Is America’s seemingly unending nightmare of the loooooooong war in Afghanistan now drawing to an end? If news reports are correct, President Barack Obama today will take the first substantive step — according to a few reports against the advice of some military advisors — by announcing a two-phased withdrawal of an initial 10,000 forces with a total of some 30,000 over the next two years.
The highly anticipated speech is slated for 8 p.m. EST. CNN reports:
On Tuesday, an administration official told CNN that Obama will announce this week that 30,000 U.S. “surge” forces will be fully withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012.
Members of Congress are being informed that 10,000 troops will be withdrawn by the end of this year, followed by another 20,000 next year, a congressional source said.
The time frame would give U.S. commanders another two “fighting” seasons with the bulk of U.S. forces still available for combat operations.
Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pushed for additional time to roll back Taliban gains in the country before starting any significant withdrawal — a position at odds with a majority of Americans, according to recent public opinion surveys.
Gates — along with Afghan war commander Gen. David Petraeus — had pushed for an initial drawdown of between 3,000 and 5,000 troops this year, the congressional source said. The secretary also urged the president to withdraw support troops only — not combat troops.
Obama, however, ultimately decided to adopt a more aggressive withdrawal plan.
Even a top conservative Democrat was urging Obama to speed up withdrawal plans:
One day before President Obama is set to announce the beginning of the troop drawdown in Afghanistan, a Democratic senator is coming out with one last push to urge the commander-in-chief to put forward a “significant” withdrawal — a move that seems to have ruffled the feathers of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
On Tuesday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the most conservative Democrats in the chamber, sent Obama a letter urging a change of course in the war and an acceleration of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
“After 10 years and $443 billion, I believe it is time [to] focus our resources on rebuilding America, not on rebuilding Afghanistan,” he wrote. “It is time for the Afghan people to decide their destiny and take responsibility for governing themselves. … It is my hope that by redefining the mission in Afghanistan away from nation-building, you will pursue significant troop reductions immediately and end the scope of our current mission well before the 2014 deadline.”
According to some reports, Obama’s withdrawal schedule was not pleasing to some in the military. The Guardian:
Barack Obama is set to reject the advice of the Pentagon by announcing on Wednesday night the withdrawal of up to 30,000 troops from Afghanistan by November next year, in time for the US presidential election.
The move comes despite warnings from his military commanders that recent security gains are fragile. They have been urging him to keep troop numbers high until 2013.
The accelerated drawdown will dismay American and British commanders in Kabul, who have privately expressed concern that the White House is now being driven by political rather than military imperatives.
“This is not something we feel entirely comfortable with,” a Whitehall official told the Guardian.
Obama’s nationally televised address, the sixth he has given since becoming president, is intended to mark the beginning of the end of American military deployment in Afghanistan, from a present high of almost 100,000 troops.
The White House confirmed that the withdrawal will be “significant”.
Obama’s decision is aimed at placating an American public tired of a 10-year war that has cost 1,522 US lives. The killing of Osama bin Laden added impetus to calls to pull out.
Nato commanders led by General David Petraeus have set out the risks of withdrawing too many troops too soon, and warned Obama there has been no noticeable dividend from the death of the al-Qaida leader. They had urged him to keep in place the bulk of the extra 30,000 troops he committed to the “surge” until the end of 2012, so a drawdown can begin in 2013. That would give the military another full “fighting season” to attack Taliban strongholds and target insurgent leaders.
“They say they need another full year of this,” one official told the Guardian. “They want as much as possible for as long as possible.”
Here are some more details about British military concern about the troop drawdown, via AFP:
Senior British army figures have warned Prime Minister David Cameron not to “fall into the trap” of a hasty Afghan troop drawdown, a day after the PM scolded the military for claiming it was overstretched.
Head of the British army General Peter Wall cast doubt on Cameron’s 2015 deadline for the withdrawal of combat troops during an interview for a BBC documentary due to be aired on Wednesday.
“Whether or not it turns out to be an absolute timeline or more conditions-based approach nearer the time, we shall find out,” Chief of the General Staff Wall told the Afghanistan: War Without End? program.
Meanwhile, former army chief Richard Dannatt urged Cameron not to be tempted to accelerate the withdrawal by US President Barack Obama’s expected announcement that 10,000 US soldiers will be brought home.
“Obama may wish to withdraw troops for his domestic political purposes but I am quite sure our prime minister will not fall into the same trap,” the former soldier told The Times.
“He will not want to risk the investment in blood and treasure just for a domestic political agenda,” he added.
Cameron reacted testily on Tuesday to an air force chief’s claims that fighting in Afghanistan and Libya was demoralising personnel, saying Britain could continue its Libya operations for “as long as is necessary”.
An AP video report:
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CNN’s report:
What should you look for in the speech? USA Today offers a must-read tip off sheet but here are the key items:
This is the beginning of the end. Obama and his aides have stressed an agreement among the U.S., NATO, and other allies to turn over all security operations to Afghanistan by the year 2014 — the real deadline for the war….
….He knows that the war — now nearly ten years old — is increasingly unpopular. Obama may cite the financial costs of the war, especially at a time of economic uncertainty in the United States.
….The war has been worth it. Obama — a critic of the Iraq war — has defended the action in Afghanistan, stressing that it served as a base for al Qaeda terrorists in the years before 9/11.
…There has been success. On Dec. 1, 2009, Obama ordered the deployment of 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan — and added that he would begin a withdrawal process in July of 2010.Obama is expected to say the troop surge has been a success, all but wiping out al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is also likely to get a presidential mission.
The Los Angele’s Times’ Andrew Malcom sees Obama’s speech as an attempt to get out of a political mess of his own making. Here’s the set up to his post:
Here’s some important new information that President Obama should certainly leave out of his big Afghanistan speech Wednesday evening:
Only 12% of people in our most important regional ally, Pakistan, now have a positive view of the United States. And only 8% express confidence in the American leader to do the right thing, according to a new Pew Research Center poll.
This could have something to do with deadly U.S. drone raids on Pakistan and the assassination of Osama bin Laden there in a commando incursion; a whopping 14% of Pakistanis think the latter was a good thing.
Obama’s speech from the White House this evening will be his third major address on Afghanistan, now …
… the nation’s longest war ever. The first two — on March 27, 2009, and Dec. 1, 2009 — involved Obama ordering the sorts of American troop surges into combat that the Democrat used to say would make things worse when his predecessor ordered one into Iraq. (Scroll down for links to the full texts of those two speeches.)
Obama’s latest speech will be directed solely at Americans, who have begun registering impatience with the war, especially since Obama joined another one in Libya in March that he said would last days, not weeks, and has now gone on for months.The president is in a mess of his own making. He built his initial national political persona on opposition to Bush’s Iraq war because, the former U.S. senator argued, it distracted America from the far more important conflict against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and terrorism in Afghanistan, which was the haven for Al Qaeda’s 9/11 training.
Bush’s Iraq surge worked, however, enabling Obama to proclaim victory and transfer those troops. This, in turn, enabled Vice President Joe Biden, the candidate who wanted to slice Iraq into three parts, to go on cable TV and with no sense of irony call Iraq one of Obama’s “great achievements.”
Go to the link to read the rest.
The political context here is indeed important for several reasons:
Arizona Senator John McCain raised eyebrows and some ire within his party when he criticized members of his own party for their sudden change in position on the war:
Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, took aim Sunday at the field of contenders for the 2012 GOP nomination, accusing them of “isolationism.”
“We cannot repeat the lessons of the 1930s, when the United States of America stood by while bad things happened in the world,” McCain said in an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”
Citing what he viewed as the GOP presidential hopefuls’ positions in general on both Libya and Afghanistan, McCain said, “We are the lead nation in the world, and America matters, and we must lead. But sometimes that leadership entails sacrifice, sadly.”
GOPer Tony Blankley thinks McCain is wrong on his reading of the attitude of some of his party members:
Sen. John McCain, whose life is a continuing exemplar of the American heroic ideal, regrettably has got it quite wrong when he says that growing GOP opposition to the Libyan and Afghan wars is evidence of isolationism.
He goes into detail about McCain’s comments and the history of GOP Presidents in times of war and concludes:
But almost two years ago, I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghanistan War effort had served its initial purpose and that it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we had removed the Taliban government and killed as many al-Qaida and Taliban fighters as possible. (See about a dozen of my columns on Afghanistan War policy in the 2009-10 archives.)
But as the purpose of that war turned into nation building, even GOP internationalists had a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy being brought to the new purpose, such policy was likely to be effective.
Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we isolationist in our judgment (along with the opinion of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command) that we see no national interest in Libya.
This is not isolationism; it is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world. The charge of isolationism should be reserved for the genuine article. Such name-calling advances neither rational debate nor national interest.
The bottom line: Obama can make his speech and announce troop withdrawals but the war remains a hot political potato — made hotter due to jockeying to win over voters in an election year. Will GOP candidates soon wear peace sign buttons next to their flag pins and join hands with Democratic liberals at peace rallies?
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.