Relaxed Politics

In several thoughtful and informative pieces, Spencer Ackerman gives some insight into the plan that President Obama unveiled last night in the Eisenhower Hall in front of the Cadets of West Point.

In The Washington Independent, Ackerman gives an overview of the plan.

“We will pursue a military strategy that will break the Taliban’s momentum and increase Afghanistan’s capacity over the next 18 months,” Obama told Army cadets at the U.S. military academy at West Point, pledging to “refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, our or interests.” U.S. troop levels will rise to an all-time high of about 98,000.

Obama recommitted to the ultimate goal, first set by his administration in March, of disrupting, dismantling and defeating al-Qaeda in its Pakistani tribal safehaven and preventing either its return to Afghanistan or a takeover in Pakistan. But for the first time in the war’s history, Obama announced a date — July 2011 — when U.S. forces in Afghanistan will begin handing over security responsibilities to Afghan soldiers and policemen currently under American and allied tutelage, a step toward what he described as a long-term political and economic relationship with Pakistan and Afghanistan after U.S. troops ultimately depart.

Senior administration officials elaborated that U.S. troops would primarily focus on southern or eastern Afghanistan — the heart of both Pashtun Afghanistan and the largely Pashtun insurgency on the porous border with the Pakistani tribal areas sheltering al-Qaeda’s senior leadership — while NATO partner nations, which currently contribute more than 30,000 troops, would bolster the north and west of Afghanistan, where security has recently deteriorated. On Friday in Brussels, NATO will hold a conference of allied foreign ministers that the administration expects to become a venue for securing several thousand new troops from partner nations.

Civilian aid to Afghanistan will be restructured, Obama indicated in the speech. In particular, the United States will emphasize agricultural development instead of big reconstruction projects to revitalize the nation’s agriculture-based economy, Obama said, to make an “immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people.”

A senior administration official explained that the adjustment was partially inspired after recent and relatively inexpensive U.S. military projects in Afghanistan to improve or repair irrigation canals proved “extremely popular” with the locals. Those “immediate impact” development projects would be expanded, the official said, and would benefit legal “agricultural output, as opposed to poppy,” which finances the insurgency and fuels Afghan governmental corruption.

But the administration still believes that the most important thing it must do in 2010 is provide security for the Afghan civilian population. One senior administration official said that Afghan interlocutors were telling Obama’s team, “Give us security and the rest will come.”

How that security will be achieved went largely unexplained in Obama’s speech, but has been spelled out extensively by McChrystal. McChrystal has called the attitudes of Afghan civilians “strategically decisive” in the war, and as such he has ended offensive U.S. and NATO airstrikes, which caused extensive civilian casualties; prevented U.S. troops from returning fire into areas with dense civilian populations; and even changed the rules for U.S. convoy movements to make Afghan roads more accessible to Afghan civilians. Administration officials explained that U.S. troops would primarily operate by securing key population-heavy areas in southern and eastern Afghanistan, but would also use select force to disrupt the Taliban outside of those areas and prevent al-Qaeda from moving into them — something strongly advocated by current and former leadership of the Joint Special Operations Command who remain close allies of McChrystal.

Keeping congressional support for a controversial war now certain to last past the 2010 midterm elections, and most likely Obama’s first term in office, will be “a challenge” for the administration, said Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Penn.), a retired Navy admiral who is running for a seat in the Senate next year and who supports the troop increases. The war is unpopular, particularly within Democratic and progressive circles, constituencies the Democrats in Congress need to retain their majorities. Traditional Obama allies like the netroots giant MoveOn and the progressive veterans group VoteVets announced opposition to the strategy on Tuesday. And a just-released estimate by Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Center on Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, claims that Obama’s “extended surge” will “increase costs by approximately $30 billion per year,” and speculated that a supplemental appropriation — something the administration has pledged not to seek — may be necessary in fiscal 2010.

Still, Sestak believed that Obama could retain congressional and national support. “People believe in him,” the congressman said, adding that Obama’s “non-political” approach to decisionmaking in the war would earn him popular support.

The plan includes several things I wanted to see – stop killing Afghan civilians, start to rebuild the infrastructure to help the Afghans live – but I am not for more troops. And how this is going to be paid for has not been addressed. I admit that what I want may not be possible without more troops, so I am willing to support President Obama and give him the benefit of the doubt. His decision track record has been pretty good so far, so let’s see if he’s right again.

Here is some more from Spencer Ackerman in which he explains more of the nuances of the plan.

Matthew Yglesias wonders:

At the intersection of these two arguments is the idea of “no blank check” for Hamid Karzai. How, one naturally wonders, is the check not blank if the President of the United States has defined the mission as serving a vital American interest? If you made the case that the mission is a good idea differently—if you just said we’re obligated to the Afghan people and government to give it a try—then your check has real limits. We’re obligated, but they’re obligated too, and if they don’t meet their obligations we can meet ours so we’ll have to walk away. But that’s not what he said. What he said was “I make this decision because I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan . . . [w]e must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.” Insofar as that’s true, then it’s true completely independently of how we feel about the Afghan government, so Afghan government actions have a limited influence on our policy, so whatever checks we write to them are pretty much blank.

I think it’s fair to say that the problem Yglesias identifies can’t be solved within the logic of Obama’s strategy, but it can be mitigated. As my piece reports, the administration is aiming to — well, if not exactly circumvent the Karzai government, say that it has more Afghan partners than just Karzai: “it would aim its military and development assistance down to Afghanistan’s provinces and districts, where Karzai’s influence is relatively tenuous.” Hence the reorientation of development aid from big reconstruction projects — and if you’ve been to Afghanistan and seen the destitution there, you have a sense of how little sense those make — to “immediate impact” projects like agriculture, and particularly irrigation*. And that’s of a piece with the decision to partner with local or tribal militias.

I do not know if it will work. But it strikes me as at least a plausible way to broaden the U.S.-Afghan relationship from just a U.S.-Karzai relationship. And unlike previous administrations, I do not get the sense that the Obama administration or McChrystal’s command sees the approach as stronger or less problematic than it is.

Lots to ponder here. Or is the plan more like or Escalate War to End War or Escalate Occupation to End Occupation.

I think we should call this whole Afghanistan affair an OCCUPATION – we are occupying Afghanistan to further and protect OUR INTERESTS. That people are being killed is what allows the term *war* to be bandied about – but don’t be mislead, it is an occupation. There can be no war on a philosophy – all philosophies are espoused by people individually or in groups. So you can attack and kill the people who espouse the philosophy, but it is not war.

And I am more than sickened that the repugnants and blue dog dummies are *for* this war escalation and aren’t screaming about the amount money to be spent on it but are whining and crying about the money that would be spent to rebuild America and give affordable health care to Americans. They are jerks.

posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 12:47 pm under Current Events, Defense, Global News, President Obama, US News, US Politics.