U.S. commander in Afghanistan: Influx of 17,000 more troops will help 'stalemate'

[Turborama]

Source: Chicago Tribune

Gen. David McKiernan praises Obama for deployment decision as he tells the Tribune's Kim Barker that the additional forces don't constitute an Iraq-style 'surge'

February 27, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Just days after President Barack Obama announced the deployment of 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Tribune correspondent Kim Barker sat down in Kabul with Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in the country. In the interview, McKiernan painted a candid picture of the "stalemate" he sees in Afghanistan and what role the U.S. troops will play in solving it. Following are edited excerpts:

Q) What's your assessment of where we are with the military in Afghanistan?

A) I haven't met anybody who's happy with where we're at right now, and that includes myself. ... I have used the word stalemate there, and we've got to provide additional resources to break that stalemate, one of which is the recent decision by my government to provide additional forces, most of which will be positioned in the south. This next year is a really important year. And it's important because of a lot of different variables. One, national elections in Afghanistan. It's important because of the fact there's a new administration in the United States that is obviously placing priority on this region. It's important because there's new diplomatic opportunities.

Q) Why are there so many bad assessments of the situation?


A) I'm not with the group that says everything is in a downward spiral, that the Taliban are resurgent and stronger than they were. I think they're very resilient, but I don't necessarily think they're stronger. And I do see some measures of progress in this country. Now I'm not going to say everything is going to improve dramatically in 2009, but I think as a military commander, I am not going to be pessimistic about this. I'm going to be glass-is-half-full.

Q) What resources do you need here to win? Are 17,000 troops enough?

A) Immediately what we need to do is create a secure environment where education can increase, where governance can be effective. And what I want to do is get to what I call a tipping point, where we have sufficient, capable Afghan army and police capacity in this country, where international forces increasingly are in the background and increasingly are more in the training and mentoring and enabling role. In order to do that, we need additional resources in this country. That's why I asked for additional U.S. forces.

Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-afghan-commander-qafeb27,0,7446192.story

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See below for the rest of the interview...

[Turborama]

1. Part 2

Q) How long is it going to take to get to the tipping point?

A) It's hard to predict that. But I think we need to stay on a fairly large sustained commitment on the part of the international community for the next three to five years, at a minimum. I don't use the word "surge," because I don't think it's necessarily a temporary increase in forces. I think it's more of a sustained increase in forces for the next perhaps as much as three to five years.

Q) But is 17,000 enough?

A) That's just what the president approved. And he did that based on my request, and really to get us the forces to get to the summer, the height of the fighting season. And that was a very difficult decision because he hasn't finished the strategic review for his administration and their strategy and policy for this region. Later in the year will there be other decision points to adjust future requirements? Absolutely. I'm absolutely satisfied with the president's decision for U.S. forces. Now I'm like others. I want the international community < NATO allies> to contribute more.

Q) How difficult is it to run the NATO coalition?

A) The fact that there are 41 nations in ISAF sends a signal of international commitment to this campaign in Afghanistan. But it is challenging. There are different friction points, that start with language. Start with different training doctrines, different equipment, different levels of readiness.

Q) How does the issue of civilian casualties feed into that?

A) By the very nature of an insurgency, where the threat is mixed in with the population, it is virtually impossible to totally avoid civilian casualties. That said, we spend a lot of effort on tracking civilian casualties in this country. And our data show that over 80 percent of the civilian casualties are caused by the insurgents, although that's not the perception.

[Turborama]

2. Part 3

Q) But the United Nations recently said the figure is 55 percent.

A) The UN figures in some cases differ from our figures. There are some numbers that organizations will use that are alleged numbers, that when we go out and conduct an investigation and find out what happened, find that in some cases this event didn't happen.

Q) We've got a very large contingent from the Illinois National Guard that's now working on police training. How important is this, and are there enough people actually doing this?

A) Very important, and no. I think getting back to what we want to accomplish in Afghanistan, what's a reasonable expectation in the near term, in the next three to five years. A central part of that in terms of security is an effective police force. That's a major limitation right now in Afghanistan because there was not an effective police force to begin with. Not only do we have to develop that police force, it has to be reformed in many places. Corruption and values, lack of the right values, was a prevalent condition across Afghanistan, so it's absolutely fundamentally vital to long-term security for Afghanistan.

When you look at it as a counterinsurgency approach, where you clear an area, where you separate the insurgents from the population, you would like to transition into holding, which means you protect the population while you're setting conditions to build. The police need to hold. The police need to be there to protect the conditions to build. Everybody agrees the size of the police, the authorized size of the police, is not large enough. We know it's got to grow. But we don't have enough international contributions to do that right now.

Q) What are the right outcomes?

A) At the end of the day, it's not going to be a military outcome. It's going to be a political outcome. It's going to be decided by the will of the people.

Q) What's your assessment of what's happening across the border and the new truce in Swat between militants and the government?

A) We've started to coordinate border activities in the east, with the intent to spread that along the border over time. So I am cautiously optimistic that we're going to improve mutual border security conditions over time, but it's going to be a slow process, along a historically wide-open border. That said, one of the things I've consistently said is that the sanctuaries that exist in the tribal areas in Pakistan fuel the insurgency in Afghanistan, so the militant groups that operate out of Pakistan have freedom of maneuver to come into Afghanistan and fuel the insurgency. That's not to say that the insurgency is not a local insurgency, but it is supplied, facilitated, equipped, armed, and funded in many cases from the sanctuaries across the border in Pakistan. That situation has deteriorated over the last decade. And until there is a solution to those sanctuaries in the tribal areas of Pakistan, it's hard to imagine the right outcome regionally. There's a history of failed peace negotiations in the tribal areas. Swat's not a tribal area. That's a whole new level of concern inside Pakistan. I don't know exactly what's going to be the outcome of these latest discussions we read about. We will continue to watch that very closely.

Q) Are you concerned about it?

A) Absolutely. Because the insurgency is a regional insurgency. It's hard to imagine regional stability without a resolution of these sanctuaries that militant groups operate from

(Edit to add last question)