President Donald Trump will again consider his options for the 16-year-old Afghan War on Friday when key members of his Cabinet convene at Camp David — a discussion that his advisers and key lawmakers hope will bring an end to the administration’s drawn-out strategic review.
“We are coming very close to a decision, and I anticipate it in the very near future,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Thursday of the meeting, which will also include Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, CIA Director Mike Pompeo and other national security advisers.
In an earlier Pentagon appearance Monday, Mattis told reporters that “all options” are still on the table.
“We’re sharpening each one of the options so you can see the pluses and minuses of each one, so that there’s no longer any new data you’re going to get,” Mattis said. “Now just make the decision.”
The options the Pentagon is presenting are straightforward, and nothing the president has not seen before: Stay the course with the current strategy, which combines counterterrorism with a relatively narrow advise-and-assist mission to support Afghan government troops; add the several thousand additional American forces that the top U.S. general there has asked for; send in private contractors; or withdraw.
The more ambitious escalation that Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) has proposed is not on the table, at least as far as the military is concerned. McCain’s proposal does not include a troop-level estimate but calls for far more additional combat advisers than the generals have requested.
So far, Trump has not decided on any of the options the military has offered, and instead has raised questions about whether the Afghan War is still worth it, current and former military officials have told POLITICO. And he may well go with an idea from another quarter. White House advisers like Steve Bannon are reported to favor replacing uniformed combat advisers with thousands of armed private contractors. The result could be a hybrid option: replacing some advisers with contractors, for example, while leaving other advising tasks in military hands.
There is broad agreement among former government officials who have served in Afghanistan, however, that pulling up stakes and leaving the Afghan government forces on their own, in the face of widening Taliban advances even with allied support, is not a credible option.
“A Taliban-controlled Afghanistan is an Afghanistan that is hospitable to Al Qaeda,“ said David Sedney, a former diplomat who oversaw Afghanistan policy for the Pentagon under President Barack Obama and is now a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They’ve been a host for Al Qaeda, and their ideology is such that they will always be a potential host for Al Qaeda.”
These are the major alternatives Trump faces:
1) Stay the course
None of the current and former government officials and military officers who spoke to POLITICO thought Trump was likely to tell the military to just keep doing what it’s been doing in Afghanistan, although that is one of the options the Pentagon is presenting.
Since the withdrawal of the last large U.S. ground combat units in 2014, the military headquarters in Kabul has overseen a strategy with two parallel tracks — advise-and-assist and counterterrorism. At the same time, they’re constrained by an Obama-era troop cap that limits the number of American service members in the country. The cap is 8,400, although troops on short-term assignments are thought to push the number to 10,000 or more.
With Afghan losses growing heavier each year and more districts steadily falling under the sway of the Taliban, the latest commander in Kabul, Gen. John Nicholson, initiated his own strategy review when he took charge in early 2016. Afterward he started sending some advisers on tactical missions with conventional Afghan army brigades, using troops already in theater.
Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, "believed General Nicholson’s strategy was about as good as it could be given the resources that were allocated,” a senior officer familiar with that review said. But for the Afghans to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, Nicholson concluded that he would need more troops for more brigade-level adviser teams, and he said as much in congressional testimony in February, soon after Trump took office.
2) Send thousands more troops
Nicholson’s requested “uplift package,” as the military refers to the proposed reinforcements, would be deployed not for a short-term surge but for a long-term shift in how the military advises and assists Afghan troops.
Some 4,000 fresh troops would form additional brigade adviser teams, partner up with an Afghan commando force that is set to double in size over the next few years, and step up support to Afghan forces countrywide with more closely coordinated air, artillery and rocket strikes. Units of HIMARS long-range rockets, which U.S. forces have used heavily to support their Iraqi and Syrian allies over the past year, would form part of the uplift package.
Meanwhile, the existing special operations task force would continue the current counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda and the Afghan affiliate of the Islamic State in areas the Taliban controls, using drone strikes and night raids.
No one in the military is suggesting that the “uplift” would deliver a speedy turnaround in the war. “There’s about a three-year horizon to get sustainable gains here,” even with the reinforcements, said one American officer in Kabul.
That matches with a four-year “road map” for improvement that Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has promulgated for his forces. But it may be too long of a timeline to impress Trump, who, before he was a presidential candidate, often tweeted his displeasure at the long slog and high cost of the Afghan War effort.
The plan McCain proposed earlier this month as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, S. 1519 (115), is essentially a much-expanded version of the uplift plan, calling for adviser teams to embed not just with a few Afghan army brigades but with many of their subordinate battalions.
That would be a much more manpower-intensive task and would risk many more American casualties, and there is no indication that McCain’s proposal will be up for discussion at Camp David on Friday.
3) Send private contractors
The proposal that controversial former Blackwater chief executive Erik Prince has been shopping in recent weeks, for a partial privatization of the advisory and air support missions, has met a chilly reception in the Pentagon and especially in Kabul.
Like the McCain plan, it calls for advisers to embed with Afghan battalions on battlefields all around the country, risking heavy casualties on the teams. The difference is that the advisers would be private contractors, not soldiers and Marines, which Prince contends would cut costs.
Putting contractors at the forefront of the advisory effort would probably cause a firestorm in Kabul, however, and badly undermine the military’s, State Department’s and CIA’s carefully cultivated relationships with the Afghan government.
“In appropriate roles, contractors can be of real assistance,” said Douglas Ollivant, a former Army officer who was himself a contractor in Afghanistan during the surge there, providing advice to U.S. commanders. “But I can’t imagine any sovereign country being OK with what we’re hearing about. Having them in the baggage train, in a supporting role, is something you learn to live with, but having third-party mercenaries holding the guns and making the decisions is something else altogether.”
The legal question of “inherent government functions” casts a shadow over the Prince plan, too. Prince has proposed getting around this by putting the contractors under CIA, rather than Pentagon, control. But that would radically redefine the intelligence agency’s involvement in the country and potentially raise more fresh legal issues than it would answer.
4) Withdraw
Pulling up stakes and leaving might have the most emotional appeal to Trump of all the options. Before his White House run, he took to Twitter repeatedly to advocate just that. “Let’s get out of Afghanistan,” he tweeted in 2013. “Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” That message fits with the “America First” platform that Trump campaign on, too.
But former officials with long experience in the region warn that the U.S. has essential interests in Afghanistan — the same ones that drew the military there in 2001 — and that ceding large parts of the country to the Taliban would open the door to an expanded Al Qaeda presence there.
The Taliban plays host to Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan’s rugged northeast and other remote areas already, and Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, swore allegiance last year to the Taliban’s latest emir, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada.
“The core reason we went into Afghanistan was to prevent another attack on the U.S. homeland from Afghanistan by Al Qaeda, and so far we have achieved that,” said Sedney, the former Obama Pentagon official, who was also acting ambassador in Kabul early in the George W. Bush administration. “But we have not succeeded in placing Afghanistan into an overall political, military and economic situation where that is not likely to happen again. The country retains the potential to be a source of future acts of terrorism against the United States.”
No comments:
Post a Comment