WASHINGTON - As the man responsible for
the health and strength of the US military,
Pentagon chief Robert Gates is increasingly
finding himself between the devil and the deep
blue sea.
On the one hand, there's the
devil in his Iraq-obsessed boss, President George
W Bush, who clearly opposes any move that could
risk what gains have been made in curbing
sectarian violence and establishing a semblance of
stability over the past six months.
So
when Bush's commander on the ground, General David
Petraeus, insists that reducing US troops strength
in Iraq below
130,000 could indeed
jeopardize whatever chances remain of snatching
"victory" from defeat there, Gates, who had
previously favored reducing US troops in Iraq to
as few as 100,000 by the end of this year, is
forced to defer. He did just that Monday when,
after meeting Petraeus in Baghdad, he announced
for the first time that he supported a "pause" in
the ongoing drawdown when pre-"surge" levels are
reached in July.
On the other hand,
there's the deep blue sea in the rapidly growing
conviction among top military officers and the
national security establishment in general that US
ground forces are already dangerously
overstretched and that retaining as many as
130,000 troops in Iraq is simply not sustainable
for any appreciable length of time.
Indeed, those top military officers,
notably the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral Michael Mullen, and Army Chief General
George Casey, have become increasingly vocal in
recent weeks about their concern that Iraq is
systematically transforming the US military into
what one expert, former navy commander Harlan
Ullman, called "a 'hollow force reminiscent of the
post-Vietnam War".
"If this is happening
... should we be faced with the choice of staying
in Iraq with 130,000 or so troops or eviscerating
our military?" asked Ullman, who developed the
"shock and awe" strategy during his tenure as
professor of strategy at the National War College,
in his weekly column in the Washington Times last
week. "Do we put the future of Iraq ahead of the
future of our armed forces?"
That point is
being made with growing intensity by the Pentagon
brass itself, albeit somewhat more diplomatically.
"Our service members, in particular our ground
forces and their families, are under significant
strain," Mullen said last week, stressing that
current 15-month deployments of US soldiers and
marines are "too long" and must be reduced to 12
months as a matter of urgency. "The well is deep,
but it is not infinite," he warned.
Even
his normally reticent predecessor, former Joint
Chiefs chairman and secretary of state Colin
Powell, who worked closely with Gates during the
George H W Bush administration, felt compelled to
weigh in. In a television interview on Sunday, he
warned that even pre-"surge" troop levels "can't
be kept up indefinitely".
But it is not
only the effect on the morale and capabilities of
US ground forces that the experts are concerned
about. Mullen, Ullman and others point to yet
another deep blue sea - the growing dangers posed
by the Taliban insurgencies in both Afghanistan
and nuclear-armed Pakistan - to make the point
that Washington may be facing threats greater that
those it faces in Iraq.
"We must not allow
the challenges of today to keep us from being
prepared for the realities of tomorrow," Mullen
said. "There is a risk that we will be unable to
rapidly respond to future threats to our vital
national interests," he added in what appears to
be the consensus among the national security elite
and one in which Gates no doubt shares.
Indeed, the growing consensus among the
national security professionals embraces the
notion that Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly
the Pashtun areas along their common border, have
become the "central front" in Bush's "war on
terror", even if the president himself still
believes that that war will be won or lost in
Iraq.
The US intelligence community -
Gates' home during most of his professional career
- has long thought that Iraq was a diversion from
the anti-terrorist campaign, a point it underlined
in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)
published last July.
The NIE concluded
that al-Qaeda has largely rebounded from its
eviction from Afghanistan six years ago and
reconstituted both its central organization and
some of its training and operational capacities in
the safe haven established by the Pakistani
Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas
(FATA)along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
In
remarkable testimony before Congress last week,
the Director of National Intelligence, retired
Admiral Mike McConnell, went even further,
stressing that al-Qaeda has "regenerated its core
operational capabilities needed to conduct
attacks" on the US itself.
In his own
written testimony to Congress last week, Mullen,
Gates' chief military adviser, reiterated that
point, noting he believed the next terrorist
attack on the US would probably originate with
al-Qaeda operating out of FATA.
He was on
his way at the time to Pakistan for meetings with
President Pervez Musharraf and army chief General
Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, reportedly to impress on them
Washington's worries about the spread of the
Taliban insurgency and to reiterate recent US
offers not only to sharply increase intelligence
military aid, training, and advisers to Pakistani
forces, but to engage in "joint operations" on the
Pakistani side of the border.
His visit
was the latest in a string of top-level US
delegations - indicative of how central the
national security bureaucracy sees southwest Asia
- dispatched by Gates and the intelligence
community to Islamabad in just the past month.
They have included McConnell; the head of
the Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael
Hayden; the commander of US Special Operations
Command, Admiral Eric Olsen; and the chief of the
US Central Command (CentCom), Admiral William
"Fox" Fallon, who has reportedly clashed
repeatedly with Petraeus over the relative
importance of Iraq with regard to the larger
regional situation, particularly in Southwest
Asia.
Despite his tentative siding with
Petraeus on the question of "pausing" before
considering further withdrawals from Iraq after
July, Gates himself suggested on the way to his
meeting this weekend with other North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO)defense ministers in
Munich that Bush's devilish obsession with Iraq
carried serious diplomatic and military costs both
for the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda and
for the future of the NATO alliance.
"I
worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq
and Afghanistan are confused," he told reporters,
explaining why Washington's NATO allies were
reluctant to send more troops to Afghanistan
despite Gates' increasingly urgent appeals. "Many
of them, I think, have a problem with our
involvement in Iraq and project that to
Afghanistan, and do not understand the very
different ... kind of threat."
Jim
Lobe's blog on US foreign policy and the
neo-conservative influence in the Bush
administration can be found at
http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe.
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