I don’t know. But as an exercise in strategic brain surgery, it is impressive. Not just picking a halfway range between the opposing ears of no-more-troops and McChrystal’s full request and planting a medieval battleaxe in the patient’s forehead, but futzing about with digital knob-fiddling exactitude on multiple options in the mid-range. It certain creates a greater impression of thoughtfulness, like the president and his advisors really know what they’re doing. Not like some journeyman neurosurgeon left with the patient while the senior surgeon takes a potty break, who says “ummmmmm,” and takes a minute or three months to figure out whether that open cranium in front of him wants a scalpel, forceps or some kind of probey thingy.
A few weeks ago, the rumor emanating from the White House was that President Obama might approve as few as 10,000 to 20,000 additional troops for Afghanistan. Now the rumor I’ve been hearing is that he will approve more than 30,000 — still considerably short of the 40,000 or so that General McChrystal would like but a lot better than the lowball alternatives being aired earlier. This McClatchy newspapers article flatly reports that the president plans to send 34,000 more troops. This New York Times article claims, no doubt correctly, that no actual decision has been made but that the president is considering three options: “Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements.”
As anyone familiar with the ways of Washington will know, the president almost always chooses the “middle option.” Indeed aides sometimes game the process with, as insiders like to joke, the “high” option being nuclear war, the “low” option being unilateral disarmament, and the “middle” option being whatever the president’s advisers favor. Given this reality, there has been an interesting and subtle redefinition of the middle option going on. Under General McChrystal’s troop request, 40,000 was the middle of the road, moderate-risk option; 60,000 troops was the low-risk option, and 20,000 troops was the high-risk option. If the Times article is accurate, the White House has arbitrarily made McChrystal’s request the high-end estimate and added a third option that’s higher than his low-end request but lower than his middle option. Presumably this is so that Obama can tell his liberal base that he didn’t just “cave” in to what the generals wanted, though why the president should be afraid of “rubber-stamping” a request from his handpicked commander in the field isn’t clear.
I would be more comfortable if the president were to give General McChrystal at least 40,000 troops, but if he does approve at least 30,000, that will enable the general to implement a good deal of his counterinsurgency strategy, albeit with more risk than should be necessary for the troops involved.
Putting that aside, the delay in making a decision has become an embarrassment, even if it does look as though Obama will move in the right direction by committing more resources to the Af-Pak theater. This is, after all, a war, a shooting war in which Americans and our allies are getting killed while Obama ruminates over a series of options that he’s had for months. Resolving the Karzai-Abdullah election standoff should not have precluded the Obama administration from consulting NATO about the troop levels needed for the war. It sounds like the latest excuse for an entire series of procrastinations that Obama has used to avoid a politically damaging decision.
And now the war has to wait for Obama to get some face time in Asia? Why not wait until after the Christmas shopping season?
November 8, 2009...6:49 pm
The Number Will Be Anywhere From 0 To 2,000,000,000
Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy:
Spencer Ackerman:
Jules Crittenden:
Max Boot at Commentary:
Ed Morrissey:
UPDATE: Leslie Gelb at Daily Beast
UPDATE #2: Joe Klein at Swampland at Time
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Filed under Af/Pak, GWOT
Tags: Afghanistan, Commentary, Daily Beast, Ed Morrissey, Foreign Policy, Joe Klein, Josh Rogin, Jules Crittenden, Leslie Gelb, Max Boot, Spencer Ackerman, Swampland, Time, War On Terror