When President Barack Obama accepted International Security Assistance Force commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resignation in June and named Gen. David Petraeus to lead U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, questions about the direction of the war were met with pleas for patience, as the American public was told to wait for a promised Afghan strategy review in December.
The review didn’t live up to its billing. While it reported some progress in security and governance across Afghanistan, it also said that progress has been uneven and could be reversible. Petraeus and the administration may have used the document to buy more time for their population-centric counterinsurgency strategy to work.
In his Dec. 1, 2009, speech at West Point calling for more troops in Afghanistan (DTI January 2010, p. 39), Obama identified July 2011 as the point at which the U.S. would begin handing over control to Afghan security forces and local governments. Subsequent comments pointed toward the December 2010 review as a kind of make-or-break moment in the war.
But in a sleight of hand, NATO leadership used the organization’s Lisbon Summit in November as the real strategic review, moving the goalposts to 2014, now set as the date when security will be transferred to Afghan forces. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO secretary general, made sure to keep the door open even longer, saying “we will not transition until our partners are ready . . . we will stay to finish the job.” He added that “the process must be conditions-based, not calendar-based.”
While all this was going on, a debate emerged in policy circles and among policy-makers about what NATO can reasonably hope to achieve in Afghanistan, and what it should be trying to achieve. While training initiatives for Afghan troops and police continue, a look at how that training is being resourced is disheartening. According to NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan’s own year-end review, of the 2,800 trainer billets identified as critical, only 900 are filled, with 900 “pledged” but not yet present. That leaves another 1,000 billets empty, with no plans to fill them. A full 58% of the police and 52% of army training slots remain unfilled at year’s end. Despite this, NATO clings to its scenario of training enough soldiers and cops by 2014 to begin the drawdown of its forces.
Jack Segal, former chief political advisor to the commander of the NATO Joint Force Command in Afghanistan, says that the problems in Afghanistan go deeper, starting with the country’s constitution. The West imposed a strong central government in 2001, ignoring local governance, which is where the country needs it most. “The Afghan constitution needs to come on the table at some point,” Segal says. An element of this discussion must revolve around a critical security shortcoming: the local police. “If the regions—and particularly the larger tribal structures—had some say over their police, they might have more confidence in the security structure,” Segal says.
As the last U.S. Stryker Brigade rolled south out of Iraq and crossed the Kuwaiti border in August, the moment was supposed to mark the departure of the last American combat brigade in Iraq after 7.5 years of combat. The 50,000 U.S. troops remaining would be called “advise and assist” brigades, whose job is to train and mentor Iraqi security forces. By the end of 2011, these forces are to pull out of Iraq, leaving security completely to the Iraqis.
Despite the official end of U.S. combat operations, the fact remains that 13 American service members in Iraq have lost their lives in combat—to roadside bombs, small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenade attacks—since September as part of Operation New Dawn, formerly Operation Iraqi Freedom. As of the end of the year, 4,420 U.S. military personnel had lost their lives in Iraq since March 2003, and more than 30,000 have been wounded, according to icasualties.org, which tracks such statistics. The remaining U.S. troops are scheduled to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. While they are not officially involved in combat, the fact remains that U.S. forces still come under fire and are targeted by insurgents. As long as the Iraqi political and security situation remains unstable, expect more bloodshed, both Iraqi and American.
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