Obama's real Afghanistan options

By RALPH PETERS
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com/
October 9, 2009

PRESIDENT Obama faces three options in Afghanistan. Hints from the White House suggest that he's going to choose the worst: a non-decision decision.

Leaving Afghanistan entirely is not one of the options. We need boots on the ground. Even Obama understands that.

The question is: How many boots? Here are the three broad choices on the table:

The McChrsytal Plan: Surge 40,000 more US troops from a weary Army to renew the failing effort to apply our counter-productive counterinsurgency theory -- which attempts to cure cancer with herbal tea.

The Biden Strategy: Focus ruthlessly on the destruction of al Qaeda and its auxiliaries across the border in Pakistan or wherever they may appear in Afghanistan. This is the counter-terror practice that's worked for 3,000 years.

The "Vote Present" Strategy: Send a token increase of 10,000 or so troops, make cosmetic changes to the mission, try to please everyone partially -- and kick the can down the road.

The evidence on the ground, the lessons of history, and our real security needs strongly favor the Biden approach, but giving Gen. Stan McChrystal the full surge he wants would be far better than "more of the same, with new slogans."

This president has to make a decision. A real decision. But it looks like he's going to wiggle, squirm and dodge, then go in front of the teleprompter to vote "present" again.

Worsening the muddle, the troop-level debate is being disgracefully politicized on all sides.

Obama's seeking the least politically damaging choice, rather than the most effective military approach. He's less concerned with winning than with avoiding blame.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Meanwhile, too many conservatives are doing to Obama what they rightly decried when the left did it to Bush: Dems used Iraq as a club to beat Bush; now Republicans want to wield Afghanistan against Obama. Hey, this is about our national security and the lives of those in uniform -- not scoring cheap political points.

Shameful, shameful, shameful.

Of course, there are also genuine disagreements. One spat that goes largely ignored is within the military.

Pundits assume that those in uniform automatically support Gen. McChrystal's request for more troops. It ain't so, folks. Of the numerous uniformed contacts who've reached out to me -- soldiers and Marines of all ranks -- only two backed the McChrsytal plan. One of those was a close subordinate of the general's, calling from Kabul.

There's a deeper, long-term problem hidden here. Our military nurtures brilliant tacticians and operators, but no longer produces strategists. It hasn't given us a serious global thinker in 50 years. We're great at solving battlefield problems, but poor at grasping the greater context of war.

McChrystal's a mighty tactician and a fierce operator. But, elevated to strategic command, he couldn't think beyond the Army's minimum-violence/maximum-aid counterinsurgency doctrine -- which just doesn't work. His solution to failure? Try harder. Send more troops. He's a hero out of his depth.

McChrystal is performing superbly in the lethal counter-terror mission at the heart of the "AfPak" crisis (the term "AfPak" acknowledges the relative non-existence of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan). He's terrorizing al Qaeda in Pakistan's wild northwest.

But he's floundering in Afghanistan itself, where he's trapped himself in other men's bad ideas. We promoted a superb field officer above his competence level when we tried to turn this warrior into a strategist.

On the plus side, both the administration and Congress seem to have figured out two key things at last. First, Pakistan's the big game. Second, aid can't continue to come as blank checks. If the Paks want the bucks and the bullets, they have to perform.

The Pakistanis are balking at our conditions. (Hey, it's our money, dudes.) They liked the old slush-fund approach. But it's time that Islamabad -- which still supports its own favored terrorists -- faces up to the fact that, while Islamist extremism is a bitter annoyance to us, it's a mortal danger to Pakistan.

The Pakistanis seemed to get it earlier this year, when a Taliban franchise appeared within commuting distance of the capital. They're finally fighting. Because it's their fight.

But they still won't go after "their" Taliban or the terrorists who target India. Our relationship's an affair of convenience, and we'd better not mistake it for a marriage.

For our part, we've shattered al Qaeda and have a chance to destroy it. But we need to recall the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place -- to slay our enemies. That's the only thing that works, and the only thing that matters.

If Obama tries to split the difference in Afghanistan, he'll have made the worst possible choice. And he won't be able to blame Bush anymore.