Strategic Mistakes

The Charleston Post and Courier has a good article about strategic mistakes in the AfPak region.

With American help Pakistan is making progress against its Taliban enemies in Pakistan. The same cannot be said for the American effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan, which appears to be suffering from a fundamental strategic mistake made by President Obama last year.

The NATO campaign against the Afghan Taliban has suffered recent military and political setbacks. The Marine Corps offensive in Marja has failed to establish Afghan control in a Taliban stronghold. A long-heralded allied push to free Kandahar from the rebel grip has been postponed and downgraded, reportedly because of opposition from the half-brother of Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai.

Training a competent Afghan army and police has turned out to be a more difficult job than the Obama administration had planned for. Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently said Afghanistan urgently needs another 450 NATO trainers.

According to the president's timetable, there will be an assessment in December of the military surge he ordered late last year. And in June, a year from now, American troops will begin leaving Afghanistan. Presidential adviser David Axelrod confirmed this deadline last Sunday.

Events suggest this artificial deadline is a strategic mistake. Although some of the key participants were clearly not ready, the deadline may have forced Gen. Stanley McChrystal to accelerate the timetable for the joint effort in Marja by the allied military, the Afghan security forces and allied economic assistance teams.

The allied military performed, but the Afghan government's administrators and security forces and the allied aid agencies did not. The prospect is dim that these shortcomings will be corrected in the next 12 months. More troubling is the strong possibility that the deadline, combined with President Obama's initial delay in setting a clear Afghan policy, dangerously weakened the close Afghan-U.S. cooperation needed to deny al-Qaida a future base in Afghanistan.

Worth reading the rest of it...

By: Brant