PRESIDENT BARACK Obama has told Congressional leaders that whatever his decision in the heated debate over strategy in Afghanistan, he will not substantially reduce troop strength there. Nor will he switch to an “anti-terrorism” strategy that would remove US troops from the battlefield to rely mostly on missiles fired by drones.
Mr Obama stressed that he had not yet decided whether to send up to 40,000 reinforcements, as requested by his commander in Afghanistan, Gen Stanley McChrystal. He said he knew his eventual decision would displease some. The remarks were made in a closed meeting with 31 Democratic and Republican Congressmen at the White House late on Tuesday.
Mr Obama held the third of five scheduled conferences on the Afghan war with his national security team, including the secretaries of state and defence and top generals, yesterday. The fourth meeting will be held tomorrow.
Mr Obama is expected to take his decision later this month, after the final meeting. There are signs the US president, who has been called the “compromiser-in-chief”, will seek a middle-of-the-road solution. Congress would have to endorse any presidential request for further troop deployments.
Tuesday’s briefing was the first time in six months that large numbers of Republicans have been invited to the White House. The moment the 90-minute session was over, they rushed to microphones outside the West Wing to brief reporters.
Senator John McCain, who opposed Mr Obama in last year’s presidential election, has emerged as the most vocal critic of his slow pace. “This should not be a leisurely process,” Mr McCain reportedly said during a tense exchange with the president. “John, I can assure you this won’t be leisurely,” Mr Obama replied. “No one feels more urgency to get this right than I do.”
After the meeting, Mr McCain told reporters he was worried about “half-measures” that could “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support”. Republicans seem to forget it took George W Bush four months to decide on the “surge” that eventually changed the course of the Iraq war. “It’s pretty clear that time is not on our side,” Mr McCain warned.
But Senator John Kerry, the Democratic chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who, like Mr McCain served in Vietnam, urged caution. “There are serious questions about Pakistan’s relationship to what we do in Afghanistan; there are questions about the Taliban,” Mr Kerry said as he left the White House meeting.
“Until those questions are satisfactorily answered, I think it would be irresponsible to make a choice about committing people to harm’s way.”
Mr McCain argues lessons for Afghanistan should be drawn from Iraq, not Vietnam. "The closest parallel to Afghanistan today is Iraq, the strategies that succeeded and the generals that succeeded," he told the Wall Street Journal.
A central question in the debate at the White House was this: if the Taliban return to power in Afghanistan, will al-Qaeda regain a sanctuary there? Some argue that the Taliban learned their lesson when they were driven out in 2001 because they’d harboured al-Qaeda. But the consensus, as stated by Mr McCain, is: “We all know that if the Taliban come back, then al-Qaeda will come back.”
In a visit to the National Counterterrorism Centre, also on Tuesday, Mr Obama cited recent US successes in strikes against al-Qaeda. The group have “not only lost operational capacity, they’ve lost legitimacy and credibility,” he said. The Obama administration claims al-Qaeda now has fewer than 100 full-time fighters.
If the danger that al-Qaeda will re-establish itself in Afghanistan is the strongest argument for troop reinforcements, the corruption and illegitimacy of Hamid Karzai’s government is its Achilles heel.
Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, pointed out that the strategy advocated by Gen McChrystal required the Afghan government to be more popular than the Taliban.
The Washington Post yesterday reported further evidence that Mr Karzai grossly rigged the August 20th presidential election.
Mr Obama sought to quash speculation that Gen McChrystal has fallen out of favour for speaking publicly in favour of troop increases. “I’m the one who hired him. I put him there to give me a frank assessment,” he told the Congressional leaders.
Gen McChrystal has become the new darling of the American right, eclipsing the celebrity Gen David Petraeus.