The surge in Afghanistan The beginning or the end?

Obama rushes troops in, but promises to start bringing them home soon.
MOMENTS after President Barack Obama announced a surge of 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, his commander on the ground, General Stanley McChrystal, quoted Winston Churchill: it was not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it might be “the end of the beginning”.

That General McChrystal should be implicitly comparing Mr Obama’s speech to military cadets at West Point to the defeat of Rommel’s army at El Alamein says much about how hard the bureaucratic battle has proven to be during Mr Obama’s three-month policy review.

General McChrystal did not get all of the 40,000 troops that he had asked for as his main recommendation. But with NATO promising that its other members would provide at least 5,000 more troops, the total was close enough for him to tell his subordinates that “a tremendous amount of things are going to happen, and they are good things”. At the very least, NATO hopes, some bad things will stop happening in Afghanistan, where the Taliban have grown in strength and deadliness by the year since they were toppled in 2001. Mr Obama’s decision to rush his troops in by next summer, something many commanders had ruled out, given the “narrow straw” through which supplies must pass, indicates a desire quickly to try to sap the Taliban’s momentum.

Mr Obama had to send insurgents a message of American determination, while reassuring Americans that he would not be fighting “an endless war”. So the president trod a middle path. American forces would start withdrawing from July 2011. But the pace of the drawdown, and the final departure date, would depend on “conditions on the ground”. Mr Obama had also to attempt the difficult task of stiffening Pakistan’s resolve to fight the Taliban in their havens across the border.

The core of the reinforcement is expected to be the equivalent of about four brigades. One is to train Afghan forces and the other three are for combat duties. First in the surge is likely to be a 9,000-strong contingent of marines for Helmand province in the south, where a 10,000-strong marine expeditionary brigade is deployed alongside a similar number of British troops.

They will probably be followed by an army brigade for the neighbouring province of Kandahar and another for eastern Afghanistan. General McChrystal wants to focus on “protecting the population”. Troop deployments in the ethnic-Pushtun heartlands of Kandahar and Helmand will look like a dumbbell: in the east NATO would hold Kandahar city and its environs; and in the west it would secure the fertile farmland around Helmand’s main towns, Lashkar Gah and Gereshk. Forming the bar between the two areas will be extra security on the road connecting them, to allow the unencumbered movement of commercial trade for the first time in years. Meanwhile the increasingly shaky north and west of the country will be beefed up with penny-packets of extra troops largely drawn from other NATO countries.

Not all are convinced by the new strategy. A number of important Afghans close to President Hamid Karzai are unhappy about the focus on population centres, saying the extra troops will simply attract trouble for ordinary people. “We have a lot of problems on the border, with the Taliban coming in from Pakistan, and the foreign troops should be sent to deal with them instead,” says Shukria Barakzai, an MP.

It will be in places like Kandahar city, the country’s second-biggest and the main fount of the Taliban, where the strategy will be most severely tested. For months NATO has fretted that the city was on its way to being taken over by the Taliban—not by invading bands of insurgents but an insidious campaign of intimidation and the Taliban’s proven ability to arbitrate local disputes in a fairly reasonable way. “One morning we will all wake up and realise that all the sources of local power are no longer with the government—it would essentially be a Taliban city,” says one of the few foreigners living there.

Thousands more American soldiers, ignorant of the ways of the Pushtuns, may be able to do little to stop the Taliban’s infiltration. Rear-Admiral Gregory Smith, the top military spokesman in Kabul, concedes that the mission will be difficult; the task will be to “change the governance structures” to tackle a corrupt system, especially the police, that preys on civilians.

That will rely on President Karzai’s support for a serious clean-up which, many argue, would require the removal of his half-brother, Ahmed Wali, the dominant political force in Kandahar and an alleged drug lord. The president, though, may see his powerful brother as all that stands in the way of a complete Taliban takeover. It is unclear how to reconcile this with Mr Obama’s demand for accountable government, and his stern warning that “the days of providing a blank cheque are over”.

Mr Obama pointedly rejected the idea of an open-ended commitment to the war, “a nation-building project of up to a decade”, as unaffordable and out of line with American interests. He was keen to instil a “sense of urgency” to ensure that Afghans “take responsibility for their security”.

For General McChrystal, training Afghan security forces is now “the most important thing we do in the future”. The general had asked for Afghan forces to be nearly doubled to 400,000 soldiers and policemen. But Mr Obama had little to say on this Afghan surge, which is arguably even more important than the American one. White House officials explained that expanding Afghan forces will be done in “annual increments”.

By evoking the economic crisis, and setting some kind of time limit of America’s involvement, Mr Obama is acknowledging the qualms of his own party. But the danger is that the Afghan people, and the Taliban, will conclude that America is tiring of the fight and can be outlasted. For America’s hopes of success that would be the beginning of the end.