The Moment We’ve All Been Waiting For
Reports today indicate that President Obama will announce his new, revised strategy for Afghanistan in an address next Tuesday. Later in the week, General Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry are expected to testify before Congress, along with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It’s also been reported that the president will grant McChrystal an additional 30,000-35,000 troops, roughly two brigades short of what the general is believed to have requested for his proposed “medium-risk” course of action.
It will no doubt come as a relief to many in Washington, Afghanistan, and NATO alliance capitals simply that President Obama has concluded his protracted deliberation process. But now the hard part begins. In the coming weeks and months, the president will be challenged to rally flagging support for the war among Democrats in Congress, while at the same time communicating to an increasingly skeptical American public the purpose of our mission in Afghanistan. If, as some have suggested, these past fourteen weeks have represented in part the president’s efforts to come to terms with his “ownership” of the war in Afghanistan, the test will come in his rhetorical approach to the war in next week’s address and beyond. Will he steel the American people for a long haul toward victory? Or will he reaffirm a commitment to bringing the conflict to a speedy conclusion?
What’s more, despite the steady trickle of leaks from the White House, it remains unclear just to what extent the new approach will diverge from either the administration’s original March strategy or the course of action laid out in Gen. McChrystal’s strategic assessment. The president has already thrown out the Biden-inspired “counterterrorism-only” straw-man; the White House is also reportedly attempting to “reset” its acrimonious relationship with Hamid Karzai (and Karzai, for his part, appears to have taken some initial, modest steps to address corruption within his government). Thus, reports suggesting that the new strategy will concentrate efforts on securing population centers (a key element of McChrystal’s proposed approach) while conducting a counterterrorism campaign against high-value targets further afield — and at the same time seeking more productive means of holding Afghanistan’s senior leaders accountable for corruption — should come as no surprise.
The centerpiece of the president’s remarks, then, may well be his proposed “exit strategy” for the war, a topic which appears to have become central to the debate on Afghanistan within the White House in recent weeks. As press secretary Robert Gibbs noted on Monday, the president is very concerned “not just how we get people there, but what’s the strategy for getting them out.” If this is indeed the case, it will mark a dramatic departure from the president’s March announcement, in which he articulated the contours of a strategy for winning the war — not simply ending it. But, as has become clear in the past months, the president had failed to internalize the extent of the commitment — military or otherwise — necessary to implement his original strategy as stated. He’s unlikely to make the same mistake again.
Tim Sullivan is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
