In Friday’s Washington Post, Stephen Hadley, President George W. Bush’s national security adviser from 2005 to 2009, and a key architect in the surge in Iraq, wrote in support of President Obama’s policy in Afghanistan:
"President Obama has embraced a strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan that deserves bipartisan support. Its success is crucial to the security of our nation and that of our allies."
Hadley explained why succeeding in Afghanistan is important and why he sees President Obama’s policy as a continuation of what he calls President Bush’s "quiet surge" of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan during President Bush’s last two years in office. While the latter seems a bit of an exaggeration, I do agree with former.
Hadley also tries to address my biggest concern about the policy President Obama announced, i.e., announcing a date to start bringing the troops back before they have even gotten there:
"Despite some well-grounded concerns, the president and his national security team have said there is no arbitrary withdrawal schedule or exit date. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was explicit, saying [last] Sunday that ‘we're not talking about an exit strategy or a drop-dead deadline.’ Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the transition to Afghan responsibility ‘will be the same kind of gradual conditions-based transition, province by province, district by district, that we saw in Iraq,’ where the decision of when a district or province "is ready to be turned over to the Afghan security forces is a judgment that will be made by our commanders on the ground, not here in Washington.’"
The New York Times reported the same thing last Monday:
"The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.
In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan.
The television appearances by the senior members of Mr. Obama’s war council seemed to be part of a focused and determined effort to ease concerns about the president’s emphasis on setting a date for reducing America’s presence in Afghanistan after more than eight years of war."
Which is all well and good, but all the Sunday morning news shows in the world are not going to overcome the problem that the President created with what may be his most important audience, the Afghan people. What the Afghan people heard the President say was that, come July of 2011, we are going to start leaving. It is nice that Secretaries Clinton and Gates explained to the Sunday morning news junkies what the president "really meant," but how many people in Afghanistan are going to know or understand that the Obama administration, or at least some members of it, may be trying to re-characterize the July 2011 date? To ask the question is to answer it.
The key in beating an insurgency is to win over the people. The key to winning over the people is providing security. The key to providing security is to be there. But President told the Afghan people that we are going to start leaving in 19 months. Which means, or which they will think means, that we won’t be there. If we aren’t there, we can’t provide security. And if we can’t provide security, we won’t win over the people. And if we don’t win over the people, we won’t succeed.
It is too bad. The policy that President Obama announced was pretty good. It was good enough to have a decent chance of working – except that the President made things more difficult by announcing the date we are going to start leaving before the extra troops even get there. President Obama first called our commitment to succeed in Afghanistan into question, and made the job of actually succeeding in Afghanistan more difficult, by announcing a reassessment of our policy there just six months after he first announced it in March. He did the same thing by taking over three months to decide on a policy in Afghanistan once he called everything into question in late August. And he did it again by announcing the date we are going to start leaving before the troops even arrive. The job in Afghanistan was already going to be hard enough. It is unfortunate that President Obama has made it even more difficult.
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