Sun, Feb 01, 2009 page3

• Obama unlikely to widen Afghan war

  • AP
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  US President Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to redirect US troops and resources to Afghanistan from Iraq, but he has done little so far to suggest he will widen significantly the grinding war with insurgents in Afghanistan.

  On the contrary, Obama appears likely to streamline the US focus, with an eye to the worsening economy and the cautionary example of the Iraq war that sapped political support for former president George W. Bush.

  “There’s not simply a military solution to that problem,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said last week, and Obama believes “that only through long-term and sustainable development can we ever hope to turn around what’s going on there.”

  Less than two weeks into the new administration, Obama himself has had little to say in public about what his top military adviser says is the largest challenge facing the US armed forces.

  He did say Afghanistan and Pakistan constitute the central front in the struggle against terrorists, a clue to a probable shift toward a targeted counterterror strategy.

  After Obama’s first visit to the Pentagon as president, a senior Pentagon official said the new president surveyed top uniformed officers about the strain of fighting two wars and warned that the economic crisis would limit US responses.

  The official spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama’s meeting with the joint Chiefs of Staff was private.

  Obama said he wants to add troops to turn back a resurgent Taliban, Afghanistan’s deposed former rulers, but he has not gone beyond the approximately 30,000 additional forces already under consideration by the previous administration.

  Those troops would almost double the US presence in Afghanistan this year, but they amount to a finger in the dike while Obama recalibrates a chaotic mishmash of military and development objectives.

  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last week warned of grandiose goals in Afghanistan, prescribing a single-minded strategy to prevent Afghanistan from being a terrorism launch pad tantalizingly close to Europe.

  “Afghanistan is the fourth or fifth poorest country in the world and if we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose,” Gates said, referring to a haven of purity in Norse mythology. “Nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience or money, to be honest.”

  Obama has ordered a fast internal review of his military, diplomatic and other options in Afghanistan before he makes decisions that define how aggressively he will answer the growing threat of failure in Afghanistan.

  Along with that review, coordinated by the National Security Council, Obama will have results of a just-completed classified Joint Chiefs of Staff assessment of a largely stalemated fight against the Taliban and counterterrorism efforts against al-Qaeda and affiliated groups along the Pakistan border.

  That report, which has not yet gone to the White House, talks broadly about tamping down expectations in the Afghan war.

  Instead, it suggests that key goals should be to make modest gains to stabilize the governance and to eliminate terrorist havens, senior defense officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the report is secret.

  It also recommends that military commanders articulate better what their objectives in Afghanistan are, because only then can leaders determine what types of troops should be deployed and how many.

  The Joint Staff review also stresses that the strategy must be driven by what the Afghans want and that the US cannot impose its own goals on the Afghanistan government.
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