Obama Takes a Risky Gamble in Afghanistan

By announcing the withdrawal of 33,000 troops, the American president seems to prioritize counterterrorism work over the controlling of the population’s loyalty.

Barack Obama’s decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by the end of summer 2012, including 10,000 by the end of the year, reflects a re-evaluation and downgrading of American objectives and military strategy. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make any sense. The decision, which the president announced during a fifteen minute speech on national television on Wednesday evening, means that over the next fifteen months, all the reinforcements Obama sent to Afghanistan in December 2009, one third of the total number of U.S. troops in the country, will return. Their service would have come to an end anyway, but from now on, instead of being replaced by new recruits, soldiers or U.S. Marines, the torch will be passed to the Afghan security forces. Obama added that over the coming months, the U.S. withdrawal will continue at a steady pace until the end of 2014, when the Afghan soldiers will in turn ensure security in all provinces. The reason given for this decision is that the United States has made ‘substantial progress’ regarding its objectives, which were to defeat al-Qaeda, to break the Taliban’s momentum and to train the Afghan security forces. At a briefing earlier in the day, a senior official from the administration announced that there was ‘no terrorist threat from Afghanistan,’ at least not one capable of attacking the United States or its allies.

Attacks rarer

But if you follow that logic, the president did not need to send extra troops at all. For the last eight or nine years, al-Qaeda fighters or Taliban militants able or willing to launch attacks beyond Afghanistan’s borders have been relatively rare. The fact that so few active terrorists have crossed the Pakistani border into Afghanistan can certainly be explained by the presence of 100,000 U.S. troops in the territory. The question now is whether the threat from these terrorists will be contained once a third of the U.S. soldiers currently in Afghanistan repatriate. The Afghan army has grown in size and power in the last two years, but will its soldiers be able to establish themselves with the same degree of effectiveness or at least with sufficient efficacy? This is one of the gambles tossed up in this decision. Obama has insisted that the most powerful elements of the American military forces will in no way be affected by this recall: neither the special operations commandos who organized the night raids on Taliban targets nor the drones and other aircraft that launched ‘smart bombs’ on similar targets in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan.

CT-Plus versus COIN

But the question that has divided the U.S. administration since the beginning of this command is the determining of whether this strategy, called “Counterterrorism Plus,” is sufficient. The main defender of CT-Plus is Vice President Joe Biden, with support from several White House staff members. In the debates on strategy in Afghanistan that occupied the administration for the majority of the last few months of 2009, a majority of senior military officials as well as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who advocated a counterinsurgency strategy, often abbreviated COIN, opposed Biden. One of the premises of COIN is that insurgency wars are effectively competitions to win the population’s loyalty; therefore the objective is not merely to chase the bad guys — in a game where they can remain one step ahead — but to protect and control the population. To do this, a counterinsurgency force needs large numbers of men on the ground, not only to monitor the Taliban and other insurgents, but to maintain security in the region so that conditions allow the local government to establish basic services, thus gaining the support of the population and drying up support for the insurgents. At the end of 2009, Obama largely, but not unconditionally, supported COIN’s defenders. He approved the deployment of 30,000 extra soldiers, in addition to the 68,000 who were already there. This proved sufficient to maintain a COIN strategy in the large towns and certain vulnerable provinces where the Afghan forces would end up being able to retake control in terms of security, but not to the point of allowing this strategy to be implemented on a nationwide scale. He agreed with Biden in stating that a COIN strategy would provide the ingredients for an unending war with no guarantee of victory, but he agreed with his military advisers in saying that CT-Plus alone would probably not be enough to break the momentum of the Taliban or to result in the people swearing allegiance to the Afghan government.