According to press
reports,
President Obama will soon clarify one of the lingering mysteries about his Afghanistan
policy: what he meant by the July 2011 deadline he imposed on the "West Point surge"
he announced in December 2009. If the advance leaks are any indication, Obama is under some pressure to replace one form of strategic confusion with another.
The arbitrary timeline generated considerable confusion after
the West Point speech, with senior administration officials contradicting each other
in background interviews and occasionally even on the record. Since the West Point
surge was itself a product of a compromise -- it split the difference between advisors
who wanted to jettison Obama's campaign critique of Bush-era Afghan policy so as
to shift back to a Rumsfeldian light-footprint posture and those advisors who advocated
nearly the opposite approach of replicating Bush's Iraq surge in Afghanistan -- the
timeline had the awkward feel of a hybrid policy based on contradictory premises.
One premise was that cooperation from locals depended on them not taking U.S. support
for granted. The other premise was that cooperation from locals depended on them
not hedging against U.S. abandonment. The West Point surge adopted the kinetics
implied by the second premise, but undercut the policy with the rhetorical posture
implied by the first premise.
The resulting internal strategic incoherence yielded a heavy
dollop of public strategic confusion. Many observers recognized this was a mistake.
Occasionally an insider would concede as much in private but publicly the administration
stoutly defended the contradiction.
The contradiction has now played itself out and it is time for
Obama to reveal his thinking. In an eerie parallel with the earlier debate, some
advisors want him to rush the end of the Afghan surge and declare that all surge
troops will be out within a year. Other advisors want him to announce a token withdrawal
-- sort of a down payment on further reductions -- but keep most of the combat power
in place through several more Afghan fighting seasons. The compromise position appears
to be announcing an arbitrary deadline for the withdrawal of all surge troops --
well, not that arbitrary since it will
happen to coincide with the presidential elections -- but delegating to the military
the pace and timing of the withdrawals.
The Obama war pattern has been to split such differences and
to adopt a policy that has more kinetic punch than the doves want but to frame (and
in some cases, to undercut) that kinetic punch with dovish concessions. The betting
money is that he will do the same thing this time. The result is a policy that neither
fully satisfies nor fully enrages either side. There is enough hawkish punch to
achieve some battlefield results (or, in the case of Iraq, to forestall a battlefield
collapse) but not enough to maximize the chances for success.
Meanwhile, the geopolitical clock keeps ticking away. In the
fall of 2009, Obama's advisors talked as if they were under considerable political
pressure to hurry the U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Today, they actually do face that
kind of serious political pressure. In the fall of 2009, it was evident that international
patience for Afghanistan was wavering. Today, that patience is fully exhausted.
In the fall of 2009, U.S.-Pakistan cooperation was wobbly. Today, it is on the ropes.
However, there are some positive developments that Obama can
draw upon. First and foremost, Obama now faces virtually no prospect of an anti-war
challenge during the presidential primary. Forestalling such a challenge was a core
objective of his Afghanistan strategy and it appears he has succeeded. Second, because
of the killing of bin Laden and the kinetic action of the McChrystal-Petraeus strategy, al Qaeda has been seriously degraded and the Taliban initiative has been reversed.
It is too soon to declare mission accomplished, but the military prospects in Afghanistan
look brighter today than they did when Obama took office.
What this all adds up to is a difficult choice. There are considerable
risks associated with all three of the primary options under discussion. Hastening
the exit risks undermining all of the battlefield progress. Slowing the exit risks
collapsing political support at home. Splitting the difference risks doing just
enough to fail on the battlefield and at home.
According to civil-military relations theory, there is only one
person with the political and moral competence to adjudicate those risks: the president
of the United States. If Obama's past practice is any guide, he is taking this decision
very seriously and reserving the final say to himself, perhaps even considering
different options at this late hour. That does not guarantee he will make the right
decision, but it does increase the likelihood that it will be a decision that reflects
his own national security vision.
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