Obama’s Afghan Indecision

Conservative critics of the President's Afghanistan speech have generally applauded his decision to deploy more troops while writing scathingly about his timeline for withdrawing American troops. One argument is that by announcing an 18 month limit for the surge, he will encourage our enemies to lie low for that time and come out when we are gone. I hope that that is true. It will give us a year and a half to accomplish our objectives with little resistance.

The more serious argument is that the time limit indicates a lack of commitment on the President's part. Ralph Peters put it best:

It's as if, during WWII, we'd told the Japanese and Germans that we really meant business, but intended to quit by 1944.

The depth of the President's commitment is the real question. The Washington Post has a fine piece on the process from which the President's policy emerged. From this piece, by Anne E. Kornblut, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung, we learn just how the President took all those months to reach a conclusion. The WaPo piece tries to make the President look heroic, but does not quite succeed.

Last summer it looked like the President was at odds with his generals. General McChrystal was saying in public that a big increase in troops was necessary, which was apparently not what the President had in mind. The press reported this as a case of generals getting too big for their britches and forgetting who was in charge. The WaPo piece explains what really happened.

In June, [General] McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: "Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population."

"Is that really what you think your mission is?" one of those in the Situation Room asked.

On the face of it, it was impossible -- the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. "We don't need to do that," Gates said, according to a participant. "That's an open-ended, forever commitment."

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan -- the execution orders for the March strategy, written by [Obama's own] NSC staff.

In short, the Obama Administration didn't know what its own Afghanistan strategy was. General McCrystal did know. He was only doing and saying what the President had instructed him to do and say, even if the President had no idea what that was.

The WaPo story explains in great detail how the present policy was developed. But it contains another tidbit that is rather worrisome. Here is how the final "decision" was made:

Just after twilight on Nov. 29, Obama gathered Biden, Gates, Petraeus, Jones, Emanuel, Cartwright and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Oval Office. He had called Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton earlier.

He had made his decision.

Thirty thousand additional U.S. troops would arrive in Afghanistan by summer, and NATO would be asked to send at least 5,000 forces. …

Obama then went around the room asking one question: Do you support the strategy?

"If they didn't support the decision, he was going to issue another decision" until there was unanimity, a senior administration official said. "But it was his assessment that everyone could and should get behind it." Each of them did.

Now look at those words carefully. He had made his decision. Except that he hadn't. If "they" didn't agree, he was going to make another decision. He got unanimous agreement. Did it have to be unanimous? What if Secretary Clinton had expressed reservations on the phone?

The President is supposed to make such decisions. That is his job. President Obama prefers to outsource his most important decisions to other people. This is a bad sign. Suppose the President confronts a real national security crisis, one in which his advisers are divided. What will the Hyde Park Hamlet do?

For now, the commander of insurgent forces in Afghanistan, if there is one, need only worry about which of the President's decision makers he has to turn when the moment of truth comes.

Comments

[GeneK]

From my observations over the years the positions and reservations of the principles at that meeting had been worked out by their staffs prior to the meeting. I don't believe this was an impromptu meeting. I would consider it prudent that the President would ask each individual if he was in agreement--this was an opportunity for a principle to raise an issue or state a position that he did not feel had been adequately addressed--sort of a speak now or hold your peace. This in warfighting terms is a deliberative decision process--most military operational planning uses this methodology. So I'm not surprised nor concerned by the events described in the WaPo story. This process is in contrast to an urgent decision process where you must react quickly. Rarely is a President a party to an urgent decision process--the last one that comes to mind is President Bush's response in the early hours of 9/11.

I would have liked the WaPo story to have given some good insight into how they intend to achieve the mission. The Soviets tried for many years and failed. I suspect that intense discussions took place examining all aspects as to how to be successful occurred behind the scenes in the months leading up to the decision. This is the untold story. I guess I'll just wait for the book and history to play out.

[KB]

GeneK: whatever the President was doing, he wasn't "acting quickly." All I have to go on is the WaPo story. It is clearly written with sympathy to the President, but the way it describes the final decision is very disturbing. The President is supposed to make the final decision.

What this sounds like is that everyone at the table agreed to endorse the same view because, if they didn't, no decision would have been made at all. That explains all the false starts along the way where we were told that the President had decided to decide what to do in Afghanistan, and then were told that no decision would be forthcoming.

[Will]

I wish republicans would stop complaining they spent trillions and got us in this deficit and never slowed down every decision pres. Obama makes they dont like lets all come together we are becoming the divided states of america give him a chance