
(CBS)
Call this a war stimulus package for Afghanistan: the Commander in Chief is sending in just enough extra troops to turn the momentum around, he hopes, and then he’s going to start bringing them home in 2011. At least, that’s how the president’s new plan for Afghanistan is being described inside the beltway. Put another way, he’s sending the signal to the American people, Congress, the Afghans and the world in general that he is renting this war, not buying into it.
The purpose is to tell those multiple audiences there’s an end in sight, because that’s what he thinks they need to hear—the American people, because they’re tired of it and afraid they can’t afford much more of it; the Congress, especially the Democrats, who fear they may get voted out if they are perceived as having bought into a war that’s been labeled a (potential) quagmire; and the Afghans, because Mr. Obama wants them to know he’ll not only let them have their country back, but that he intends to leave them to it, as soon as possible, so they (read: Afghan President Hamid Karzai) better cooperate with the Americans now because the gravy train will eventually pull out.
He told them how he plans to leave, in the form of a somewhat retooled strategy. It’s not a wholesale departure from what we’ve heard before. Instead, it’s a narrowing of goals, using the same tactics the president articulated when he sent an extra 21,000 troops earlier this year: an expanded use of counterinsurgency, with continued counterterrorism (going after the bad guys, be they remnants of foreign Al Qaeda fighters or resurgent local Taliban), and a hyped-up schedule to train and then turn over responsibility to Afghan forces, so we can get out. Old fashioned counterinsurgency is "clear, hold and build." This is more "clear, hold, while building up someone else, and handover ASAP."
"It’s status quo plus," Af-Pak scholar Haider Mullick e-mailed me after the speech. (E-mail reactions were flying thick and fast, post-speech. ) He called it "a clever counterterrorism and counterinsurgency hybrid free of costly nation-building – enough to suppress Taliban and al Qaeda in the next two years but not enough to deter their resurgence in next five." Mullick is a fellow at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University, and he’s spent a lot of time in the region.
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