WASHINGTON - With only three weeks left
before United States military forces are scheduled
to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, the debate
over the size and pace of that withdrawal has
become increasingly intense.
On one hand,
the Pentagon, backed by prominent
neo-conservatives and other hawks, insists that
the 18-month-old "surge" of 30,000 US troops has
turned the strategic tide against the Taliban.
Anything more than a "modest" drawdown of
a few thousand of the nearly 100,000 soldiers and
marines there through the end of the year, they
argue, risks losing all that has been gained.
"I would hope that [the withdrawal] is
very small," the 2008
Republican presidential
candidate, Senator John McCain, told the Financial
Times this week. "I would hope that it is 3,000.
We need another fighting season [against the
Taliban]."
On the other hand, President
Barack Obama's political advisers, backed by a
strong majority of Democrats and a small but
growing minority of Republicans in congress, are
arguing for a much more substantial withdrawal.
In the clearest marker so far, the
influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, Carl Levin, said this week that at
least 15,000 troops should be withdrawn between
July and the end of the year.
His appeal
came just days after the ranking Democrat on the
House subcommittee that oversees the Pentagon's
budget, Norm Dicks, shocked Washington by calling
for an end to the US military presence in
Afghanistan before 2014. Current plans call for
the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization
allies, which have sent more than 40,000 troops,
to withdraw all their combat forces by the end of
that year.
"We need to start seeing if we
can do this [withdrawal] a little faster," Dicks,
a veteran Democratic hawk, told Politico.
"I think the American people would
overwhelmingly like to see this brought to a
conclusion sooner than 2014," he said, citing
growing "war fatigue" in congress.
Obama,
who has promised that the initial withdrawal would
be "significant", has otherwise kept his cards
close to his chest. The White House said he was
still waiting to receive formal recommendations
from the outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
who met with military commanders during a
three-day farewell visit of Afghanistan that began
on the weekend.
The withdrawal debate has
intensified steadily since the May 2 killing by US
Special Forces of al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden
at a compound in the Pakistani resort town of
Abbottabad where he had apparently been living for
six years. Until then, it appeared that the
Pentagon and its civilian allies would prevail
upon Obama to withdraw only a "modest" - if not
token - number of troops in July and through the
end of the year.
But Bin Laden's demise
gave new momentum to the war's critics who have
long argued that al-Qaeda had, for all practical
purposes, left Afghanistan in 2001 and that
Washington's military-led counter-insurgency
(COIN) strategy there was overly ambitious and
largely ineffective, if not counter-productive.
"We've gone from being waist- to
chest-deep in quicksand," noted Matthew Hoh, who
directs the Afghanistan Study Group and served in
Afghanistan as both a Marine captain and a State
Department adviser.
At the same time, the
growing focus in congress about the yawning
government deficit has cast a harsher light on the
war's enormous cost - some US$10 billion a month,
not including another $300 million a month for
civilian-led aid projects.
It was these
considerations, as well as unhappiness with US
military operations in Libya, that led late last
month to near-passage by the House of
Representatives of an amendment to the $690
billion 2011 defense authorization bill that
required Obama to submit a plan for withdrawing US
troops and "an accelerated transition" of US
operations there to the Afghan government.
The amendment, which was defeated 204-215,
gained the votes of all but eight Democrats and 26
Republicans - a total of nearly 42 more votes than
a similar measure last year.
The vote,
which was taken as a strong indication of war
weariness, appears to have tilted the balance in
the debate, as the Pentagon and its backers
stepped up their public campaign for a "modest"
withdrawal of just a few thousand troops beginning
in July.
Thus, a Washington Post/ABC poll
released earlier this week that showed a sharp
increase - from 31% last March to 43% after Bin
Laden's death - in the percentage of people who
believe that the war in Afghanistan has been worth
the costs was seized on by one former George W
Bush administration adviser as evidence that Obama
"probably has the political breathing room" to
choose a "measured withdrawal" as opposed to a
"rapid retreat".
The same survey, however,
showed found that three out of four respondents
favored withdrawing "a substantial number of US
combat forces from Afghanistan this summer".
At the same time, Kimberly and Frederick
Kagan, neo-conservative military analysts close to
the outgoing US commander in Afghanistan, General
David Petraeus, published an op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal arguing that "nothing about
conditions on the ground justifies the withdrawal
of any US or coalition forces".
Moreover,
they warned, if Obama withdraws all 30,000 "surge"
forces by the end of 2012, "the war will likely be
lost".
Gates, who has called for a
"modest" drawdown, has not offered a specific
number, but, since the House vote, in particular,
he has made clear that he wants as few combat
troops as possible to leave.
"I think we
shouldn't let up on the gas too much, at least for
the next few months," he said over the weekend. He
has also hinted that he will speak out publicly in
support of the current strategy after he steps
down at the end of the month.
Whether this
will be enough to sway Obama, who has been
criticized by his fellow-Democrats for deferring
too much to the military, remains to be seen.
But it is clear that disillusionment with
the war is spreading in both parties.
Releasing a highly critical staff report
on the effectiveness and sustainability of US aid
programs in Afghanistan on Wednesday, Senate
Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry
expressed strong doubts about the current
strategy.
"While the United States has
genuine national security interests in
Afghanistan," said Kerry, a key foreign policy
ally of the White House, "our current commitment,
in troops and dollars, is neither proportional to
our interests nor sustainable."
His
remarks were seconded by the Committee's ranking
Republican, Senator Richard Lugar. "Despite 10
years of investment and attempts to better
understand the culture and the region's actors, we
remain in a cycle that produces relative progress
but fails to deliver a secure political or
military resolution," he said.
"Undoubtedly, we will make some progress
when we are spending more than $100 billion per
year in that country. The more important question
is whether we have an efficient strategy for
protecting our vital interests that does not
involve massive open-ended expenditures and does
not require us to have more faith than is
justified in Afghan institutions," he said.
Jim Lobe's blog on US foreign
policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.
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