After 92 days of slow and at times agonised debate over how to prosecute the war in Afghanistan, President Obama is suddenly a man in a hurry: he now wants 30,000 US troops to hit the ground within the next six months, an enormous logistical and financial challenge.
In the defining speech of his young presidency, Mr Obama was preparing to tell the American people tonight that he has ordered tens of thousands of US reinforcements to Afghanistan to take on the Taleban, secure the country and hand it back to its own security forces within three years.
A total of 30,000 extra American troops, supported by at least 5,000 more soldiers from other Nato members, will be in Afghanistan by next summer and will start withdrawing by 2011, the President was expected to say in a prime-time address to the nation from the West Point military academy.
The timetable for both the deployment of the long-awaited surge and the start of an American withdrawal has been accelerated because of Mr Obama’s insistence on an exit strategy before committing the extra troops his generals have demanded. White House officials said yesterday that he has ordered the military to hit the Taleban hard and fast. He wants to show quick gains in the battle for the hearts and minds of the civilian population. Unstated, but as important to the White House, is the battle to shore up crumbling support for the war at home.
Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s spokesman, told reporters that the faster the US gets troops into Afghanistan, “the faster we can get them out”.
Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, travels to Brussels tomorrow to ask America’s Nato allies to provide another 5,000 troops. The combined US and Nato forces would amount to nearly the 40,000 new troops requested three months ago by General Stanley McChrystal, Mr Obama’s ground commander.
The new deployments, in addition to the 22,000 troops Mr Obama ordered to Afghanistan early this year, will bring the total number of US troops there to more than 100,000 — more than half of whom will have been sent by Mr Obama.
The scale of the challenge is staggering. It costs $1 million a year to station a single soldier in Afghanistan. New bases will have to be built, and huge numbers of extra tanks, armoured vehicles and weapons will need to be airlifted into the war zone.
General McChrystal’s strategy is a classic counter-insurgency plan: he wants to secure the ten largest cities, protecting civilians from Taleban attack. If he succeeds in building trust and security, the hope is that ordinary Afghans will begin to provide good intelligence on the whereabouts and identities of the Taleban leadership and al-Qaeda operatives. Armed with such intelligence, specialist units — like the hunt-and-kill squads General McChrystal led in Iraq — will seek out and eliminate the enemy.
General McChrystal also plans to pull forces out of the rural outposts, effectively ceding sparsely populated areas to the Taleban. He believes if he can control and protect the heavily populated areas and the roads that connect them, the country can be stabilised.
The first deployment of 9,000 US Marines begins next month. They will head to Helmand province in the south, a Taleban stronghold. They will focus on the city of Marjeh, hub of the opium trade and the Taleban’s bomb factories, which the 9,000 Marines already there have failed to retake despite months of fighting.
Next in will be 1,000 military trainers. Mr Obama wants the Afghan Army increased to 134,000 by next autumn, three years ahead of schedule, with 10,000 of them stationed
Source. The Times
