Word: afghanization
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President Obama knows that the Afghan war is going badly, but he insists that the specter of an al-Qaeda comeback makes Afghanistan a "war of necessity." So he has ordered some 30,000 new troops to the front, hoping to hold the line enough that Afghan forces can be built up to eventually take over the mission from the U.S. It may sound like a limited goal, after the sweeping visions of democracy promised during the Bush years. But even that relatively modest strategy is based on some very questionable assumptions. (See a slide show...
...Afghan Security Forces Can Be Trained to Take Over the Mission The centerpiece of Obama's exit strategy is the training of Afghan security forces to take responsibility for fighting the Taliban, just as Iraqi forces have taken charge of security in Iraq. But Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq, and training may not be the decisive issue: although the U.S. has officially trained 94,000 Afghan soldiers, there's no sign of an effective Afghan security force capable of fighting the Taliban. Desertion rates are high - 1 in 4 soldiers trained last year, by some accounts...
...framed the speech more as a plan for withdrawal than a surge proposal. The biggest Italian paper, Corriere della Sera, ran the headline “Obama: Troop Withdrawal Starting in July 2011” and a subhead that reads: “The American president announces his Afghan exit strategy...
...make the case that a timeline for transition to Afghan control will have absolutely no leverage in getting Karzai to clean up his act. After all, on the day of Obama's speech, close aides to the Afghan President told the Wall Street Journal that Karzai opposes the surge; why won't he just wait us out? (But there's a counter-counter here as well: Isn't this just posturing? Doesn't Karzai know that without American protection, he could be swinging from a lamppost in Kabul like several of his predecessors?) And as for the argument, made passionately...
...public? Obama had no choice about the public part of the program; he is privately furious about the leaks, especially those from the military. "We will deal with that situation in time," an Obama adviser told me. The criticism of the President for dithering is also unfair. This second Afghan strategy review in less than a year was made necessary by an assortment of dramatic new developments on the ground. Each had to be analyzed individually and then correlated with the others. There was the fraudulent election, which stripped the remaining clothes from the Emperor Karzai. There...