Report: "Obama Nixed Full Surge After Quizzing Brass"

By Cernig

Gareth Porter reports that President Obama refused to approve the full deployment of troops for Afghanistan that the Pentagon had called for after asking the commander on the ground what he'd do with all those soldiers and being told the general didn't really have a clue.

The request for 30,000 additional troops, which would bring the U.S. troop level in Afghanistan to more than 60,000, had been approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as by Defence Secretary Robert Gates before Obama's inauguration. A front-page story in the Washington Post Jan. 13 reported that Obama was ready to "sign off" on the deployment request.

On Jan. 30 Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said between 20,000 and 30,000 more troops would "probably" be sent to Afghanistan and the figure would "tend toward the higher number of those two".

But on Feb. 9, Mullen indicated that the Pentagon would soon announce that three brigades, or about 16,000 troops, would be deployed to Afghanistan in the coming months.

What had changed in the nine days between those two statements, according to a White House source, was that Obama had called McKiernan directly and asked how he planned to use the 30,000 troops, but got no coherent answer to the question.

It was after that conversation that Obama withdrew his support for the full request.

The unsatisfactory response from McKiernan had been preceded by another military non-answer to an Obama question. At his meeting with Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon Jan. 28, Obama asked the Joint Chiefs, "What is the end game?" in Afghanistan, and was told, "Frankly, we don't have one," according to a Feb. 4 report by NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.

Petraus' highly public and premature announcement in January that all would be alright with the US airbase in Kyrgyzstan may have also dented Obama's confidence in the sainthood of "commanders on the ground". Today, the Kyrgyz government gave the US six months notice to vacate the base.

Obama will now come under intense pressure from the Pentagon and from neocons who don't want any kind of de-escalation in Afghanistan to approve the military's wish for the rest of the troops. John McCain is to become the frontman for that neocon push on February 25th, when he's due to deliver a keynote speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He should resist, and enlist the aid of those who have done their shares of being "wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains" to help counter their hubristic ambition.

From the first, I've been worried that Obama had delegated foreign policy entirely to realist hawks with dreams of a benevolent empire from the Clinton camp and to neo-liberal think tanks entirely too enamoured of a colonialist, generation-long, counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan as at least being better than the clusterf**k that has gone before. Dare I Hope (tm) that this move is an indication of his style - that he just likes surrounding himself with those more gung-ho than himself and then being the naysayer on their wilder flights of fancy? I've met several very effective managers over the years with exactly that strategy. If so, then he should have nay-said the morans who wanted to keep the Bush blanket state secrets defense, shouldn't he?