Obama's 2011 "beginning of the end" is a crock

By Steve Hynd

Today, both US SecDef Bob Gates and UK prime minister Gordon Brown revealed that Obama's announcement of a 2011 "beginning of the end" - and Brown's earlier announcement of a 2010 date for starting a British withdrawal - were simply PR statements intended to soften public perceptions of an occupation without end. That is, they were lies.

Gates, in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, has made it clear that 2011 is not a hard and fast date.

in a sign that U.S. commanders were keeping their options open, Gates said they would review progress in December 2010 and would not abandon Afghanistan to its fate if the security situation was untenable.

"We're not just going to throw these guys into the swimming pool and walk away," he said.

And Gordon Brown, under pressure from opposition leader David Cameron, made that slippage even more explicit.

"There is no question of us withdrawing our British troops until the point where we are sure Afghans can take over security control themselves," said Brown. "We will continue to have our troops until that point."

But as Harlan Ullman pointed out today, getting the Afghan security forces to stand up isn't going to happen in anything close to that 2011 timeframe.

The notion is to build an Afghan force of some 400,000 army and police quickly and turn security over to them much as the United States tried to do in Vietnam with the Vietnamization program.

In theory, such logic is clear. However, McChrystal himself concludes it will take three to five years to stand up such a force. And some of his advisers believe this is optimistic. To others, the ethnic and illiteracy realities are more constraining. Enlisting sufficient Pashtun recruits to serve under an officer corps long headed by Tajiks is a non-starter even if literacy were not an issue – which it is. The police are even more problematic.

And if this tool were not sufficiently dull and in need of purchase or replacement, who will pay for it? Surely not the Afghans, who are broke. And is the West prepared to underwrite these costs for long?

Obama's beginning of a withdrawal is a crock.

Update: Steve Coll, who is broadly in favor of escalation, still wasn't impressed by Obama's speech - and he is saying 2011 is a crock too. Coll explicitly ties the date-that-isn't to the electoral process.

I joined a few background-spin briefings put on by the White House yesterday. The roll-out talking points differed from the speech itself in emphasis. The President used his prime-time audience to address the concerns of American citizens. The roll-out briefers dwelled much less on the significance of the July 2011 “start date” for removing American troops from a lead combat role, emphasizing instead that such a transition would be constructed “district by district” and “as conditions allow”; that is, they did not talk about it as a hard deadline at all.

...At home, the appeal of such a date is obvious—as Nancy Pelosi said today, President Obama has now illuminated an exit strategy. The White House political shop must also be pleased. Who knows what kind of reëlection campaign President Obama might face in 2012? If things are truly awful, he might even face a significant primary challenger. An advantage of marking July 2011 now is that it provides the President the greatest flexibility of decision-making about Afghanistan and campaign narrative-writing alike. The President, of course, has said that politics has not remotely entered into his thinking about the Afghan war. We can take him at his word; no similar concession is required about Rahm Emanuel, however.

Coll thinks that Obama's speech has "purchased from his own deeply skeptical party eighteen months of political forbearance". I think he's very wrong about that.