Military Seeks to Make Case Against Too-Hasty Reduction of Troops in Afghanistan

NYtimes
June 6, 2011 by xmlbot

WASHINGTON — With a major internal debate gathering inside the White House over how quickly to reduce the size of the American fighting force in Afghanistan, the military pushed back on Monday against the prospect of a substantial withdrawal, arguing that to leave too early would imperil hard-fought gains.
Finishing his final trip to Afghanistan as defense secretary on Monday, Robert M. Gates told troops there, “I think we shouldn’t let up on the gas too much, at least for the next few months.”
Mr. Gates met over the weekend with the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is hammering out a suggested schedule for the troop reduction. The Pentagon knows the White House will be deeply skeptical that keeping troops around for another fighting season next spring would make strategic or political sense.
In Washington, senior military officials say the withdrawal of United States forces depends in large part on the ability of the Afghans to defend themselves, an effort they concede is still a work in progress and makes them reluctant to remove troops too quickly.
Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the American in charge of the NATO effort to train Afghan forces, said Monday that although NATO was on track to reach its goal of training 305,000 army and police forces by October, attrition remained a significant problem. Those forces currently total 296,000.
General Caldwell said that about 30 percent of Afghan soldiers leave the Army every year before their terms of service are up, particularly in areas of heavy combat where they are needed most. In addition, he said that only one in 10 recruits can read and write, meaning NATO must first provide literacy training so that soldiers are able to write their names and read serial numbers on their weapons. So far, he said, NATO has trained 90,000 men in basic literacy.
As military officials made their case for caution in reducing American troop strength, President Obama met with his senior national security advisers in the White House Situation Room to review progress in Afghanistan. That meeting was not intended to debate the withdrawal, which will happen in a separate process over the next few weeks.
Aides said Mr. Obama had not received any recommendations on troop reductions. Still, the meeting on Monday was likely to inform that debate, because it was one of the last moments for the military to make its case about the progress it was making, including in training Afghan troops.
Mr. Obama will hold a video teleconference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan on Wednesday to discuss the war, the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, said Monday.
At issue is where Mr. Obama sets the “bookends,” in Mr. Gates’s phrase, of how quickly American troops begin to depart, and when all 30,000 reinforcements sent to Afghanistan in the surge last year will be out of the country. Most officials expect the latter date to be next summer.
Mr. Gates’s comments, made to troops at Combat Outpost Andar in eastern Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province, demonstrated that while the secretary is to retire from his Pentagon post at the end of the month, he intends to remain a prominent advocate for the counterinsurgency strategy even as voices in the White House express doubts on sustaining the large commitment of troops and money.
“We’ve made a lot of headway, but we have a ways to go,” he said.
He made the case that success in Afghanistan required a combination of counterinsurgency efforts and counterterrorism strikes, and stressed that counterinsurgency — COIN in military jargon — produces benefits required for the more precise counterterrorism strikes to be carried out.
“It is a mix of COIN and counterterrorism,” Mr. Gates said, arguing that valuable information on insurgents and terrorists will be offered only by a population that feels secure and has bonds to the local government.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Thom Shanker from Combat Outpost Andar, Afghanistan. Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
“I think over time our mission will be less and less COIN and more and more counterterrorism, so there will be a transition,” he said. “But I don’t think we are ready to do that yet.”
Even so, Mr. Gates said the United States should be cautious that its counterinsurgency efforts — which call for protecting the population, establishing credible government institutions and rebuilding the economy — should not become a lengthy and expensive commitment to nation-building.
In his comments, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, General Caldwell also voiced caution, saying that corruption in the Afghan security forces “constitutes a very complex problem with no real easy solutions.”
On a positive note, he said the quality of the Afghan security forces had improved. As evidence, he said Afghans must now be certified in proper use of their weapons before they can join the army, a requirement that did not exist in 2009.
Earlier in his visit to Afghanistan, Mr. Gates said he expected that the administration would conduct a review of American troop levels in Afghanistan that would go far beyond simply arriving at a single number for how many troops would return home starting in July, as Mr. Obama has pledged.
To order a number home in July “in complete isolation from anything else has no strategic meaning,” Mr. Gates said. “And so part of that has to be: What’s the bookend? Where are we headed? What’s the ramp look like? When does the surge come out? Over what period of time?”
A separate timetable would manage the departure of all foreign troops, including the rest of the American combat force besides the surge units, by the end of 2014 as agreed by NATO and the Afghan government. General Caldwell said that NATO training of Afghan security forces would not end until 2017.
The expected decisions on Afghan forces could mirror how Mr. Obama managed the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. While a status of forces agreement between Washington and Baghdad requires American combat forces to leave by the end of this year, Mr. Obama unilaterally set an earlier date by which time the military first reduced its presence to 50,000.
Senior Pentagon officials said that after Mr. Obama set a deadline for dropping to 50,000 troops in Iraq, he let his commanders in Baghdad manage the specifics of which units to order home, and when, so long as they met the president’s ultimate timeline.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Thom Shanker from Combat Outpost Andar, Afghanistan. Elisabeth Bumiller and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.