U.S. lowers its goals for Afghanistan

[Cheetah786]

President Barack Obama is likely to scale back U.S. ambitions for troubled Afghanistan, redefining victory in a war that his closest military and foreign affairs advisers say cannot be won on the battlefield.

Even before a planned doubling of U.S. forces occupying Afghanistan later this year, the new administration is lowering its sights — and lowering expectations. Although there is general agreement that the United States will be in Afghanistan for years to come, the new focus is on how to show even small security gains and development progress quickly.

"That's clearly the message I'm getting is, 'What are the near-term goals going to be?' " Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, said when asked about Obama's agenda for Afghanistan.

Mullen and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who has recently suggested the administration of former president George W. Bush overreached in Afghanistan, are scheduled to testify Tuesday before the U.S. Senate and House armed services committees.

Vice-President Joe Biden said the world hasn't done enough to provide economic, political and military resources to Afghanistan, and the United States and its allies lack a coherent strategy. The result is a country backsliding into Taliban control, Biden said.

He warned of higher U.S. military casualties as the Obama administration adds up to 30,000 troops to the Afghan war, where the Taliban is resurgent and where critics say the Bush administration was slow to respond.

"The bottom line here is we've inherited a real mess," Biden told CBS's program Face the Nation on Sunday. "We're about to go in and try to essentially reclaim territory that's been effectively lost."

Obama will refocus U.S. military agenda
Obama has promised to refocus the U.S. military agenda away from what he considers a misbegotten war in Iraq, and last week he called Afghanistan and Pakistan the central front in the struggle against terrorism and extremism.

Aside from transferring troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, he has offered few specifics about how his approach would turn around a fight that Mullen, the nation's top military officer, says the U.S. is not winning.

A few things are becoming clear, however, and none more stark than the notion of what winning in desperately poor, decentralized and deeply traditional Afghanistan would look like.

It is likely to be less about democracy and more about old-fashioned charity and development work. It will be measured by small, local gains in security and governance that give Afghans a reason to reject the efficiencies and protection offered by the Taliban insurgency.

Gates, a holdover from the Republican Bush administration, suggested last week that the previous administration had unrealistic ideas about what it could accomplish in Afghanistan.

"One of the points where I suspect both administrations come to the same conclusion is that the goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future," Gates said during a Pentagon news conference.

"We need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after al-Qaeda,... some very concrete things."

Taliban stronger since 2001 U.S.-led invasion
The Taliban are stronger now than at any point since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001, which toppled a Taliban government in Kabul and dismantled some al-Qaeda havens in the country. The Taliban regrouped with help from Islamic militants and factions across the rugged border with Pakistan, and now control chunks of the east and south.

Those militants are now fighting a modern version of an age-old war, relying on the classic insurgent tactics of ambush, assassination and anonymity to tie up a vastly better armed U.S. and NATO force of some 60,000 spread over an anarchic country that sprawls from Iran to China.

Critics of the management of the war include Obama's new national security adviser, retired U.S. marine Gen. James Jones, who last year warned that the U.S. risks losing "the forgotten war."

Gen. David Petraeus, who headed up a renewed U.S. security push in Iraq two years ago, is the latest senior military leader to say that the war in Afghanistan won't be won militarily.

"One of the concepts we embraced in Iraq was recognition that you can't kill or capture your way out of a complex, industrial-strength insurgency," Petraeus said in an interview this month with Foreign Policy magazine.

Petraeus favours deeper outreach to former enemies, and has hinted he would like Iran's help in Afghanistan. The latitude he gets for that effort will be an early clue to the breadth of Obama's planned policy changes.

To that end, Obama has hired a special troubleshooter for Afghanistan and Pakistan whose background is heavy on development and diplomacy. The announcement came at the State Department, the first agency Obama visited outside the White House, with nary a military uniform in sight.

"This is a very difficult assignment, as we all know," envoy Richard Holbrooke said. "Nobody can say the war in Afghanistan has gone well."

U.S. will likely lower its goals for Afghanistan: officials

 

[Omar1984]

This war is unwinable. Taliban are the local inhabitants of the land, they are not foreigners and they are not Al Queda. US cant get rid of taliban, maybe US can get rid of Al Queda who are foreigners...but I dont know this whole thing is a big mess. I say its an unwinable war.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

And the US officially lowers its goals in Afghanistan.

US signals change in priority for Afghan policy​

Amanda Hodge, South Asia Correspondent | January 29, 2009
Article from: The Australian

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has given the clearest indication yet that the Obama administration has scaled down ambitions for Afghanistan and will seek to contain terrorism rather than push democracy for the region.

While the conflict affecting the South Asian nation was the US's "top overseas military priority", Mr Gates told a Senate armed services committee yesterday that the Government's main goal was "to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base for al-Qa'ida attacks on the United States".

"Our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and our allies. And whatever else we need to do flows from that objective," he said.

"We can attain what I believe should be among our strategic objectives: an Afghan people who do not provide a safe haven for al-Qa'ida, reject the rule of the Taliban and support the legitimate Government that they elected and in which they have a stake." But he added: "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of a Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose. Because nobody in the world has that much time, patience or money."

The latest remarks by Mr Gates represent a shift from the ambition to bring democracy to the region pursued under former president George W. Bush.

They are unlikely to be greeted enthusiastically in India, where analysts have suggested that the US is only interested in preventing attacks on its own soil and is happy to contain terrorism within South Asia.

India is expressing concern about Washington's proposal to triple non-military aid to Pakistan conditional on co-operation from Islamabad on the Afghanistan border. Analysts say that policy frees Pakistan to pursue its proxy border conflict with India.

The New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research fellow Brahma Chellaney said Mr Gates's comments indicated that, instead of addressing instability in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a single issue, the US looked set to pursue a military strategy in Afghanistan and a political one in Pakistan.

"I am afraid (Mr Obama's) moves so far do not signal any kind of meaningful integration of treatment of Pakistan and Afghanistan," Professor Chellaney told The Australian yesterday.

"On the one hand, Obama is going to more than triple non-military assistance to Pakistan and on the other, they plan to double US troop numbers in Afghanistan.

"That sends a very clear military message to Afghanistan and a very different one to Pakistan."

Mr Obama was scheduled to meet overnight with military chiefs to review US military strategy in Afghanistan and was expected to consider a near doubling of troop numbers there to about 60,000 and a drawdown of troop numbers in Iraq.

On Tuesday, nearly 3000 US soldiers, originally destined for Iraq, were deployed south of Kabul to join a 55,000-strong NATO force.

Mr Gates told the Senate committee the Pentagon could send two more brigades to Afghanistan by mid-year and a third brigade by the late northern summer to counter Islamic militants whose influence now extends across the country.

But he warned that flooding the country with US troops could make it look like an occupying force and added that the US was "lost" unless it reduced civilian casualties.

US signals change in priority for Afghan policy | The Australian
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This still leaves a lot of other issues hanging. How are India and Pakistan going to be prevented from continuing to play out their proxy war in Afghanistan, in the absence of a strong Afghan government?

There has to be a push for some sort of normalization between the two for that to happen.

Gates comment of 'no one has the time, money or patience' seems to confirm the analysis by Rubin and Rashid that argued that billions of dollars in funding for decades was the only way to sustain an Afghan state with an army the necessary size to control the insurgent threat on its own.

But if there is no time, money or patience for nation building - then are we looking at a perpetual US military presence that just goes on killing?

"I am afraid (Mr Obama's) moves so far do not signal any kind of meaningful integration of treatment of Pakistan and Afghanistan,"

Not sure what sort of 'integration' chellaney was looking for - does he expect teh US to start bombing all f Pakistan and invade it?

India obviously would love that, emasculated as it is in taking action herself, as an attempt to further destabilize Pakistan, but beyond destabilizing I am not sure what benefits such a policy would serve.

Unlike Afghanistan, Pakistan has functioning institutions (though they may not function well) and a relatively self sustaining economy and military (though perhaps not when including the insurgency related costs). Pakistan still offers a solution through careful political and economic engagement.

For analysts in India, the possibility of a stable and successful Pakistan down the road may just not be palatable though.

 

[zhero]

It also seems to fall slightly short on what kind of post-victory political scenario is 'acceptable'.

 

[Captain03]

the u.s. has already lost the war on terror
apparently the strongest country in the world doesn't know that terror doesn't discriminate against race, religion, or color.
the only country winning the war against terror is pakistan
as we have successfully eliminated more, captured more, and destroyed more terrorists than any other country involved in the war.

 

[fatman17]

BBC is reporting that the Afghan Elections scheduled for May this year have been postponed by three months, citing security concerns!

 

[ajpirzada]

ill call it a political bluff. they are reducing their targets after 7 yrs inorder to show the world that they have won. still i doubt if they ll be able to achieve these new ones. in the end they ll be thinkin about settin a target of somehow saving their a$$ and gettin out of there

 

[muse]

US will introduce significant numbers of troops into Afghanistan shortly - is this a tactical move to prevent the surrounding of Kabul or a signal that a new round of consultations will bring about a lengthier stay in Afghanistan?:


Obama’s Afghan policy
Najmuddin A Shaikh



Our TV commentators and newspaper columnists have had a great deal to say about US Defence Secretary Robert Gates’ testimony in Congress where he seemed to confirm that the drone attacks on suspected Al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan’s tribal areas will continue. This is important to us as is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s statement, when asked about the same drone attacks, that “there’s little doubt in anyone’s mind that the border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan are a source of instability for Afghanistan, for Pakistan, and far beyond the borders of those two countries”.

The government should acknowledge publicly that our own campaign against extremist and criminal elements in Swat and the tribal areas is floundering, that we do not have the resources to take on Al Qaeda in the remote relatively inaccessible areas where they have ensconced themselves, and that drone attacks are helping rather than hindering our own anti-terrorism efforts.

Rather than allowing public debate to focus on the infringement of our sovereignty, we should be talking about our discussions with the Americans on how the targeting could be made more effective and how civilian casualties could be avoided. This may sound like we are making the best of a bad bargain, but that is the ground reality.

We have become a country in which the government has lost control over significant swathes of its territory, and in which bombings and suicide attacks are taking place all over the country not because of the foreign presence in Afghanistan, as some of us would like to believe, but because the extremists think that they have the strength and perhaps the support to be able to “Talibanise” Pakistan’s polity.

On the other hand, we have a new administration in Washington that, perhaps even more than the Bush administration, will seek to make America safe against attacks from non-state actors. It recognises that Pakistan is a vital ally in the campaign given the belief that the Al Qaeda safe havens are in Pakistan or along the Pak-Afghan border. It is prepared to offer the economic assistance that Pakistan needs and to finance the military operations needed to quell Al Qaeda and indigenously inspired insurgencies with which Pakistan has now to contend.

It will even make noises about helping Pakistan resolve its problems with India and will certainly work hard to prevent any Indian moves that impede Pakistan’s anti-terrorism effort. If this fails, however, we can be sure that they will be prepared to take other measures to “keep America safe”.

For the moment, however, let us return to what Gates had to say about Afghanistan and the goals he believes the Obama administration should set for itself in that benighted country. In his prepared testimony, he said that “Our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the US and our allies, and whatever else we need to do flows from that objective.”

Later, while taking questions, he said that “If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose.” In an earlier press conference at the Pentagon, Gates had spoken of the goals that had been set for Afghanistan being “too broad and too far into the future”, and opined that “we need more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after Al Qaeda, preventing the re-establishment of terrorism, better performance in terms of delivery of services to the people, some very concrete things.”

Gates has also called upon the European coalition partners to take on a greater part of the burden for economic development and to contribute the funding necessary to build the Afghan army to the proposed strength of 134,000. Administration officials have said, echoing the thought that Obama had often expressed in the campaign, that the new administration wanted to be able to focus its effort in Afghanistan on the elimination of the Al Qaeda.

In the new dispensation in Washington, there appears to be a realisation that the deterioration in the situation in Afghanistan is attributable largely to ineffective administration, corruption and lack of economic development, and only in small part to the existence of safe havens in Pakistan. Gates himself conceded that the coordination of the efforts of “40 nations, hundreds of NGOs and international institutions” to help Afghanistan “have been less than stellar and too often the whole of these activities has added up to less than the sum of the parts”.

I did not, however, see anything that suggested a focus on economic development. What will happen is that American military expenditure in Afghanistan will probably come to $60 billion a year but funds for economic development will remain abysmally low.

Secretary Clinton has said that “we view defence, diplomacy, and development as the three pillars of American foreign policy. That’s not rhetoric. That is our commitment”. Secretary Gates has also talked about supporting an expanded role for the State Department, but the truth of the matter is that it is the Department of Defence that has the resources. As one State Department official put it, the Department of Defence has more musicians than the State Department has diplomats (the Pakistani Foreign Office is, of course, in even worse shape as compared not only to the military establishment but even to the ISI).

More importantly, there is the fear that President Obama, having said that Afghanistan is the central front in the fight against terrorism, is going to rely on the military option to achieve quick results because taking the development path is, in Afghanistan’s circumstances, likely to take a decade or more to produce substantive results.

In practice, this means that the Americans will be returning to the highly flawed policies with which they started in Afghanistan in 2001. At that time, they decided that eliminating Al Qaeda and the more violent Taliban rather than nation-building was their objective in Afghanistan. If this required resurrecting the warlord culture, patronising the Northern Alliance and turning a blind eye towards the renewed poppy cultivation, then this is what they would do.

Today, it seems that they see little hope for good governance emerging from Kabul and therefore intend to work with local leaders in the provinces and districts. This of course means working for the most part with warlords who, by force of arms, have achieved dominance locally. They also intend to arm villagers to help them fight the Taliban and while they deny that this will lead to the resurrection of warlord militias, this is what is bound to happen.

No development work is likely to take place even if the coalition partners were willing to take it on, because the outline of the emerging American strategy does not appear to suggest that they will have the forces to provide the security needed for such work. The Afghan National Army, even if comes up to scratch, will be of little help since by all accounts it is going to be largely Tajik officered and will therefore be even less welcome in the troubled Taliban dominated Pushtun areas than coalition forces. There is also a very real fear that this may lead, despite the strong nationalism of the Afghans, to a north-south divide.

Karzai is under fire in Washington. Obama probably shares Joe Biden’s aversion to Karzai but it seems unlikely that before the elections that must be held this year the Americans or the Afghans can find a suitable replacement. The prospect of strong leadership and good governance will remain a distant dream.

Pakistan must therefore assume that Afghanistan will remain a mess and that American aspirations notwithstanding, the Americans will be mired in that quagmire for some time to come. For Pakistan, it is therefore imperative to devise policies that will to the maximum extent possible insulate it from Afghanistan and prevent developments in Afghanistan from adding to the destabilisation in Pakistan itself.

The writer is a former foreign secretary

 

[waraich66]

Few thausand troops could not covert the lost war into victory .US actualy losing stamina

They need counter insurgency special forces not in experience regular army to defeat talaban now very much trained againt US forces