The Obama administration’s plan to begin an Afghanistan withdrawal in 2011 is creating growing friction inside the U.S. military, from the halls of the Pentagon to front-line soldiers who see it as a losing strategy.
Critics of the plan fear that if they speak out, they will be labeled “pariahs” unwilling to back the commander in chief, said one officer who didn’t want to be named. But in private discussions, soldiers who are fighting in Afghanistan, or recently returned from there, questioned whether it is worth the sacrifice and risk for a war without a clear-cut strategy to win.
Retired Army Reserve Maj. Gen. Timothy Haake, who served with the Special Forces, said, “If you’re a commander of Taliban forces, you would use the withdrawal date to rally your troops, saying we may be suffering now but wait 15 months when we’ll have less enemy to fight.”
Haake added, “It plays into … our enemies’ hands and what they think about us that Americans don’t have the staying power, the stomach, that’s required in this type of situation. It’s just the wrong thing to do. No military commander would sanction, support or announce a withdrawal date while hostilities are occurring.”
A former top-ranking Defense Department official also saw the policy as misguided.
“Setting a deadline to get out may have been politically expedient, but it is a military disaster,” he said. “It’s as bad as [former U.S. Secretary of State] Dean Acheson signaling the Communists that we wouldn’t defend South Korea before the North Korean invasion.”
The former defense official said the Obama administration’s policy can’t work. “It is the kind of war that is best fought with a small number of elite troops, not tens of thousands trying to continually take villages, leave, then take them again,” he added.
NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s rules of engagement, which emphasize protecting civilian lives, even if that means putting troops at greater risk, are adding to the anxiety of troops in Afghanistan. That strategy is contradicted by a policy that sets an early withdrawal date, said some soldiers with combat experience in Afghanistan.
“I think McChrystal’s strategy is probably right, it is just not the strategy I want to fight under,” said one officer who recently returned from a combat tour in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.
A Pentagon spokesman declined comment on Afghan policy.
President Obama announced his plan in December to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan by July 2011.
According to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the withdrawal date set by Obama is only the beginning of a drawdown, marking the time when U.S. and its foreign allies begin to turn over more security to Afghan security forces. Gates recently told members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “It will be the beginning of a process, an inflection point, if you will, of transition for Afghan forces as they begin to assume greater responsibility for security.”
However, a foreign military official currently training Afghan security forces in Afghanistan told the Washington Examiner that “Afghan forces are far from being capable of taking over security themselves, and it may take a lifetime to get them where they need to be because corruption is so prevalent in the system.”
For the troops on the ground, it’s a subject that keeps them awake at night, “wondering if what we’re fighting for will mean something in the end and did all the people who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice die for something,” said one U.S. troop stationed in southern Afghanistan.
“I don’t want to speak out against my commander in chief but we’re out here everyday fighting against an enemy that wants to kill our way of life,” the U.S. troop said in correspondence with the Examiner. “At least that’s what we’ve been told and now we’ve given the Taliban and al Qaeda hope that we’ll be walking out of here. I just don’t understand why he would’ve done that.”
Another U.S. soldier stationed in Afghanistan said that “making the announcement of a withdrawal date was a signal of defeat.”
He added, “It’s not whether we withdraw a little or a lot, but it’s the point we’re making. Once we made it public, the Taliban knew we weren’t going to stick it out, and I think that little bit of hope is all they need to keep going.”
