Afghan Strategy May Fall Short on New Army

One of the intellectual godfathers of President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy and a noted expert on counterinsurgency strategy is warning that the White House is dangerously short changing efforts to create a viable Afghan army to help defeat a Taliban insurgency.

Though he attended Obama’s unveiling of the new strategy March 27 and applauds the president’s new, more aggressive Afghan push, retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl says he is worried that the U.S. commitment to building local forces to secure the country wasn’t given enough emphasis.

“The long-term answer has to be an expanded Afghan national army, and this is the policy I hoped to hear [at the speech] but did not,” Nagl said during a March 31 seminar sponsored by the Foreign Policy Initiative think tank in Washington. “The Afghan national army is the most respected institution in that country and must be expanded to 250,000 … to prevent Taliban re-infiltration of the population.”

The current U.S. plan is to build the Afghan army to 135,000 troops.

During his March 27 White House speech, Obama pledged 17,000 more U.S. combat troops for Afghanistan this year and an additional 4,000 troops to act as trainers for Afghan national army units. The president also claimed his administration would emphasize civilian mentoring for Afghan governance and development, using diplomats, agricultural experts and government legal officials to help rebuild Afghan civil society.

Nagl, now president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a New American Security think tank, is the author of “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife” – thought among most military strategists to be the intellectual impetus for the services’ current shift to counterinsurgency training and strategy. The former president of CNAS, Michelle Flournoy, was appointed by Obama to be the Pentagon’s top policy official.

Nagl called Obama’s troop increase and trainer push “a down payment” on what’s needed to defeat a resurgent Taliban and keep extremists from taking over Afghanistan once more.

“Building Afghan security forces will be a long-term effort that will require American assistance and advisors for many years,” Nagl added. “But there is simply no viable alternative.”

While Obama’s new strategy was largely applauded by advocates of a more robust approach to winning the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and makes good on a campaign promise to fight what he termed the “real central front” in the war on terror, some experts are warning that fissures could soon appear in Obama’s near universal support for the new strategy – putting at risk the “long-term commitment” Nagl sees as vital.

Robert Kagan, senior associate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a foreign policy expert, warned of a political flip-flop should Obama’s plan face setbacks. The president might have bi-partisan support for his Afghan plan now, but if U.S. casualties mount and a faltering economy continues to suck away political capital, Republicans who once supported the war may join the anti-war left to undercut the effort.

“There clearly, on both the right and the left, is an allergy to this kind of commitment,” Kagan explained. “The capacity to make political hay about this issue – on either side of the spectrum – I think is great.”

“While I don’t believe there is a real isolationist tradition in the United States … the isolationist critique of American foreign policy is always strong and is usually found in the opposition party,” Kagan added. “The stronger we can build the consensus on a continuing commitment to Afghanistan now, the less likely it will be for people to fall off later.”

While Nagl acknowledged the threat of political wavering outside the White House, he said support for the policy wouldn’t face opposition from within the administration.

“The president had his entire national security team behind him when he gave his speech,” Nagl said. “The statement was very clear … very resolute, and he committed his administration to this fight. This was an ‘all in’ statement from his entire national security team.”