THERE ARE growing calls in Washington for Barack Obama to reassess his Afghan war strategy after his dismissal of the US and Nato commander in Kabul, Gen Stanley McChrystal.
Leading Republican politicians and former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger have called on the president to drop a July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing US troops, saying that it undermines the effort to defeat the Taliban.
However, voices on the Democrats’ left want withdrawal to begin immediately, saying the war cannot be won.
Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who sits on the powerful armed services committee, said the deadline undercut the war effort. “It empowers our enemies, it confuses our friends and I think it needs to be re-evaluated.”
Mr Graham said Gen McChrystal’s replacement, Gen David Petraeus, who led the surge in Iraq, had testified to Congress that he would urge the president to delay the pullout if he believed it was unwise.
“If the president says, ‘no matter what Gen Petraeus may recommend we’re going to leave in July of 2011’, we will lose the war,” Mr Graham added.
Mr Kissinger, writing in the Washington Post, warned of the potential for a collapse in US public support for the conflict that could lead to a political focus on "an exit strategy with the emphasis on exit, not strategy". He said it was a mistake to impose a deadline.
Democratic senator Carl Levin, chairman of the armed services committee, said: “There’s a greater chance of success if people in Kandahar . . . see it’s their army that is in control, it is their army that is taking the lead against the Taliban, rather than outsiders.”
Other critics of the war have noted that the article in Rolling Stonethat forced Gen McChrystal out offered a disturbing insight into the mindset of America's frontline troops in Afghanistan.
In Kabul, there is a belief that changes at the top of the International Security Assistance Force are inevitable, including the purging of Gen McChrystal’s entourage, especially the source of the anonymous quotes criticising senior US officials.
Mark Sedwill, Nato’s ambassador in Kabul, said Gen McChrystal was “an outstanding military commander . . . but the mission is bigger than one man and in choosing Gen Petraeus, he [Obama] has picked the right man to lead this campaign over the coming period.”
Even the strategy’s strongest supporters though say it is a task far harder than Gen Petraeus faced in Baghdad.
The scale and timing of the drawdown will depend on how the campaign is going. If violence has decreased, it may be possible to “slow the Washington” clock.
If things continue to look like they are going disastrously – and if September’s parliamentary elections are a repeat of last year’s electoral fiasco – policymakers in Washington are likely to conclude the strategy is unworkable and will look for alternative ways of dealing with Afghanistan.
This would almost certainly involve far fewer troops concentrating mostly on counter-terrorism operations against al-Qaeda.
Progress in Helmand has been frustratingly slow and in Kandahar, the other main target of the strategy Gen Petraeus is inheriting, it has been delayed.
Gen Petraeus will need to prove that strides are being made on “transition” – getting Afghanistan’s corrupt, poorly trained and undermanned army and police force in a position to take over security.
Although people talk of July 2011 as a “deadline”, the actual cut-off point is more like November when Nato foreign ministers meet in Lisbon. It is assumed Mr Obama will want to be in a position to decide the fate of US operations in Afghanistan by his state of the union address in January. – (Guardian service)