In a year, our troop strength in Afghanistan will be, as Secretary of Defense Panetta commented, half of what it is now:
I welcome President Obama’s announcement tonight that 34,000 American troops will be home from Afghanistan by this time next year. This plan to continue drawing down our forces in a phased approach over the coming year was recommended by Gen. John Allen based on a thorough assessment of the ISAF campaign plan moving forward.
When we surged troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, there could be no question that it signalled an increase in our commitment to winning. Whether or not we used those troops wisely was a separate issue to the quantifiable statement of our resolve. One reason I was worried about the Iraq surge--when I thought we were already on the path to a successful hand off to the Iraqis, even if it left them with a long fight--was that I wasn't sure we could achieve results fast enough to match the increased expectations of sending more troops. I worried that we would become too discouraged to stick with a longer but messy glide path to victory.
As it turned out, in about half a year of added effort, we broke the back of the al Qaeda and Sunni Arab insurgencies and terror campaigns. A good campaign plan with more US and Iraqi troops and the defection of many Sunni Arabs from al Qaeda's side did the trick. And it was obviously a success that really didn't require a willing suspension of disbelief to see.
Our withdrawal of troops and decreased activity in Iraq was thus easier to see as the result of victory and not the result of defeat despite enemy efforts to portray our successful hand over of fighting responsibility to the Iraqis as our defeat.
It will be more difficult to do this in Afghanistan even though I think we've won enough to start withdrawing. One problem is that our phased surge offensive plan never was finished. We planned to go on offense in Regional Command South while we shaped the battlefield in Regional Command East in preparation for an offensive in Regional Command East while we defended gains in the south. We never did get to that second part. I think we've pounded down the Taliban enough and built up the Afghans enough, but it is harder to say.
And worse, it is harder for our enemies, allies, and neutrals who have to decide which way to jump in Afghanistan to say.
You'd think that two campaigns in Central Command where we had the staying power to overthrow regimes with invasion and fight until we built up friendly (enough) fighting forces to carry on the fight that we'd have more credibility. But image is fleeting, it seems. Defense spending curtailment that reduces our capabilities and a government perceived as unwilling to stand forcefully against our enemies mean it is easy to see our pull back from Afghanistan as a defeat.
It is probably too late for our administration to grow a pair and get a reputation for resolve (John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are no pair to inspire confidence in allies and fear in enemies). But we can signal resolve by holding the line on Afghan security strength to avoid giving the impression we increased their end strength only long enough to cover our retreat:
The U.S. general nominated to oversee a vast region that includes Afghanistan on Thursday backed keeping Afghan forces at a peak strength of 352,000, contrary to current plans to shrink them after NATO declares the war over next year.
General Lloyd Austin, nominated to lead the U.S. military's Central Command, said at his Senate confirmation hearing that a more robust Afghan force, while more costly, would "hedge against any Taliban mischief" following America's longest war.
"Keeping the larger-size force would certainly reassure the Afghans, it would also reassure our NATO allies that we remain committed," Austin said.
Sadly, just saying that we can win with a reduced Afghan and American presence is not enough to convince people that is the case--even if it is absolutely true. If we are reducing our commitment--and we are, as we must eventually--we shouldn't take the risk of shaking the morale of our friends and bolstering the morale of our enemies by visibly reducing Afghan capacity to fight the Taliban and al Qaeda any time soon. Give the Afghans time to see that things will be fine before we take that step.
UPDATE: Remember that the enemy in Iraq wanted us to retreat under fire to give the impression that it was defeat. But we had made far more progress in Iraq than we have in Afghanistan prior to standing down and getting out. This is a look at the problem from the outpost level:
The Americans knew they would be most vulnerable in their final hours after taking down their surveillance and early-warning systems. The Taliban knew it, too, and intelligence reports indicated that they had been working with sympathetic villagers to strike at the departing soldiers. Two days earlier, the militants made a test run against the outpost, taking the rare step of directly engaging it in a firefight, albeit a brief one, soon after the first radio antennas came down.
On the same day that President Obama announced that roughly half of the American troops still in in Afghanistan would withdraw this year, and that Afghan forces would begin taking the lead in the war, the smaller-scale departure from the Haji Rahmuddin II outpost was an uncelebrated milestone.
But it pointed at a harsh reality of the process: that some of the withdrawal will happen under fire in areas of the Taliban heartland where the idea of Afghan-led security remains an abstraction. With the start of the annual fighting season just weeks away, some of the hardest-won gains of the war are at risk of being lost.
This assessment of the big picture reflects my understanding of the situation pretty closely:
It was not as bad as it might have been, however, and prospects for success in this conflict remain, although the odds grow ever longer. The president appears to have yielded to military realities and the laws of physics on a number of important points. The drawdown itself is paced to keep a significant number of American troops in Afghanistan through most of this coming fighting season: Around 6,000 troops are to be withdrawn between now and this spring; another 8,000 by November; and the final 20,000 by February 2014.
Getting out isn't being done as fast as feared. But we did not make the big effort in the east that had been the precondition for a successful withdrawal not conducted under fire heavy enough to look like a defeat. I spent last year blogging about whether we would conduct that planned offensive in Regional Command East. There were conflicting stories about it. But it never took place. And there was never a debate that reached the public over that issue. In the end, the offensive just didn't take place. I assume that the administration decided that bad optics were not to be allowed during an election campaign.
So we are taking a risk in Afghanistan by that failure to stomp down the jihadis in the east, and by the withdrawal and the pulling back from combat of even those American troops remaining. Certainly, Iraq is not lost even though ultimate success looks shakier given our near-complete withdrawal from Iraq at the end of 2011. So I don't assume our efforts in Afghanistan will fail.
But it is sad that after spending so much time saying that Republicans should have focused on the "real" war in Afghanistan without being distracted, here we are risking victory. Distracted by what I don't know.
NOTE: I took out three paragraphs from that last quote that I accidentally re-pasted from the quote before it. Oops.
