The US ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more US troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is —to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, senior US officials said. Karl W. Eikenberry's memos, sent as President Obama enters the final stages of his deliberations over a new Afghanistan strategy, illustrated both the difficulty of the decision and the deepening divisions within the administration's national security team. After a top-level meeting on the issue Wednesday afternoon - Obama's eighth since early last month - the White House issued a statement that appeared to reflect Eikenberry's concerns.
"The President believes that we need to make clear to the Afghan government that our commitment is not open-ended," the statement said. "After years of substantial investments by the American people, governance in Afghanistan must improve in a reasonable period of time." On the eve of his nine-day trip to Asia, Obama was given a series of options laid out laid out by military planners with differing numbers of new US deployments, ranging from 10,000 to 40,000 troops. None of the scenarios calls for scaling back the US presence in Afghanistan or delaying the dispatch of additional troops...
More at The Washington Post.
Doubts on Karzai Complicate Troop Plan - Peter Spiegel, Wall Street Journal.
President Barack Obama expressed fresh doubts about the credibility of Afghanistan's government in high-level discussions Wednesday over what troops to send there, after his ambassador to Kabul warned against any reinforcements until the Afghan regime cracks down on corruption. US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent two classified cables to Washington in recent days raising serious concerns about the military's recommendation to increase troop levels, according to three US officials. Mr. Eikenberry criticized Afghan President Hamid Karzai's recent behavior as well as corruption in the top ranks of his administration, according to an official who saw the memos. Mr. Karzai has in recent interviews lashed out at the US and blamed corruption on international organizations working in his country.
In Wednesday's meeting, which Mr. Eikenberry attended via videoconference, Mr. Obama discussed options for adding troops for nearly 2½ hours. Two of the options were previously proposed by his top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. A new "hybrid" option has recently gained momentum at the Pentagon, combining significant numbers of troops with trainers to improve Afghan forces' capability to secure the country themselves. A White House official said Mr. Obama made requests that could lead to significantly altering any or all of the choices, changing the number of troops involved and the length of their deployment. The official said Mr. Obama asked for specific timelines in each scenario for when US troops would turn over security to Afghan forces. In the past, senior military officials have resisted such timelines...
More at The Wall Street Journal.
US Afghan Envoy Urges Caution on Troop Increase - Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Landler, New York Times.
The United States ambassador to Afghanistan, who once served as the top American military commander there, has expressed in writing his reservations about deploying additional troops to the country, three senior American officials said Wednesday. The position of the ambassador, Karl W. Eikenberry, a retired lieutenant general, puts him in stark opposition to the current American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who has asked for 40,000 more troops.
General Eikenberry sent his reservations to Washington in a cable last week, the officials said. In that same period, President Obama and his national security advisers have begun examining an option that would send relatively few troops to Afghanistan, about 10,000 to 15,000, with most designated as trainers for the Afghan security forces. This low-end option was one of four alternatives under consideration by Mr. Obama and his war council at a meeting in the White House Situation Room on Wednesday afternoon. The other three options call for troop levels of around 20,000, 30,000 and 40,000, the three officials said...
More at The New York Times.
Comments
While Hopkirk's <u>The Great Game</u> is a great book for Afghan history, that is obviously not the end of the story. Nor does <u>Charlie Wilson's War</u> bring one up to date on the geopolitics of the region(even assuming a fair amount of current events knowledge). Throughout the 20th century there were a series of progressive (for Afghanistan) governments until the Soviets 'intervened' because the conservative Pashtun rabble had been sufficiently roused to be more than a nuisance to Soviet modernization efforts. This period is just as essential to understanding Afghanistan and the absurdly fractious nature of the state. It is a bunch of different nations cobbled together whose only common history is political instability and war.
More important is the period after the Soviets left, as it illustrates that leaving the Afghans to their fate would not necessary decrease the body count, because they do a damn good job of keeping their population numbers down without errant NATO munitions. The Taliban spent the the better part of the '90s taking control of the country by force, not with flowers and books - and that would be a likely scenario over the next decade if NATO doesn't leave Afghanistan with a workable political structure. Look at the battle for Kabul during the post-Soviet years when the Taliban was in its infancy - it was a decided brutal battle with thousands (tens of thousands from one source I read) of dead civilians.
To borrow a concept from Mark Moyars new book <u>
A Question of Command</u>, we need to focus on good governance right now, not self governance. We do not need a divisive <i>and</i> corrupt government. Corruption is irrelevent right now if all the players are happy and getting their palms greased. We need to hit the reset button on the Karzai government because it is a liability and has been a ball and chain around our strategic ankle for a long time. However, I think the situation is salvageable - we can remedy the issues if we realize the current and historic grievances that have driven the insurgency and take steps to distribute power (and $) away from Kabul. The only way to do that right now is with more troops to provide security - and reforming the Afghan government is the only way to ensure our core objective for this war is met. Carrying on supporting a regime wholly lacking legitimacy* is a waste of our time. However, making serious political change will require moving power away from Kabul, which will need more troops to monitor and protect the situation from being torpedoed by insurgents.
*(legitimacy = a government's store of political capital necessary to make discretionary decisions to run a country)
John, just a literary embellishment: the book's title you describe was written by Peter Hopkirk, though he took his inspiration for it from Kipling's "Kim."
My above comment added, I fear things will not return to the norm after we leave, as I think the norms of Afghan society have and are changing for the worse.
Simple pious people should be left alone.
It should be required for those with an interest in the future of US involvement in Afghanistan that they read The Great Game, the Struggle for Empire in Central Asia. The great game was coined by Rudyard Kipling to describe the chess match between Russia and Great Britain for hegemony in central asia, from Turkey to India. This history begins after the Napoleonic Wars and extends through the 19th Century. When one reads about Afghanistan in this treatise, one will certainly be struck that the only thing that has changed, is that weapons have become more sophisticated. Certainly like the topography,the character of the peoples and politics have changed little. Regardless of what the US may accomplish in the short run, things will return to the norm. We should get on with a staged withdrawal to prevent additional casualties.