President Barack Obama has been briefed on the state of the war in Afghanistan, and what he told was reportedly not pretty:
President Obama’s national security team gave a dire assessment Sunday of the war in Afghanistan, with one member calling it a challenge “much tougher than Iraq” and others hinting that it could take years to turn around.
U.S. officials said more troops were urgently needed, both from the United States and its NATO allies, to counter the increasing strength of the Taliban and other warlords opposed to the central government in Kabul. But they also said new approaches were needed to untangle an inefficient and conflicting array of civilian-aid programs that have wasted billions of dollars.
“NATO’s future is on the line here,” Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told an international security conference here. “It’s going to be a long, difficult struggle. In my view, it’s going to be much tougher than Iraq.”
Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said the war in Afghanistan “has deteriorated markedly in the past two years” and warned of a “downward spiral of security.”
Every day there is seemingly a new troubling report, either on trends or a news story such as today’s report that two U.Se. soldiers defusing a bomb in Afghanistan were killed. Or the report about an Afghan official who invited some guests into his home — and they beheaded him…a killing later blamed on “enemies of Afghanistan.”
Meanwhile, after 10 day battle British and American forces destroyed a Taliban stronghold. And the Taliban shot dead an official in one district.
Afghan lawmakers are also now criticizing some of the U.S. attacks:
Afghanistan blames US-led troops for its civilian casualties, calling on foreign forces to avoid military operations in residential areas.
Afghan lawmakers have condemned the recent US strikes in Zabul and Khost provinces — which claimed the lives of seven Afghan civilians – as examples of US-led military operations contributing to the rise in civilian casualties in their country.
The criticism comes after Afghan President Hamed Karzai told parliament last week that NATO and the US had urged Kabul to remain silent on the civilian killings in the war-torn country.
Analysts say the civilian casualties at the hands of US-led troops have deteriorated relations between Kabul and Western powers, which have nearly 65,000 troops stationed in Afghanistan.
According to the United Nations, more than 2,000 Afghan civilians were killed throughout 2008. The NATO claims, however, that only 200 civilians were killed by foreign troops last year.
The lawmakers responded on the issue that occupation forces are obliged not to resort to military action in residential areas.
One Afghan official said NATO needs to go in and wipe out the drug lords since they are one and the same with the Taliban, AFP reports:
NATO troops operating in Afghanistan should find drug traffickers and “eliminate” them as they would Taliban militants and other insurgents battling the government, the counternarcotics minister says.
“They are the same … they are supporting terrorism in Afghanistan,” General Khodaidad said in an interview with reporters on a visit last week to inspect opium poppy eradication efforts in the southern province of Helmand.
“They are working the same networks,” he said of traffickers and insurgents both particularly active in Helmand, heartland of a huge opium industry and a key battleground in the Taliban insurgency.
“They are the same targets. ISAF must locate these targets and eliminate them,” he said, referring to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force.
NATO’s top commander, US General John Craddock, came under fire last month for a similar suggestion, telling commanders he wanted ISAF troops “to attack directly drug producers and facilities throughout Afghanistan.”
The orders were later toned down with a spokesman saying ISAF forces would however be able to “engage against narcotics facilities and facilitators where they provide material support to the insurgency.”
According to CNN, the Obama administration is now working to redefine U.S. policy towards Afghanistan:
The administration is conducting reviews of its policy in Afghanistan, including one by Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander in the region. The objective is simple: Define what the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan should be.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates cautions that goals have been too broad and need to be need to be more “realistic and limited,” or the U.S. risks failure.
“If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money, to be honest,” Gates told senators, calling for more concrete objectives that can be achieved in the next three to five years.
Obama seemed to signal a more modest approach, defining the mission as limited solely to stabilizing Afghanistan.
“What we can do is make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven for al Qaeda. What we can do is make sure that it is not destabilizing neighboring Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons,” Obama told NBC News. “We are not going to be able to rebuild Afghanistan into a Jeffersonian democracy.”
At a minimum, the U.S. must help the Afghan government curb corruption and extend its authority to establish rule of law. That means a hefty component of civilian assistance. The U.S. will increase development efforts and aid to strengthen the Afghan government, including additional nonmilitary aid for education, infrastructure, human services and alternative livelihoods for farmers to turn away from narcotics.
Part of the U.S. strategy will repeat the tactics used to help Iraq’s “Sunni Awakening,” in which Sunni tribal leaders united to fight insurgents and maintain security. In Afghanistan, the U.S. will look for opportunities to engage with tribal and regional leaders, including those who might have been affiliated with or joined forces with the Taliban, insurgents Petraeus refers to as the “reconcilable Taliban.”
During the election campaign administration officials pooh-poohed the idea that Afghanistan was suffering due to American military resources and attention being focused in Iraq. It’s now increasingly evident that this was, in fact, the case — and the new administration will now have to refocus and redefine policies involving Afghanistan at the same time that it’s trying to fine tune the war in Iraq.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.