In a panel discussion on WAMU about (among other things) Afghanistan, one reporter reminded us that -- to date -- President Obama is acting much more quickly in his decision-making about an Afghanistan surge than did George W. Bush when faced with the possible surge in Iraq. Bush holds the dither record so far.
The moderator was Susan Page of USA Today. The panel members were:
David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for "The New York Times," author of "The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power."Karen DeYoung, senior diplomatic correspondent, The Washington Post.
Roy Gutman, foreign editor, McClatchy Newspapers; author "How We Missed the Story: Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan."
What follows are excerpts from the discussion, separated and titled to make reading easier.
Who holds the presidential record for "dithering"?
David Sanger: ...I went back and took a look at the decision process that led up to President Bush's decision, announced in January of 2007, to launch the surge. Our first stories on the debate began in late September of 2006. So it took President Bush just about four months to make this decision. While it was being actively discussed, there were the same kinds of leaks around these situation room meetings that we're seeing today. I don't recall that word being used at the time. It was a quite controversial decision to do the surge. If you took the same time period forward, you'd say that President Obama could take another month on this decision and still be slightly ahead of the record set by President Bush! ...
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Those Eikenberry memos
David Sanger: The cables came from Karl Eikenberry, the American ambassador to Afghanistan. This is actually his third tour in Afghanistan and his second one was as the military commander for American and NATO forces there. That gives him a particular authority in discussing the issue of troop levels because he is now the only one who's ever held both the top military and civilian American posts there. Eikenberry's views are pretty well known. From the time that he was military commander, he kept arguing that more and more troops -- while occasionally useful for specific purposes -- weren't going to solve the overall problem. In fact there's one moment where he told Condoleezza Rice, when she was secretary of state, "If you give me the choice between another division and another road for the Afghanis, I'm choosing the road." The position that he has taken now -- which is to argue that provision of additional American troops might actually create a disincentive for the Afghans to train their own military -- is a fascinating one, not necessarily a new one.
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Putting pressure on Karzai
Susan Page (moderator): This puts Ambassador Eikenberry quite at odds with General McChrystal who is the military commander there, Karen.
Karen DeYoung: Well yes, it does. As you know, the Obama administration inside the White House has spent the last two months deliberating over whether to meet General McChrystal's request for more than 40,000 new troops or whether to choose a lower amount of troops. One option that they're not considering is sending no new troops or withdrawing some of the 68,000 US troops that are there already. Eikenberry's intervention, which obviously comes late to that process -- although, as David says, it is not a new point of view being expressed by him -- was one that many in the military took some umbrage at as a sort of monkey wrench thrown into the process late. Some people questioned [Eikenberry's] motives. Again, I would agree with David that this is not a new point of view of his. One of the other things he's saying besides what affect this will have on the Afghans themselves and how much it costs is that we are now at a point where at least we have some leverage with the Afghan government -- and particularly with Afghan President Karzai. He's scheduled to choose his cabinet by the end of the month -- his new administration. There are certain people that we think are not good choices, others that we would like to see in there. The feeling is -- certainly by Eikenberry -- that once we say, "all right. We've decided. Here's our policy," that removes whatever leverage we have over President Karzai to press him to do what it is we want.
Susan Page: Which might argue for even some additional delay. We've been waiting for this announcement on US troop deployments for some time. Roy Gutman, your organization, McClatchy, posted a story yesterday about all the leaks that have driven this debate recently with the Eikenberry cables.
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The leaks and what really happened
Roy Gutman: Maybe the most interesting one came out of Kabul just before Ambassador Eikenberry sent his cable. He had a meeting with Hamid Karzai and suggested to him that there was a list of possible candidates for his cabinet. We have the number of 40 -- people who were clean, weren't involved in drugs, not involved in corruption or major scandals. Karzai did not accept the list. Eikenberry also said, "You've got to clean up your act in general. Send your brother abroad." Karzai rejected it. I think the problem for Americans after Karzai's fraudulent -- but enormous! -- victory in the elections is that they don't have leverage over him. Karzai is certainly going to resist as much as he can. So I think that is really the prelude to Eikenberry's cable basically asking the administration to slow down in the troop [decision] process. I don't believe at the end of the day that Eikenberry is opposed to McChrystal's plan. I think in fact they must have a general agreement. He didn't do this at the last minute as a tactical measure because of a profound disagreement. But I think it was a matter of timing.
Karen DeYoung: It's also important to say, just to give a little bit of Karzai's point of view ... A lot of American officials are announcing, "Gosh, this guy's erratic. Maybe he's not totally together." There are a lot of things being said about Karzai. But one of the points he makes is one that I think is worth considering. There are very few people in any position of power on a national, provincial, or local level in Afghanistan whose hands aren't dirty in some way or another. In many cases both previously and ongoingly, these are people who have been in collusion with various US policies that have changed over the years. The Obama administration adopted a very different approach than the Bush administration did to these matters. And speaking of President Karzai's brother, as the New York Times reported last week, he has been and still is on the CIA payroll as are many, many others -- including many of those who we now say should not be a part of Karzai's government.
David Sanger: There's another element to the leverage that we have and don't have over President Karzai. President Karzai gave a very interesting interview to Margaret Warner on the NewsHour a few days ago in which he made two good points. Number one, the US isn't in Afghanistan for the Afghanis. The US is there because after 9/11 they were trying to make sure that Afghanistan did not again become a haven for Al Qaeda. So the point that Karzai has made repeatedly is that the US didn't really care about corruption, good governance in Afghanistan when the Taliban were running the place as long as the attacks didn't hit America. So the issue now is: supposing President Obama were to say, "If you're not governing the country the way we want, we're leaving." Karzai's response is going to be, "Remind me again why you're here!"
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The US has a poor track record in Afghanistan
Roy Gutman: Well, of course there's been a problem with the way the US has dealt with Afghanistan going back to the Russian invasion. During the entire 1980's, the US saw it as a platform for attacking Russia and and weakening the Red Army. In 1989? We've just celebrated the fall of the Berlin wall, but we have to remember that the first event of 1989 was the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Afghans defeated them. They lost a million people. The Americans never ever followed through in supporting Afghanistan, helping to stabilize it. And then, during the 1990's under Bill Clinton, there was no interest whatsoever in Afghanistan. And then, under George Bush, once again the Afghans were used as a platform for attacking Al Qaeda in Pakistan. So I think Karzai -- it's not just a point of the moment. This is really the point of historic American policy being quite wrong in Afghanistan.
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The brick wall
Susan Page: You get the sense that President Obama doesn't like his options. Doesn't see where they lead. When it will make it possible for the US to withdraw. Given all that, Karen, do you have a sense of where he'll come down or when he'll make the decision?
Karen DeYoung: I think it's interesting that, as we've gone through this process, we get reports out of these high-level White House meetings that, "Well, the president today asked for information on ..." and last week it was "Who runs all the provinces in Afghanistan and what do we know about all these governors?" Well, we know a great deal and every time a question like that comes up and the president sends his teams back out to report back, it turns out to be a sort of brick wall. There is no good option. In every direction things are in some degree of chaos. We don't know where he's going to come down. The betting right now is that he'll come down somewhere in the middle -- which is an option that doesn't please too many people.
Roy Gutman: There are only so many troops that he can send, by the way. It's possible that if he went for 34,000, for example, that he'd go to NATO for the extra 6,000 or 8,000 that McChrystan is asking for.
David Sanger: In some ways the least interesting question out of this is what the number is. The most interesting question is how does he stagger those numbers and how does he relate those numbers to whatever our new strategy is going to be. So, for example, you could imagine a situation in which he says to President Karzai, "Okay. I'm going to start off with trainers -- 4,000, 6,000 --and if you manage to train up the Afghan army so that they're turning into a real force, then I may send a second tranche or third tranche of troops. I suspect that you're not going to see President Obama announce a full number all at once. I think he's going to say, "This has got to be staged and it's got to be time-limited."
Roy Gutman: The other thing to say is about his deliberative process. Some people accuse him of dithering or vascillating or being unsure of himself. I think to have a process of thinking this through is a very good thing. Because he's got to sell it to the nation, to Congress. And he's got to follow through, then, for years to come.
