The Pentagon is now pressuring the White House to take troops out of Iraq much faster. And send them to Afghanistan. According to the Washington Post:
Administration officials said the White House could start to debate the future of the American military commitment in both Iraq and Afghanistan as early as next month. Some Pentagon officials are urging a further drawdown of forces in Iraq beyond that envisioned by the White House, which is set to reduce the number of combat brigades from 20 to 15 by the end of next summer. At the same time, commanders in Afghanistan are looking for several additional battalions, helicopters and other resources to confront a resurgent Taliban movement.
Bush's decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan could heavily influence his ability to pass on to his successor stable situations in both countries, an objective his advisers describe as one of the president's paramount goals for his final year in office.
Afghanistan is seen as potentially a much greater piece of work than Iraq.
The instability in Afghanistan is part of an old story: the troops that have been sent into Iraq should never have been there. Instead they should have been in Afghanistan. Iraq not only absorbed the US military's resources but has also been enormously costly diplomatically, making it much more difficult to get help in Afghanistan. And now, having lost his "creds," Bush faces a Congress and an American people who are generally unsupportive of any kind of surge, however it may be justified. And then there's the fear many in the military feel about what may happen in Iraq as troops are drawn down. The Bush administration falls back, inevitably, on blaming European allies for not helping.
Altogether, the genuine need of Afghanistan for more serious attention may leave many Americans cold.
A new White House emphasis on Afghanistan would probably expose Bush to even more criticism from Democrats, who have long accused him of taking his eye off the hunt for Osama bin Laden with the invasion of Iraq. "It's about time they recognized the problem" in Afghanistan, said former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, a Democrat, who says Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley called him last spring to say that a newspaper column he wrote raising concerns about conditions in Afghanistan was too pessimistic.
But even friends of the White House have voiced concerns. "The strategic consequences of failure in both [Iraq and Afghanistan] are pretty severe," said retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones, former NATO supreme commander, in an interview last month, before his appointment by Rice as a Middle East adviser. "The rest of the world is listening to what we are talking about, and we are not talking about Afghanistan on a daily basis. . . . To the extent that we let that slip out of the headlines, that's a mistake."
Bush wants to leave "a stable situation" to his successor? After eight years of one FUBAR after another, that's highly unlikely.
Who's to blame for Afghanistan? Guess!
... A retired four-star general speaking at a private meeting recently characterized the lack of troops in Afghanistan as a "sixth-order problem." The key problems are the lack of a coherent regional strategy, especially toward Pakistan and Iran, and the failure from the very beginning to invest adequately in governance and development and in any aspect of security but the Afghan National Army. All of these resulted from decisions taken by the Bush administration in 2001-2002, not from our European allies.
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